Blog

On not doing well. Going to gravesweep for my grandma after one year was not pleasant. I walked into that alleyway and that room knowing that all previous times I had walked with her, not with myself. Because Babaoshan is where all the revolutionary martyrs are buried, a holy place for the CPC, it was weird so to see someone break down so publicly. But at the same time I guess it wasn’t a surprise for them at all, since the place was built to remember death. But I guess you were also supposed to be sombre, especially if you come from a background such as ours. But I chose to break down anyway, just before I got the wreath out, just as I walked along the main road. It was odd, I hadn’t seen my grandparents being put together, on one grave stone. I hadn’t registered that she died on January 26, which is now the date of her death— her death-versary. I’d blocked that out, I guess, until I was able to see it in black and white. I guess the older couple who were walking in front of me into the sacred cemetery thought I was a fake, since I looked so young, and there was a sense of self-consciousness when I realised they were aware of my every step— until I began crying for real, and then the grief was so real and raw and hard that they turned to look away. And then they turned back, psychically, wondering if they should, as elders, help this desperate woman who looked like she might pass out. She loved too hard, she had lost a grandparent (a parent?), she wasn’t okay, the grief was recent.

this year i have survived by creating stories, both my own and listening to other people’s. What is love? I feel like love is coming full circle, it is coming from whence we were before. Love is about making the effort to show up, with no guarantee that it will returned. I wanted to create art last year in order to make it through the dark times, and last year was some of the darkest times I’d ever experienced. I don’t know how I got through it except I had an army behind me. My family in Beijing didn’t help, and it doesn’t matter that they were grieving too. I felt like I was guided all this time, with many, many people standing next to me, guiding me.

Maybe it was that they saw me hurting myself on purpose. Maybe it was the shame, but a lot of it was definitely the self-harm. Perhaps what I was giving out was the sense that I wasn’t home. Someone had left the building. This homelessness resonated with many people. And they wanted to save me. Saving is a difficult task, but one worth doing– in their own ways they were also creating a shared vision, or project, with me, because they knew I sorely needed it. To remain the same, to remain calm, to remain myself.

Thank you and not, auf wiedersehen, 2023.

To be of note recently:

I don’t know how I got through my grandma’s birthday, which was December 22.

I don’t know how I got through Jan 1, which is when I found out she had 术后谵妄,
postoperative delirium, and then January 5 and 6th, when I went through some of the darkest portions and days.

In about two weeks from now, a year ago, she would be dead.

I have been completely insane this year.

think the weird part of being a child who is in between worlds— an antevasin— is that you constantly have to reject the part of you that doesn’t fit in that particular time, so it’s a constant game of people-pleasing, and code switching. But this constant rejection does so much damage, because that part of you is also a vital component that should never die, that’s just an essential part of you as any other. It hurts.

I had experienced too many things that I couldn’t process, and this was just one of those things, there was no final destination, nothing in mind.

Questions of femininity

I had always thought that mother’s brand of femininity was weak, even disgusting. I had been programmed into thinking this way because I was raised by iron maiden types who were toughened by the various revolutions in China, and these women raised me. They raised me as if in a sorority. But my mother listened, she was and is a woman who listens and does what she’s told. I always bucked against this but I think I must be more alike her than I am willing to admit. I am more like her than I realise, because really deep down inside I also want to admit to not being capable, and to *realise* that I’m not capable, at all, that I’m messy, uneven, not in control, totally vulnerable and a little bit insane. I make mistakes, I let people down, and when I do, I show my underbelly in a way that is soft and vulnerable, and incapable of making any demands. But now I see those qualities as an aesthetic quality, and if not anything, my mother is beautiful. It’s probably why my father fell for her in the first place, during orchestra, when they were playing music.

I have been obsessed with self-portraits lately. And part of that portrait is a portrait of abandonment. It is the face of someone who has been abandoned multiple times, by multiple people, and not least of all by men. When men abandon their children, whether they are men or women, it leaves a deep wound. We look up to men to be the magi of our lives, we want them to be there, and it can be an unbearable loss when they aren’t, and then we can make the wrong choices. I’ve tried my hardest to parent myself, to take away that pain, and I’ve tried to look to men to present. But, it doesn’t often work that way. There is an untetheredness when the first magi of our lives failed to guide us in any way — even if they guided us in the wrong direction. I’ve tried not to let that untetheredness stay with me for long, but it remains. When the masculine presence is missing we can fall into all kinds of difficult ways, I know I did, and still sometimes do, but less. But we don’t have that purpose, that destination, that is often associated with having a father, and the exquisite pain that comes from not having one in your life, as you start to wonder if you’re able to accomplish anything at all.

I realised that I had put a lot in place before her death so that I would be OK when she died. I knew that the end was going to be catastrophic, an absolute catastrophe, and I didn’t know how to prevent it. I knew that the tidal wave was coming for me, whether I liked it or not, and that when it came, the tidal wave would be big. I had tried to look at podcasts about grief to help me heal, and all of the advice included some iteration of “keep swimming, as huge waves are going to crash and you *will* feel you are drowning.”  So I kept swimming, there was nothing else for it. And as the days get longer it starts to get better. There was a lot of water in me this year.

How many of us had to be put back together, the broken pieces? 

Lately (*thanks everyone for your grief counseling suggestion!) I watched as my therapist cried as I told her the stories of my grandmother. To watch another human cry at your words is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And so I realised that I would look in every woman for a sign of her, to replicate that relationship that I had had with her. What she really gave me was that feeling of being an outsider, of being disenfranchised, of not being accepted, because as a Malaysian in China during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, and just being herself, she would have been ostracized. And I didn’t really get any of that when I was growing up, my family didn’t really provide a stable, safe home, but they did materially. I had been going way too fast in the past, so fast in fact I didn’t know what I had left behind. This was how it was taught to me, how to live life. I had to do so much for my family just to stay afloat, just so they would like me, and let me be a part of them. And how stabling it is to look ahead and just see death, which is the stage that I am at now. And I had to hold on to that Chinese side, in whatever way I could. I just wanted someone to be home when I got there. And this whole time I’ve had to balance the light and the dark that is within me, and in some ways, I feel as if my life stopped at seven.

Love is limitations, also known as *I am in the storm.*

“We are frightened of people who contain worlds so we try to cut them down to size,” said my friend Rachel. Love seems to be accepting the things that you absolutely hate about the other person, and sticking around. But this week I learned something different. It’s worse when someone you love disappoints you, or is disappointed in you. It feels much worse than a random stranger, because you had given so much to that person. Because they are the ones who helped you become who you are, which means they’re the ones that really matter, and you’re willing to do anything with them, for them. But being able to, or being grounded for love, that seems to be what the definition of love is. you need the eggs, even if you wants you to scream, to tear up the pieces, to tell them you don’t love them, apparently you do love them, even if they have the potential to seriously fuck you up. But you hate them and think it was the worst thing for you, What happens when the person nagging you to go home stops nagging you to go home, do you still want to go home? But it did feel like I had to choose a particular kind of poison, and that poison had filled up our entire house, until it starts to poison everything. but what is there to be said, that this poison is actually food? I didn’t realise that to love was to stay somewhere where where you didn’t want to be, and of course it has and is completely fucking me up.

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disclaimer: I’m actually feeling a lot better. partly thanks to Yoga, tcm, and friends.