Back in the game

Right now I'm sitting across an apartmate at our dining table in our new on-campus apartment. She's watching some game playthroughs on YouTube w/her headphones on and I'm enjoying a cup of warm milk tea (been so cold lately). It's 3am but we both don't feel like sleeping. Living with 5 other girls, this is really the only time it gets so quiet that I can hear the water from the faucet dripping. I'm not complaining at all. Something funny is always happening with them around and there's never a boring minute, but it's only when most of the noise is gone that I get to really reflect. I look around at our first apartment outside of home -- our neat kitchen and always fully-stocked fridge and pantry, the mess of shoes at the front door, the comfy couch where I've taken many naps before my next class -- and I realize how lucky I am. It's different from my Tenderloin apartment back home, much different. There's no police siren or ambulance going off every half hour, no heartbroken or angry person yelling alone in the middle of the street at this time of night. The water in the shower here doesn't switch from hot to cold in a second. There's a thermostat-controlled heater. We even have a balcony with a beautiful view of the parking lot redwood trees and, from time to time, deer. I'm so lucky to be living here and be able to attend college on a scholarship. But sometimes I get a little ahead of myself, and I get caught up with thinking about what I don't have and I need to remember that this is more than I have ever had before. I trust my roommates with a lot of things and I've had so many good laughs because of them, but sometimes I realize how vastly different we are at times and how things like the quality of your upbringing can affect your decisions and opinions about a lot of different topics. Like I can't help but think "Really?" and just nod when one says her uncle's $1million+ home (of multiple properties) is "not even big", yet at the same time realize she has a salmon diet but is stingy about lesser things and paying back due money (to the point that she will initiate an aggressive debate over some cents). The same private-school-raised roommate would say "see, I never had that kind of opportunity" bitterly when I mentioned that I was part of a local tech company's mentorship program which taught low-income youth from my neighborhood how to begin coding, making me feel like I have to step around land mines and avoid talking about any achievements or programs I've done. And I sound like I'm reprimanding them but I'm also guilty of letting this mentality get to me many times, because I start to talk like I know what they mean, as if things like $3.50 vs $4.00 boba really matter to me in the whole scheme of problems in this world. And I lose a little track of who I really am or who I want to be.. where I come from, and why I'm here. It's not until I'm by myself and get a chance to take a step back and look at the bigger picture that I realize how much more grateful I should be.. That I'm able to get a college education and study what I'm passionate about. That every day I get to wake up in a warm bed and the only immediate worry I have is whether I'll be passing a midterm that week. That I'm given an opportunity that no one in my family, or many others in the world have ever had. This blog post is a reminder for me to not get caught up in the toxicity of those little things and forget my roots, for me to become more of the person I want to be and make the most out of this education that I've been granted.

The reason for all my tears // coming to realize that my mother has a mental illness

I've come to the realization that every time I've ever seriously cried, since as long as I could remember, has had to do with my mother and my relationship with her. Even the times when I cried without her around are directly related to my experience of having her as my mother. I remember when my roommate abruptly came back to the dorm and playfully hit me several times for sending a bad photo of her to a friend, I ended up going to the bathroom to cry because it reminded me so much of how my mother would come back home out of work and without warning come up to me and beat me. I remember when my friends surprised me for my 18th birthday at a friend's apartment on campus, I cried so much because not only was I surprised by how much effort they put into making a nice collage for me but because I realized that until then my birthdays would either be spent alone or end with me leaving my apartment door with tears in my eyes and walking to the Bay Bridge at night to calm down after a bout of yelling from my mother. There was no such thing as having friends from school over at a birthday party, something that I've realized has to do with both her extreme mentality of all-you-need-is-family and messed up idea of protecting me, among other backwards ideologies. I remember during my move-in day for college, I was not left with the words "I'm so proud of you, have a great time" and a warm hug from my mother as other students were. Instead, I left my mother's car in the middle of a street before reaching my dorm with tears in my eyes with the last words from her being "You're easily fooled [by boys]." Part of me knew to dismiss her hurtful words and realize that she was actually yelling at her past self because I myself had never been in any kind of relationship with a guy, but the rest of me came to tears realizing that my mother had once again ruined what was supposed to be a milestone moment in my life. As I grew older I came to realize that she has serious unaddressed anger management issues and deals with her stress destructively by hitting things until they break, the list of which included me, and breaking out in screaming tantrums. When I try to explain to her how unreasonable she is being, she responds stubbornly with a wild look in her eyes, insisting that 1) everyone around her is either crazy or hates her for no reason despite all the work she does for everyone 2) that she must have committed a sin in her past life 3) that I'm rude to her because I'm being badly influenced by (insert name of recently mentioned friend or current institution of education), or all of the above. These have all been the rhetorics she's used since I was in middle school. Being Asian and understanding the stigma of mental illness within Asian cultures, I've also come to realize that she may never seek treatment on her own. Growing up with her, I've had to convince myself that I'm not the crazy one. Some adults just don't realize how powerful and destructive their words can be to children. When you beat a child who has limitless potential and call them dumb, they will take your words as truth and live the rest of their childhood believing that they are dumb, until they have the fortune of running into kind and compassionate friends and adults who convince them otherwise. It was both relieving (to my sanity) and saddening to know that my stepfather, aunts, and grandparents all understand how difficult my mother can be. Whenever I try to point out my mother's flaws (the most recent one being that you shouldn't take your anger out on the customer representative lady on the phone and assume that she knows the other representative at the store who you had a bad experience with), she puts the blame on me and starts putting me down when I try to reason with her that she should be polite, and from there her voice rises with her stress and by the time I realize that logic has escaped her mind she starts taking the burner plate from the stove and slamming it loudly and alarmingly against the stove again and again for about 15 times (i.e. when I'm quiet and stop trying to convince her why she's wrong, at which point I'm also in tears at the sight of her losing all reason) until she retreated to her room to let out a heartbreaking scream and cursed herself for having me as a daughter. Being that there is no place to get peace and quiet in our small studio apartment, I went and sat down next to the fridge at the kitchen and began typing away on here, since--as I mentioned in my last post--it seems that I'm most motivated to write when I am upset.. Just now she came in, as if nothing had ever happened, asking me in her higher-pitched kinder, alarmingly calm voice if I wanted to have chicken pho for dinner. I don't know how much longer I can keep up with this, or when her next outburst will happen. If there's any good that's come out of my relationship with her, it's my goal of getting a college degree and becoming as independent as I can be.. so that I will never have to be like the child who cried very night after she was beaten and wanted to leave but couldn't because the only home she knew was here. The child who was me.

Right now I'm sitting at my desk back home. I'm on winter break right now, but I'll be going back soon in a few days. I haven't updated this blog in a while, but I feel like I really need to write this down. Maybe as a reminder. Seems that I'm most motivated to write whenever I feel upset or feel strongly about something. I was thinking of talking to my friends from college about this but this time I think I'll just keep this to myself.. it's not that I don't trust them. And it wouldn't be the first time I've talked to close friends about my mother. Usually I'm very open to close friends about my family problems.. but I've given it some thought and some part of me feels like they either don't know how to respond or deep down they just don't care. And it's not that they're bad friends.. but I know at least one of them would respond with an "I know how you feel" or "I have it worse" kind of story. So I've decided to keep my problems to myself. Because I'm tired of expecting as much from others as I give. It's selfish thinking but I feel like this is how I can protect myself and become a little more independent.