Shanghai Vixen

December.

Has descended.

Another year that has been a flash in pan, a mixed bag, a disappointed dream. No deaths, one heartbreak, two indifferent break-ups, a confounding crush later…what? What can I say for myself, what can I show for myself?

A few inches up that Sisyphysian hill, I am alive and happy and well. That is significant; entropy happens, gravity and gravitas are against me. No, I have not gotten as far as I hoped this year, but as I have been saying since I was fifteen: “I aim for the stars; and if I only hit the moon, well that works too.” That, plus no compunctions and no regrets, have served me quite well. If only I adhered to them better.

The advent of December means the decision of whether I will visit the US over Christmas and American New Year. Already, last night, in orange clockwork, the nightmares arrived.

They come in two versions: One has me back in high school, the Mom playing all jealous and manipulative, killing off my pets out of negligence and/or malice, trying to control my life and turning me into her that age: insecure, manipulative, slutty cheerleader. The other has her trying to do to me what she did to my Gege: take over my life, have me declared insane, force me to live with her, which would also drive me to suicide.

The month also brings bitter anniversaries: My Gege’s death, on Boxing Day; and both getting together with and the first break-up from Jifu. I wish these things did not continue to define me, but such are ghosts.

And now add to that my first meeting Yaya. No regrets there: I loved, I tried, I was….I believed in him too much, but believing too much in the people I love is a fatal flaw I am willing to embrace in myself.

I have had an eventful week. A flurry of events and assignments. Fighting off the guy who would steal my job. Meeting and planning with Brilly and Beany what I anticipate will be a fabulous, defining project.

Yet my brain remains foolishly preoccupied with a certain boy. The aforementioned Ah Ren. I am so baffled by him. I have no idea how to read:

1. foreigners

2. americans

3. white boys

I only know how to read Shanghainese. You would think I would have picked up a clue from Franzi, Bjoston, and the many other hunxie’s I’ve hung with and flung with over the years. Nah: the only generalization I will venture is that they are not so half/half as neither/nor.

Ah Ren either likes me but is being cautious and non-committal, or dislikes me and is being polite. Possibly half/half, and/or neither/nor.

Leave the door open? Close it? Make a move? Get bored and wander off? Hell, I really like him, but don’t know how much I like him, whether it is enough to overcome my reservations. The hairy American foreigner white boy factor is disconcerting enough: he kinda looks like my dead brother.

Yet he is wonderful and intriguing and the very rare possible kindred spirit. I cringe from the cliché of writer+photographer (which is like 90% of you my friends and readers, yikes). His surface is “too boring and innocuous and quiet for [me]” the gossip and gut inform; but the rare moments I scratch that cautious surface I catch glimpses of someone brilliant and wonderful and complicated and fascinating.

It is awkward between us. Is this because he likes me? Or because he doesn’t, but knows I like him, and thus the awkward?

My suspicion is that he is, as I suspected, hooking up with aforementioned gallery girl, and/or someone else in our circle, but they’re not serious and he…likes me but is not ready to shift off onto either side of that line with me. I’m leaning that direction as it seems the most explanatorily logical. But I could be completely wrong. My instincts suck even within familiar territory, let alone laowai Americans.

Thus, I resort to the defaults, of declaring to myself I don’t like fluffy foreigners anyhow, and trying to obsess about other crushes. Is this immature, or practical, or both? Or neither/nor? Ah Ren is appealing enough that it requires quite the zapper; what I have on option are an adorable Shanghainese DJ, and that longstanding, recently revived Cali-Canto. Both are more my type, more attractive, more age-appropriate, more comfortable of fits than Ah Ren – but I really do like Ah Ren, and probably my awkwards are the self-defeatings

I toy with waxing blunt, over the antiseptic neutrality of email, and just declaring all, all these contradictions and conflictions. The other inclination is to just ignore him indefinitely, unless or until he takes some initiative. I’ve already quite stuck my neck out in his regard, only for it to grow cold and icy in the isolated breeze. Or, no, he’s draped a scarf on said exposed neck, but refrained from the hoped for nibblage. I guess…gestures of friendship?

“White boys are soooo ambiguous!” Trixie SMSes, commiserating. She has just discarded a crush on Ah Ren’s sidekick, after he blew her off. Dude. Totally. Yet: if someone feels like he might must maybe might be a kindred spirit, he is worth the risk of humiliating myself, making an ass of myself over. Aim for the stars, baby, no matter how hard and flat I fall. No regrets, no excuses.

“You love someone who doesn’t deserve it, because at least you have someone.”

Yeah, at least I have never been there; took the tact of being fiercely independent to a fault. Although I am also very much a person who needs people. I am lucky, I have never had that insecure need to seek out approval via, to fill my emotional holes, with sex. (Physical holes, though!)

The scene with the “holy poo” was so familiar: someone being completely insane, someone else insane enough to believe it, someone knowing better but going along with it, and one or two people being all No. Fucking. Way! and cracking up. It was hard when I was the only person realizing how completely warped their behavior was. I am so giddily happy that Camus turned out so cool, that I now have an ally to snicker with.

She’s tougher than I, in her way, although she has that luxury as she does have a healthy family with her mom and half-sister. When my mom waxes psycho, I’m like, “I, um, need to go over there now. Hell, I’m just going back to China! Zai wei!” Camus with lay it out, whether to my mom or her dad, “Look, you are being psycho, and I will not tolerate it!” I really admire her for that.

The Diedre/mother character…continues to remind so wincingly of my own mother, delusions of grandeur in particular. I would love my mom to watch this, I wonder how she would react? The usual denial - “I am not like THAT!” and angry accusation - “YOU think I’m like THAT?!”

Well, I do. If not worse in some ways. Bipolar, delusional, generally a bitch, check. The obsessive-compusive element just puts extra “fun” in the disfunctional. But I do not tell her that: pity, exhaustion, cowardice, the feeble desire to still have a parent, even though she never was one to me. Stronger, braver Camus has been less battered by the madness, her crazy dad did not raise her, her sound sane mom did.

My mom nearly gave me away, too - to one of her lawyers who found me “spunky”. Beginning to watch “Running with Scissors” prompted me to Google him - he was disbarred for embezzling his clients. Go mom, sure can pick ‘em! One more commonality with this tale. Instead, I landed with my wonderful grandparents, which was the best thing that ever happened to me. Except my mom hates her parents, so my finding a happy home with them is a large source of her current vitriol.

“Don’t pull that maternal crap with me.” Haaaa. *Makes mental note.*

Which is why I can only watch a few minutes at a time, it is too familiar and intense. It is no shocker that my brother killed himself; the surprise is that I have turned out as functional, even healthy and happy, as I have. It has not been easy, but it gets easier. I think I have this sturdy core of survival, a determination to be something more than my circumstances. Am I? I believe I am. I may never accomplish as much as I would like to, but I have done pretty well by myself.

Watching the movie, though, is a different story: yeah, the narratives are different, and my mother handing me off at age fifteen was the best fucking thing that ever happened to me. Although she tried to hand me off a few times before, to her shrinks/lawyers (all of whom were actually not RWS types, good men, but…), but didn’t happen, she was too reliant on me.  Still, the portrayal of the mother is too, too familiar. I think it is worse that my mother was actually quite successful and famous for her spell.

I am at the line where “Your mother fears your father will kill her”: is there a t-shirt for that? A club house? Yes, my bio-ba was a violent, possesive, condescending jerk, and frequently a physically violent one. He beat up my mom sometimes, my brother often, but me, never: I was his “wittle pwincess”. I recoiled from this. I was Nancy Drew, I was Alex in The Black Stallion. I was not a tomboy; my brain was too busy scaling ramparts to scale any trees. (Bamboo made great faux swards in the final battle against Morder!) The childhood of being given girly dress up outfits and barbies rankles of course less than the family violence, but reminds how much of an evolutionary leap and improbability I am, considering where I came from.

Memories of self: at age eleven, homeschooled, playing “princess rescuers!” with the mormon girls next door on our farm, to save women before they are reenslaved by yet more men. At age 14: when I already refused to visit the bio-ba, was all, “If you make me go, I will either run away at a gas station, or else burn down the house when everyone’s sleeping. I’d prefer Juvi to being around him.”

Bio-ba was a horrible person, and had in him this violent rage that terrified me in myself for a long time; I think and hope I have it tamed. That he could have killed my mom when they lived together, I have no doubt. But, premeditated, stalkery, nah.

“Bitch asked for it.” I also see my own situation in Burrough’s youthful adoration of his mother, the self-important, high-maintanence diva. She was always rather insufferable, I hear from her cousins who I’m now close to, but as a kid, as Princess Rescuer! I wanted to take care of her, had to take care of her. Since I was nine, throwing myself between my huge adolescent brother and her. Making her eat, making her sleep – she was much more functional then; but only marginally. She went back from being my bio-ba’s pet to being my Grandpa’s and my shared pet: he bought the litter, I cleaned it. I have never seen her, ever, once, try to take care of herself.

For six years, as a child, I took care of her. I made her eat, made her sleep, made her bath. We shared a room, often a bed. I lived on instant noodles, rotting potatoes, and Burger King. My best friends were my cats, and I still resent those she killed by being too agoraphobic to take to the vets for months.

The Barn House, the highway, the century-old Eucalyptus tree. The golden mice, The Wondrous Adventures of Hans, the 11-yo suicide attempt, the wood burning stoves, the tadpoles in the concrete pond. The raccoons, the tornado, the path, the garden, the dead baby rabit, the castle-like neighbor homes, the public school segregation I noticed even at age seven, ostracized by my own race and class because I was smart but strange like the fob Vietnamese and Indians from (to my parents) the projects. The first grade teacher, who died a year later in a plane crash, who apparently informed my parents, “[Vixen] is the smartest student I have ever encountered. She really marches to the beat of her own drum.”

“But she seems really miserable, talks morosely about her family, but becomes oh so alive discussing books!”

I have an amazing memory, and have gone from a totally shitty life to a really wonderful one. I have nightmares about both of my parents: bio-ba, being forced to meet and interact with him. Ma, that she has taken over my life/finances, gotten me declared insane, and I am tryyyyyying desperately to get back to my real family and/or bio-coz in San Diego, better yet back to Shanghai, and can’t for some reason. These are my hells. If they were real life, I would run, scream, fight: but being nightmares, I am stuck. Among the worst, this being the RESTLESS of June, I was working as an anthropologist and teacher in rural Shanxi, worrying about the Silver Lining. That part was a protracted dream, of interactions and dialectical differences. Then, within this one long dream, which felt so real, I one night went to sleep. I wake up, holey fuck, in a similar but utterly different apartment – freaked out, “Where am I?” “This is a dream.” I laid back down on my cot, woke up – in another, similar apartment, except. Except there were piles upon piles of crap, of clipped articles, of unperused magazines, of, of crap! everywhere. All with notes scribbled on them, in black pen. “I am my mom. I am in hell.” I sat back down, gazed about for a sharp object.

I awoke, gasping, in my own Huilonghui bed. Silver Lining screechedd off of me, “WTF, mom?!”

I do not take the wonderful life I have for granted. I just desire…a tiny bit more.  I have said many times, I have these stories. These memories. So many. I cannot capture every moment, lo siento. But the smells, the mental camera clicks,  the narratives, and above all the emotions, they compost just under my topsoil. The fermentation is always there. There for me to dive into. But I need a lifeline if I am to ever emerge from the shit diggage, I need to someone to trust is there before I dive in. I have great love from my amigas and didis, besos, but for such excavations I need someone who really gets me and someone who really and constantly is there for me. I have yiwei twice that I have found loves could be that, but they proved such the broken hoist.

I normally do okay on my own; that is my default, I survived that way, braved the emotional elements. Soldiering on, I do okay, albeit better with someone I can someone l can lean on sometimes. But, shit diving, I need that person I have yet to find. I don’t need the cable so much as to know the shore is there for me.

I am more than a bit fatigued. I was barely managing the 吃请 when the below missile came in from my mom. Yet, the latter was buffeted by having the 吃请 here for support on all matters non-him. And, I was still high on hope. Until…

Until today, I had a lunch meeting with a woman I don’t know well but like very much.  Business concluded, we tucked into our by then cold lunches. “Do you get back often to La Jolla to visit your family?” she asked harmlessly. “I go back more to see friends than family, I’m not…close…to mine.” Being a journo, she pressed for details.

Details I am always willing to provide. I have long since discovered that obfuscation is much harder to pull off, and that no one worth knowing will think the worse of me for my origins. She was very curious and sympathetic, has had her own encounters with mental illness, but that made for extra follow-up. “So, mom is psychotic drama queen bitch - any siblings?” “Gege, killed himself.” “And your father is dead?” “My biological father was a violent asshole who I disowned sixteen years ago.”

“Wow. You really are all alone in the world.”

Normally, I’d argue that I have a great family, just not biological. But the 吃请 already has me feeling so, so utterly alone. So alone and miserable that it scrapes my soul.

Whenever I get a psycho email from my mom, I immediately forward it onto a few close friends. The composition of the dumped upon varies from time to time, but always includes my cousin Camus and my adopted didi/college best friend King Yellow. Excuse me, *cough cough*, that would be DOCTOR King Yellow now. (Yay! You made it! I am so proud of you!!!)

Dr King has long been one my greatest pillars, and the adopted family member quickest to remind me that I have a wonderful adopted/created/”real” family who loves me. He is one of the few people in my life who gives me more than he takes from me. Really, with all the selflessly loving yet unrelentingly snarky-ness, we should be actually related.

I know I’ll get through this. For every dorky/cool Taiwanese boy who breaks my heart, I have my dorkier and cooler Taiwanese didis who take care of me. I just wish they were here right now, to smack/hug some sense back into me.

Hi [Vixen],

My address is:

XXX
San Diego, CA 92121

cell: [xxxx], but lately everything is “off” with my body with first adjusting to a new “blend” (which was working so well, giving me energy “to do” for the first time since 1986,85), but then it was stolen, as happenned last month also. Two times the two doors (2 locks on each) had been opened and then left unlatched, with the alarm off. More of my cookware is gone. It really is scarry, [Vixen]. You would not like being me–especially when everyone (but Mom) seems to think I am a wild story tell who only knows how to tell lies (that is what [Camus] said to me as well). She also (that painful night of Christmas) said that IF I WANTED that I could get a job and be working in two weeks or sooner–if only I set my mind to it. Where did she get all this “knowledge” and what has made her so opinionated? If she were taking the right med.classes she’d see everything so differently.

It’s 4:45 am and this is unusual for me.  I slept  14 hours yesterday. 5 the day before (while looking for the meds, then getting up early for a locksmith), then 15 the night before, then had 3 all nighters the week schedule before when my sleep schedule got off (is always related to medication, when I suddenly can’t find it–it has been stolen four times so far, and only once returned, and that a year later).

So, to bed I go.

I’m disappointed to hear that you don’t even remember that I exist. At least you are honest.  I hope you do not put it so bluntly with Mom.
She is doing well.  You know in Sept. she will be 89! It  may be that she has only one or two or three or four more years. Granny Lindly, Ella’s Mom, died at 93, Ella at 91 I believe.

This theft must end. It drains my energy, what little I have and wears me down. [Crazy Uncle] told me many times “I’m going to make sure that you never succeed” and I’ve got to find ways to STOP HIM.  Next week I start bringing in the police, like I did 14 months ago, and I now have a five year list of things taken, and some returned (like, much later usually). He also said he’s going to make sure I end up in the nut house (or something like that). He even told “George” (yes, they have become phone friends and I imagine it must have ended by now) that Mom and Dad were putting me in an insane assylum as I had gone insane (that was only wishful thinking on his part).  But George went on and convinced David it was true and it broke his heart.

It really is too bad, [Vixen], that you never knew the fine and noble qualities that were in your brother.  He was all torn up, and the credit for that goes to G. He was also threatened with violence if he had anything to do with me, and sometimes beatened, as you witnessed.

I still can’t get on to your web site. Soon I will be getting a new used computer and will get my websites (2) up and growing, and that will be the beginning of me making contact with the kind of women I am wanting to reach. Conan, who is currently in Oregon, will be helping me.

It would be nice if you could sent a paragraph every few weeks. To think that you don’t even remember that I’m ALIVE sounds really cold and uncaring to me.  But I don’t want you writing out of duty. So if
your email today was duty, than we’ll just have to agree not to try to communicate.

All for now.

Love, Mom

—–Original Message—–
>From: Lisa Movius <lmovius@hotmail.com>
>Sent: May 28, 2007 10:38 AM
>To: Alison Whitney <a.whitney@earthlink.net>
>Subject: Re: Are you OK?
>
>Dear Mom,
>
>Sorry I have forgotten to write for so long. As you know, the spring is a
>real crunch time for me, with a lot of work to do. I’ve been swamped, plus
>have had a succession of visitors to entertain. Still, I should have
>remembered to check in.
>
>How are things with you?
>
>How is Whit? I sent her a card not long ago, but should do so more often.
>And what is your mailing address again?
>
>Love,
>Lisa

Shit, how do I even respond to this? The WTF factor is so immense…

I am currently reading the NYT profile of the V-Tech killer. I find it particularly disconcerting because his awkward, angry loner profile so resembles my own late brother. Thankfully, my Gege did not take anyone else out with him when he killed himself - but I suspect he could have.

Media and blogosphere commentary chastises the Virginia shooter’s family and roommates and teachers for not seeing his problems and getting him help. The problem with the mentally ill is this: what can others do about it? My mother tried to get my Gege committed, and that only served to make him worse - I sympathize with the instinct to do precisely the opposite of what our crazy bitch of a mom wanted. I did nothing: I had spent a lifetime trying unsuccessfully to befriend him, and a childhood getting beaten up by him; when his downward spiral began I just avoided him. I had no interest in being taken down with him, and I find large unstable men to be rather physically alarming. I do struggle with guilt and remorse and what-iffies over this, but I will never apologize for putting my own survival first.

Very often the mentally ill do not want help, they want enabling. They often make conscious choices to wallow in their unreality rather than dealing with the unpleasantness of reality.

There are a couple of foreigners I know in Shanghai who are definitely unstable and not getting help they need. I know one women who has the very same issues of bipolarity, delusional and obsessive-compusive disorders as my mom, except more functional - but so was my mom, at her age. But how do you tell an acquaintance, “You really need psychiatric treatment, and should not be living in a country where you cannot get it”? Close friends are another story, and I hope if I ever start to succomb to genetics all of you will “Yo!” at me - as you do even when I feel just a little bit wallowy and depressed. However, many crazy people don’t have close friends.

My brother had good friends in college, but did not stay in touch with them afterwards. He was completely isolated at the end of his life.

The line between sanity and insanity is a fine one; all of us have danced on it at some point. The human mind is so evolved yet so feeble, the soul so little defense against the horrid absurdity and absurd physicality of existance. Everyone is alienated and bitter sometimes. It is not surprising that some people go nuts sometimes, but rather that most of us don’t.

My mom’s meds are working. Last week, while in Beijing, I was startled to receive this:

Hi [Vixen].

All for now.. Mom

I was floored. Concise! Sane! No guilt-trippage or rantage noticeable! Wow! Go drugs!

Then, last night, on a marathon deadline-not-going-well-working-til-6am session, I get the below. She’s still amazingly coherent, for her. But it really reveals how intensely bitter she is. How obsessed she is with her self-righteous victim position. Notice her wording, if you make it far enough - I struggled, but it was 4am and I was annoyed with my article: she made mistakes, yes, but never ever was she in the wrong.

Among the things about my mom: you don’t have to be delusional to make crap up about yourself (as I see daily with the expat fobs in Shanghai), but it sure does help. Whether in more or less sane mode, she is brilliant at spinning versions of events to always put herself in a glowingly positive center. She would have made a brilliant PR agent, or memoir writer.

An example: she’s a big psychiatric hypochondriac, and is convinced my dead Gege was schitzophrenic. I never saw evidence of this, but wasn’t around enough to be certain. He just seemed sad and confused and stubbornly fucked up. Well, two plus years after his death, she suddenly starts going on and on and on about the “voices he said he heard”. Totally different from her narrative at the time, and the first two years after his death. Methinks someone has learned how to google…

Almost all of my family’s birthay’s are in April. My Camus turned 23 on April 1. My mom and her twin Doc Unc are 4/4. My Gege was born on 4/6; he would have been 33 this year.

This letter…I know my Grandpa was a flawed character, probably as bad father as he was a citizen. A McCarthiest, sexist and racist and xenophobic. But he was my first real friend, the first person to love me for me as a person and not as a stereotyped relationship, and his intervention in my life saved it. And I like to hope that our all night talks about politics, religion, history, science, the human condition saved him too, from the pain of a decade’s battle with cancer and mooching children he despised.  I love him, miss him, appreciate him, but I certainly do not idolize him. Despite what my mother believes. But she was always violently, bitterly jealous of our friendship, lashing out with a “mine! mine!” fury towards both of us.

I’m to go two weeks without my one strong medication (limictal), which will be hard. After one day off it I start feeling really light (like I’m floating in the air), I can’t concentrate and get things done (or push myself at all), and I can’t sleep any more than 1 hour a night. The lacmictal has to get out of my system before I start…

Depakote (which I took in 1994 and gained  30 # on, [Gege] took for a while and gained weight on; also [a great aunt and her daughter]). You can eat like a bird and still put on weight. The key…tons of exercise-walk/run/swim/gym–finally! and eating only the right kind of foods. Keeping a log (ugh).

Finally a word about stress (and it can apply to you). The human body is not meant to go through the kind of stresses, cruelty, confusion, lack of love that both [Gege] and I went through. A strong support team (usually family) is needed, and I never had that, except from you for the first 6 years (then, it seems, you sided with the many critics).

[Of course, the criticism was what she needed then, but it was useless with my Grandma bailing her out.]

—–Original Message—–
>Sent: Mar 27, 2007 12:15 PM
>Subject: Re: Hi
>
>Hi Mom,
>
>Thanks for your note. I was just thinking that I hadn’t heard from you for a
>while. Hope all is well.
>
>All’s well with me, just work is very busy this time of year, so I’m getting
>a bit run down. So it goes.
>
>Love,
>[Vixen]

Okay, messed up, yes, but so fascinating. If only my mom were Chinese, rather than American, stoic and determined rather than spoiled, self-importanant, entitled, victimized. (Although young Chinese are well on their way to getting their Oporah on.)

My North Face knockoff backpack has served me well, it’s dilapidated mass accompanying me accross the US, Asia, Europe and South America. I subscribe to a belief that one should never travel with more than one can readily carry oneself, because: who knows what sort of places and situations one might find oneself in. The Andes, the New York Subway, etc: not very wheely friendly. I have great disdain for girly women who overpack and then expect men to bail them out. The exception is for two month excursions like I am currently on, but I still am pretty manageably compact.

The think is with my backpack is it has a 30 pound tipping point, or more precisely tip-me-over point. At 35, it starts to cause inordinate amounts of back pain. Also, I need it strapped tightly on; when jiggly, my disks jiggle with it. Hence, on a freezing day and thus enthusiastically bundled, thus with 32-lb bag jiggling to much back pain, I found myself trying to shlumph from the New York subway to the Chinatown bus to Boston. I couldn’t get a taxi. It was freezing, my back was screaming in pain, and I was so exhausted. I bundled into an Au Bon Pain to rest and regather, downing a soup while contemplating my options. I called my uncle to see if he was amenable, and at his assent decided I’d skip Boston and spend my remaining East Coast time ensconced in Rockville.

I was bummed to miss my Boston and Providence friends, especially one high school friend who I recently “found” after she’d gone missing ten years ago. It’s sad, she was a very talented artist, but dropped out of college for lack of funds, and is now working in food service. I also missed Itching, another of my masochistic Taiwanese MD/PhDs; Spazzy, a Shanghai friend now in nursing school, and Hu Laoshi. Bjoston was in Michigan, so I’d have missed him anyway, which is just as well.

It turned out a great decision, as I had time to finish my fellowship applications, and got to chill with my DC family. My Doctor Uncle is my mom’s twin and the sole sane one in their generation, and thus feels an obligation to take care of the rest of us.  He is guilt-ridden at not being able to “save” my brother, even though he did more than anyone. It’s not so much the doctor’s messiah complex as that he inherited my grandmother’s excessive nurturing instinct. I’ve always refused Dr. Unc’s offers of financial assistance; it embarasses me how much my mom mooches off of him. But, it was so nice to be a kid again, so taken care of. While I have a bit of a hard time relating to my uncle, it is comforting to know I have a haven somewhere in the world.

My uncle is also the best mom I know. He is so devoted to my cousin “Princess Jasmine” (since she was obsessed with that character as a kid - and we’ll never let her live it down), who’s now 15. She’s big into dance and drama, and he ferries her to a slew of classes and rehersals, dozing in the car while waiting. I’m amazed that she’s not more spoiled; I suspect the darwinianism of daycare plus high parental expectations balanced out the doted-upon only child factor.

My aunt is cool. She is a scientist, and is entertainingly wry and dry, as chatty and catty as Dr. Uncle is quiet and proper. She’s Irish Catholic, casually mocking our repressed WASP sensibilities, and is a great source of random family information. For example, I discovered that my grandfather’s brothers keep Pomeranians, since that’s the part of Germany they were from. Ha. I am Aryan, hear me yap!

With their schedules, it’s little surprise they don’t cook, and at least they’re more adventurous about where they’ll eat out than the San Diego family. Still, after several days at their house, I got pretty sick of microwave dinners. Man, no one in my family can cook without a microwave. Even veggies, pasta, they nuke ‘em.

Jasmine is fifteen years younger than me, and when I was in college I spent many holidays with them, so she and I were buddies. Teens are a bit harder to interact with, though, and I can’t quite muster much enthusiasm for musical theater. The two of us look a lot alike, although she’s much taller, and my hair has been dyed away from our mutual honey blonde. But, we have the same eyes, many other similar features, and often stared appraisingly at each other. We do need to get better reacquainted.

Dear Mom,

I’m so glad I got to spend Christmas with you, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you again this last stint in La Jolla. Also apologies for not calling you back sooner: I wasn’t home much, and the days got away from me quite quickly, but I should have been more conscientious, and I am sorry.

I did want to have brunch with you on Sunday, but after our conversations on Saturday I deemed that unwise. When you get into that emotionally argumentative mode, I am unwilling to be around you. I am not interested in hearing your accusations against anyone. However, you really crossed a line going after [Camus]. She and I are close friends, and always will be. I would prefer to not have to take sides in any disputes between you two, but if you force me to, I will side with her. So it is better for everyone if you drop whatever perceived grievances you have towards her.

I hope you will enough past this by the time I return from LA that we can spend some time together. I would like to come over, help get you used to using your complex’s gym, and cook one of the recipes in the book I gave you. I’ll call you when I get back to San Diego. However, I absolutely refuse to engage with you in any arguments, and you need to know that I will hang up or leave if you try to drag me in. This is not negotiable: if you want to see me, you cannot pick fights with me.

Happy New Year! I had a very nice time going to several parties with friends here in LA, I am lucky to have a good group of them here, and so far 2007 is off to a lovely start. I wish you equal feliciations for the year.

Love,
[Vixen]

Ah, no place like home! Camus was gamely chauffering my mom home from Christmas dinner, and my mom started ripping into her for accepting some financial support from our sane uncle in DC. This is necessitated because Camus’ dad is now refusing to contribute towards her school fees, ostensibly since he thinks women shouldn’t be doctors, but mostly because he’s a cheap jerk and an abysmal parent. Such criticism from my mom is hysterically hypocritical, since Sane Uncle pays ALL of her bills. Camus defended herself, and in my mom’s paranoied, victimization-obsessed mind, this means Camus attacked her.

So, my mom calls me up at the Buffs. “It’s very important I tell you what really happened,” she insisted, because “[Camus] is trying to turn you against me.” This is a theme she is very preoccuppied with: at any given time someone is always trying to turn someone else against her by spreading “lies” about her. Sigh. I told her I was not going to have this conversation with her, that whatever happened is between her and Camus, but her rampage would not be derailed. “I need you to stop, or I will end this conversation.” She didn’t, I did.

She called back soon after, and I managed to steer her onto neutral topics, but not for long. Soon she was again screaming about how Camus “abused” her, so again after several warnings I hung up the phone. I don’t think I had a choice: arguing with her is what she wants, so that she can add it to her heap of complaints of “Oh, cruel world!” Whatever.

The letter I would like to write her, but of course never will, is:

Dear Mom,

You are a psychotic bitch, and I am sick of your shit. Rather than trying to work through your issues and live your life, you repeatedly pick fights and invent persecutions so you can pass responsibility for your failings on to other people. This is why you are lonely and miserable. This is why your son killed himself and your daughter can’t stand you. Your mental illness is only the icing upon your insufferableness; the fundamental reason is your insistance on remaining immature, irresponsible, self-centered and self-important.

I only put up with you out of pity, and for my grandmother’s sake. When you try to pick fights with me, it is almost a relief, because it cancels out my pity for you and frees me of the obligation to deal with you. Thanks!

I wish I had a family, just one parent who was a parent to me. I don’t, oh well. I can’t bother to resent you, because surviving you has made me remarkably strong, resiliant, adaptable and calm. Learning to deal with you has made me able to deal with just about anything. Again, thanks! I am a happy, healthy, successful person, and your attempts to derail me into your swamp of introspective wallowing just make me appreciate the good place I am at.

[Vixen]

1/3/07

Today she replied:

Hi [Vixen],

I just wrote you an email that I was really pleased with, and I accidently pushed “clear” and it all went away.

I will try to put such a statement together at a different time. I’ve been up too long.

[Vixen], there is so much that you do not know or see. So much that you said was totally backward, and I can only hope and pray that someday you will see the truth of what I am saying.

I’m no longer willing to be pulled into family “pettyness” or the problems of others. I have my own life to live, and I’m getting ready to live it.

I only want friends and associates who are kind, and who treat peole who with kindness and respect.

With [Camus] I was not accusatory in any way, and I know that God knows that.  Maybe in 20 or 30 years you might see who I really am, but I am not going to try to defend myself. Of all people YOU should know me well, but reality is that you don’t know me AT ALL any more.

You are willing to let people “interpret” me to you. You may not see it, but I’ve seen it for a long time.

That’s all I’m going to say.

I hate that which is devisive. I love what is honest and pure and up-building.

I hate pettyness of any kind.

I hate it when people judge things that they don’t know anything about.

I hate it when people talk behind people’s back, trying to sway them their way (wanting power). See Prov. 6:16-19 (these are the correct verses). It mentions the things God HATES.

I better end this before I accidently erase it.

If we spend any time together in the time you are here, I do not want you to mention the “[Camus]” issue. I’m really tired of it all–that and other things.

I want every day to be positive, and I will work hard to make it that way. I will stay away situations that I know will pull me down.

Life is too short for negativity.

I will be moving, as soon as I can, but I’m far from being ready. I’m hoping I can do it.  I cannot have peace of mind here–never for very long. My condo HAS been broken into many times, and my car WAS tampered with more than a few times.  These are not things I have imagined.  If you want any specifices, I can share some with you that prove that the loss had nothing to do with papers on the dining room table or boxes in the living room and in my writing room.

I cannot write when I am frightened, or distracted.  I cannot write without long periods of quiet and peace (I am STILL trying to get to that place, and the slowness is not because I am lazy. I was terrorized for a long time and have only started being able to push it out of me in the past three weeks. I mourned David’s death for a long time, and it was only about 6 weeks ago that I knew I could let go of the grief, the loss (each person has their own healing time, and each situation is different. (I do not wish to be judged for taking almost two years to heal). I am not in a place where I can easily meet people and get to know them on a deep level. I am not in a place where I can do public speaking. I am not in a place where I can build a leadership team. You probably don’t remember me doing these things, but David did, being 2 years older. He was even introduced to the large Tues am audience. So HE knew what I could do, he was used to women calling all the time, and he knew how fond so many women were of me (the husbands too, and even ten years ago the daughters were calling me wanting The CBW. It was easy to do things there when I didn’t feel like I was in a fishbowl with doubtful even critical people watching me.

I won’t say anything more about moving until the time I’m about to move, or have moved. Obviously, I need to get over the agorphobia, the high level of fear, and Dr. Hubbard says I will probably always need medication for the panic/anxiety, and most likely the depression (when one has LOST a lot, and you can’t say that I havn’t, that sadness and sense of loss is always with you.

I hear people on Larry King Live who have lost children say that all the time, that you never really get over it.  No one can know this unless they themselves have had such a loss.

In a real sense I have lost both you and [Gege].  But there is nothing I can do about. If you continue to think/believe things about me that are not true…then we both will LOSE…A LOT.

That’s all.

Mom

Sigh. I really can’t win, can I?

My brother died two years ago yesterday.

He was 30, and a mess. He had lost job after job, friend after friend, through an odd social ineptness that our mother was convinced was schitzophrenia. I suspect he was simply awkward and unhappy.

And sick. He developed juvenile diabetes at age 13. For a long time he handled it well, and I admired the nonchalance with which he handled it in his teen years. But those quickly passed.

I never really knew my brother. The parentals separated when I was nine, he eleven, and we moved to California. Psycho mom and I are both small people, but my Gege grew to 6′2. He simultaneously began to evidence the aggressive misogeny that was our family’s prototype. My Gege then maximized his physical advantage, which resulted in his being shipped off to said biological father.

After that, I was forced to visit them both periodically, but I refused to interact at all during these. I soon refused to see our dad at all, and last saw him in court when at age sixteen I legally changed my surname. My Gege, meanwhile, was stranded in this environment of masculine violence, which meant that the blows he and his dad had long exchanged eventually became quite ugly as he entered his teen years.

College was great for him, an escape I suspect. He spent in San Diego the summer after his sophomore year, mine between high school and college. Our Sane Uncle in DC hired us both to fix up is San Diego rental property, and that endeavor encompasses some 90% of my good memories of him.

Raised religious can really fuck people up. I am skeptical and condescending to the point of offending people I love; he was an eager religious beaver. From Daoist to Buddhist to Honky Hindu, and the last killed him as he deemed chanting a substitute for insulin.

Whether it was the schitzs my ma believes or the diabetic comas I suspect, I’ll never know for sure. Gege became ever stranger, fatter and shaggier. He moved into an ashram, quit his job, followed a “holy woman” around the US, and moved to India several times. New Years 2004 I was asked to go to India to collect him, after he was kicked out of yet another ashram for being violent, due to schitzphrenic episode/diabetic coma. A friend there collected him for plane fare, luckily.

Or, not. Forced back to California, la Ma tried to get him committed permanently to a psych ward and seized control of his finances. According to her, he was ever more unstable and violent; her propensity for calling the cops on him didn’t help. According to him, he was sad and struggling. I just don’t know. But I do know how she tries to construe and control me, and that I would also kill myself if she succeeded.

My brother died alone in a skeezy hotel room in New Mexico, slomo suicide/diabetic neglect. I know it’s a mercy: he was already en route to being one of the scary homeless one sees in La Jolla. Losing limbs was not much further away in his condition. Sane Uncle gave him money, he’d blow it all on self-help classes, “qi”-enhancing crystals, with none left for rent.

At his worst, I avoided my brother. He was so strange, so hard to talk to. I was equally bored, freaked out, and afraid of getting sucked down by his self-destructiveness. I have felt and fielded a lot of guilt, for surviving and so well, and for not helping him to follow. But, as Mrs. Din taught me, guilt is an evil emotion. I protected myself, and I tried to engage as much as I dared.

Today I spent with Kaoru Buff. At one point, she poked at my latest dye job resulting in a protracted ape grooming joke. “You two have known each other toooooo long,” eye-rolled her husband. We today were down on Pearl at the Long’s Drugs; the bus stop in front is where I last saw my Gege. (Kaoru then was waiting in the adjacent library to rescue me if things got too freaky.)

“Look at you! You have such a touch chick’s attitude. I’ll bet no one messes with you,” was the last thing my brother ever said to me. I’d actually just been mugged in Shanghai, but didn’t feel like sharing. I’ve taken that as a benediction since, but actually what has mattered is not my strengths so much as my supposed vulnerabilities: all of you looking out for and calling me out on. That is survival: not the balance on the wire so much as the strength of the net below. Even if we never fall, it helps to know we can. I regret I was not a better net.

DLP 1974.4.6 to 2004.12.26

So, I’ll be heading back to the US for Christmas through January, and need to book my ticket and plan the trip already. I’m procrastinating on it because of the deeply conflicted feelings I always have about going “home”.

Those can be summarized in one word: Momsie. She called me a few days ago to inform cheerily that she had “accidentally” drunk Lysol - an American cleaning fluid - the night before. Typical cry for attention from Miss Melodrama herself. She had bought groceries and had the Lysol next to a bottle of soda on the floor (yes, apparently she serves herself off the floor), and didn’t bother turning on the light before pouring herself a cuppa and having a swig, which she didn’t swallow. She then spent three hours on the phone with poison control making sure she wouldn’t die.

This is the short version of course. One could wonder why it took her three hours to receive an explanation that would require five minutes, but consider that this is a woman who calls the cops several times a week because she misplaced an earring or something and is convinced that “someone” (my obnoxius uncle J) broke in and stole it. In other words, she harasses whoever she can find because it’s the only human contact she can get, since her paranoia, accusatory rants and general whinyness have alienated all of her friends and family.

Even talking to her on the phone stirs a desire to take razors to my flesh. She’s taking to talking in this cutesy falsetto baby voice. I don’t know if she thinks it’s appealing, or it’s a sign her mind is going further. Possibly both. Combine this trait with the fact that not a word comes out of her that’s not complaining about whoever’s “abusing” her lately and why her life sucks, perhaps you can understand the razor fantasies. I think I handle fairly well the baggage that comes from deeply despising both of my biological parents, but contact with my mom just riccochets me back to self-loathing teenage insecurity.

So, already I’m having the intense anxiety nightmares that preclude any visit to San Diego. I’m going to spend Christmas with my adopted family, the Buffs, and of course to see all my US friends, my extended “real” family. The dilemma, though, is whether to spend part of Christmas with mommy dearest. I suppose it’s unavoidable as I want to see my grandmother, who would never keep the secret of my presence from my mom. And Momma Buff  is a too kind soul who takes pity on her and guilt trips me for avoiding her. So, I will have to navigate a delicate path between obligatory misery with the biological family and having a merry Christmas with my adopted family.

My plan is to make the obligatory mom time more sufferable by planning activities. The idea is to distract her from talking constantly. She was a surfer girl when young, and I really want to learn to surf, so I’m thinking of buying her a session or two of surfing lessons for Christmas. Taking her scuba diving is also very tempting - no talking! - but she’d probably panic. Another idea is to buy her a cookbook or two and learn some recipes together. The problem is that she only likes WASP food and tex-mex; attempts to introduce her to “ethnic” cuisines (unless really crappy Americanized “Chinese” food) have failed.

It’s worth the grief, though. The following day Jersey Girl, one of my best friends from college, called me up. She’s in DC working in government, and totally sucks at staying in touch, but compensates by making long phone calls once or twice a year. Can’t wait to see her, and all of you. Will probably bop up to LA for new year’s with Theramini and others in the lala crowd, then spend most of January visiting those of you on the east coast. Manila Moxie will be back in Boston as well, so that will balance the expected bittersweet of seeing my lost love Bjoston again. Yeah, US visits deluge me with a lot of emotional intensity packed into a few deliriously short weeks.

Oh, and La Espanita is back in Argentina (where her mom’s from), and I have a standing invite to go hang out with her in Buenos Aires. Her mom is already boring her senseless. Very, very tempting. But, can I really afford the money and time?