Family...

I feel a little silly that I can't sleep tonight cos I am excited for the first day of school tomorrow :P
I mean, I guess I'm kinda really excited to start (and finish! *fingers crossed*) nursing school. I had been preparing for this since...2007! O-M-G that's right! Pre-reqs!!! I hate you. Pre-reqs that expire? I hate you even more!

Anyway. I fill up my time by getting emo. I recently had a little conversion experience. I don't know how long it will last. I'm hoping it's not a temporary thing.

I realize how much I love my family!
My quirky, weird, atypical, problematic family! (which family isn't?)

My parents are not perfect. My mom has issues of internalized colonialism being from Taiwan and loving, absolutely adoring everything Japanese. Taiwan was a former colony of Japan. Japanese colonialism had different policies for Korea and Taiwan. Where they deprived Korea of any industrialization or technological transfer etc, they fawned over Taiwan and developed it as their lil model colony. It was the bad cop stick vs. the good cop carrot game they played.

My mom's racism is probably the hardest for me to accept about my family.

Growing up in Singapore/Malaysia, and seeing my mom despise all the people around me because they were "Nanyang" Chinese, or Malay, or Indian, was really poisonous. Because being a mixture of all this was how I grew up -- language, food, friends, education. Even with Singapore's racist anti-Malay, anti-Indian, Chinese supremacist education system, we still had an illusion that we were a multiracial society in my childhood years. Hell, I even *look* like a SEAsian Chinese! And it was never good enough. Where in school we learned about Japanese colonialism of SEAsia and all the degenerate racist things the Japanese military did under the name of "pan-asian unity," in my phase of deep nationalism and patroitism, my mom would simply squash all that by hushing me up. Shaking her head furiously and yelling madly, exactly showing how my young heart seeking a history to call home, was shattering her denial of how hers had merely been at another's mercy. I didn't understand why. And I despised her for it.

I have tried rejecting her. It succeeded for some years. But I think I am ready for some fresh memories.

I am ready to remember my mom's voice, not as echoes of memory from my childhood and teenage years. I want to hear her voice again, before it ends.

Somehow, having worked in a nursing home and interacting with all these elderly who have so many contradictions, and feeling this need to distinguish between their degenerate ideology and their humanity, because I need to reclaim parts of my own humanity, is, strangely, doing something to me in a deeper way.

I know women and many oppressed people have resisted historically by killing their oppressors. I will not condemn the right to self-defense, and related to that, the rage that emerges from years of pent-up oppression. But I guess I wanna say, that this form of resistance, as legitimate as they often are, is dehumanizing to us all, even if at times necessary. This system dehumanizes all of us, and so I am not positing an ideal humanity that is being disrupted by acts of violent self defense. It's not that. It's a deeper thing, a possibly deeper, tragic thing. Something I feel unqualified to talk about because I havent been in that position yet.

Anyway, I suddenly really wanna genuinely care for my parents. My mom who has lost her kidneys to a money-grubbing capitalist medical system. My dad, who has not found what he really wants and has illusions of grandeur, of believing that persistence and inspiration alone can help transform his village high school credentials into a Einstein/John Nash genius at age 66. Maybe so, most likely not. Regardless, I love them.
I never want them in a nursing home.