Hidden Influence
The reality of how deeply my family has been influenced by mental illness is hitting me more and more ever since I visited my aunt for the first time during the winter of 2017.
I sought her out for answers. Answers to why my dad is the way he is. Answers to the question of who I am. Where I come from. I never really understood what it meant to be “white”. I just associated it with being called otherizing names in public while growing up. Gwai mui (ghost girl). Wun huit yee (mixed blood). Bak yun (white person). I also associated it with strange behaviors as I watch how my dad (for multiple reason) didn’t seem to fit into HK culture and society. I somehow felt that learning more about my dad’s family would be the key to finding clues and unlocking answers to make sense of my family story and my whiteness.
And it did. It absolutely did. I’ll maybe share more about the whiteness part another time, but as my aunt shared about my grandmother’s battle with paranoid schizophrenia, I found some answers about my dad’s life. Confusing and painful memories that involve my dad somehow started to make sense. My experiences of who he is, and why he behaves the way he does is now grounded in the reality that mental illness is a key influence in the narrative of his life.
In fact, seeing mental illness as an influence in my own childhood has shaped how I see all of my life. I no longer see my dad’s 7 years of unemployment and addiction to computer games as simply neglect; I see it as depression. I no longer see my mother’s overbearing worry and anxious behaviors as simply “being a nagging mom”; I see it as severe anxiety. -- I think my dad tried really hard to escape from and to hide his shame about his family by running away from all of it. He also tried so hard to stop me from studying in the US, and still constantly pleads with me and my sisters to move back to HK. He sends me odd (but loving in his own way?) messages about how to leave the country when (not “if”) martial law is declared here. Don’t take a plane. Drive as fast as you can up to Canada. Don’t look back.
What’s so ironic about my dad’s desire to hide us all from his past is that my knowledge of his family has helped me to love him more. I see more of his humanity. He didn’t choose his family. He didn’t ask to be born to a mother with schizophrenia, who lived at a time with limited care and available treatment (shock treatment was what she was limited to during his childhood). There’s so much he didn’t ask for, and it doesn’t excuse a lot of his actions, but at least now I see the influences the shaped him. And has now shaped me.
Below: my dad (the kid on the left wearing a tie), his mom, dad, sister, and brothers.
