Frances Leigh: A life in surreality

Butterflies in Time (Chapter 2)

Beijing, The Forbidden City, 1698

“Give it back!” Yinxiang lunged for the embroidered yellow silk pouch, only for the Crown Prince to dangle it just out of his reach.

“Give it back?” Yinreng mocked him. “Who do you think you are to command me, little bastard?” A sneer twisted his handsome face. Behind him, Yintang and Yin’e sniggered at their little brother’s furious attempts to reclaim the small memento left behind by his mother. His mother who was dead and who they’d just buried yesterday.

Butterflies in Time, Chapter 1

A modern day Beijing native finds herself flung back three centuries in time. As if that weren’t bad enough, she’s stuck with her obnoxious Texan cousin. Read the first chapter of the misadventure now.

“But Daddy, I don’t even like children!”

The Texan drawl carried long and far against the backdrop of a smorgasbord of languages. Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, French, German, Turkish — and yet, it was the American who stood out. Typical.

Kiki lifted her magazine even higher and edged away from her cousin who was all legs and boobs and smooth tanned skin. The face and figure of an angel, and the temper of a demon; that was what she had. On the other end of the phone, her American step-uncle… said something. She couldn’t hear what it was, but whatever he said, it made Lucy growl with frustration.

Yongzheng – the unspoken good emperor

Gate of Divine Prowess, Beijing. Photo credit: Kallgan via Wikipedia

Anyone familiar with Qing history at all would have heard of Yongzheng. Born Aisingioro Yinzhen, the fourth living son of Emperor Kangxi, he ascended the throne in 1723 after a fierce struggle with his numerous brothers. Rumours have always abounded his accession. There’s a popular story that he amended Kangxi’s will with a brush stroke, so that it declared the Fourth Son of the emperor would succeed him, and not the Fourteenth. His reign was short, and supposedly brutal. There are many stories of how he persecuted the confucian elite, killed and purged those who opposed him, and exiled and imprisoned many of his brothers.

A very successful Chinese TV series was made about him and the struggle against his brothers in 1999, catapulting his story into the imaginations of fangirls. This much drama, involving so many young princes — what more could a girl hope for? Chinese dramas such as Scarlet Heart and Palace propelled the story of the nine princes even more prominently into fangirl stratosphere.

But what do we know about Yongzheng, really? A lot of the stories surrounding him are simply folklore. One must also note that his son Hongli (the emperor Qianlong) didn’t spend a lot of time honouring his father’s memory.

What does it mean to be ‘Chinese’?

And what does it mean not to be?

A friend of a friend recently posted in a mutual social media group, asking Chinese people to join in a discussion and share their stories of what it means to be Chinese in our city that’s often (rather unfairly) touted as the racist capital of New Zealand.

I am tempted to go, if only to be a different voice in the discussion that is increasingly monopolised by a certain faction that celebrates tribalism and victimhood.

But I wonder, do I qualify as ‘Chinese’? I guess that’s one of the central questions of the discussion. I don’t consider myself as belonging to the group. I was raised in Chinese culture, steeped in Confucianism (and tea), I taught myself to speak Mandarin and write with Pinyin because I was once very, very proud of a history that I did not fully understand. It was that pride that led me to study China’s history and culture in more depth than many other immigrant Chinese diaspora. Like how reading the Bible turned me atheist, studying Chinese history and culture made me… not want to be Chinese.

All Asian casts in Hollywood movies – and why I’m ‘meh’ about it.

I grew up watching Jet Li movies (Once Upon a Time in China, Fong Sai Yuk, Tai Chi Master etc.) and, when I got older, I became obsessed with Chinese period dramas like Yongzheng’s Dynasty, Kangxi’s Empire, The Qin Empire, Heroes of the Sui and Tang, and so on and so forth. It would never occur to me that I never saw heroes of my race because they were everywhere in my childhood and adolescence. Sure, my white friends didn’t get it, but neither did my Asian friends. I was a special nerd from the get go. So cue my absolute confusion when people started complaining about never seeing Asian actors in ‘mainstream’ movies and TV, and then proclaiming that Crazy Rich Asians (and now Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) was the movie they’d been waiting for all their life, simply because of the all Asian cast, as if that had never been done before.

Lazy Pulled Pork

After moving out of my parent’s house, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to try new recipes. Usually, I’m too lazy. I hate doing the dishes and I can never actually tell when meat is done. Slow-cooked stuff is great because I know for sure that it will be cooked.

You can probably do this using a traditional slow cooker or just a pot and a stovetop. It’s just so much easier with a multi-cooker though.

I’m actually just putting this recipe here so I won’t forget what I did.

Ingredients:

One pork shoulder, bone in.
2 Cups cider (or apple juice. I like cider because it’s cider)
1/2 Cup chicken stock
1/2 Cup barbecue sauce
2 Tablespoons of honey (or maybe one of sugar)
2 medium yellow onions, finely chopped.
A couple of cloves of garlic, finely chopped.
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon paprika
2 medium sized cooking apples

(Note: All of these measurements are approximate. I really suck at measuring and I always just guess. If it’s too salty, add more sweet. If it’s too sweet, add a bit of salt.)

Rub salt into the pork and leave overnight in a covered container. In supermarket bought pork, it helps to get rid of that nasty smell pork sometimes has. I used a free range pork shoulder so it didn’t seem to have the same issue.

Mix stock, honey/sugar, barbecue sauce in a bowl. Set aside.

Place pork in the multi-cooker. Pour the stock and sauce mixture over it. Add in the onions, apples, spices and herbs, and pour cider over it.

Set it to slow cook for 12 hours. Mine only slow cooks for 6 hours at a time, so after the first session, I turned the pork shoulder over so the side that was exposed got a chance to be submerged in the liquid.

Once the pork is done, take it out and put it in a large bowl. Remove the bones and flake the meat.

Scoop out the apple and any large solid pieces of onion and set aside to serve with the pork as a side or to eat on its own. I love fruit and meat together.

Set the slow-cooker to saute mode to reduce the liquid to about a cup to a cup and a half of sauce. You can also do this in a saucepan. I just didn’t want to wash another pot. It should be almost thick, but not quite the consistency of syrup. Mix sauce into pork.

Sometimes the pork shoulder comes with skin and I take the skin aside and use that fat to cook vegetables or beans or whatever.

Happy eating!

Racist talk does add up – why casual racism by Hong Kongers against Mainland Chinese makes me so angry

If you’ve not lived amongst Cantonese-speaking Hong Kongers or interacted with them a lot, then this is something that you’ve probably not noticed. I spent ten months in Hong Kong in 2014 and, by the end of it, I’d had enough. Not just because of the climate or the food (none of which really suited me) but also because of the pervading racism that ran through society, from the courthouse to the family.

Even though I’ve moved back to New Zealand (a place not without racism, but I can genuinely say that the majority of us are working on making it a more welcoming place for everyone), I still keep in touch with my family in Hong Kong over Facebook, and one thing that I’ve noticed is the amount of anti Mainland Chinese rhetoric.

I’m not culturally Chinese in any form. I don’t identify with it, I don’t agree with the values; I’m probably the whitest Banana I know (aside from my brother). But it makes me really angry when I see my extended family members posting articles with headlines like, ‘Seven out of ten hospital beds are occupied by new immigrants. “Are we sacrificing the lives of local Hong Kongers for foreigners?” ~ Nurse’, ‘Majority of hospital inpatients are new immigrants while local Hong Kong birth rate has dropped’, or saying things like “Yay, no more Mandarin on the street! Give me back my true Hong Kong!” or “This place is so peaceful. No noise, no loud people speaking Mandarin!” (In this instance, I asked, “Would it not be noise if the loud people had been speaking Cantonese?” To which I received the reply. “Cantonese is different. If it were Cantonese, it would be lively and bustling, like the Lunar New Year Market.”)

My home of homes

I’m feeling a little bit blue because today is the last day of my holidays and tomorrow I’m headed back to work. (As an aside, I love my job, but holidays are incomparable, amirite?)

I originally wanted to talk about body clocks and how things are stacked against people who are more nocturnally inclined, but last night, I stayed up till 3am reading a Lord of the Rings fanfiction that I’d read and loved years ago when I was still in university. It’s called Don’t Panic! by Boz4pm, if you’re interested. And if you get alarmed because it’s a Girl-in-Middle-earth fic, stick with it, because this is a very well written story about what it would actually be like to be a modern woman suddenly dropped into a medievalesque fantastic world with immortal elves, wizards and a Dark Lord.

Which brings me to my point. Middle-earth will always be my home of homes. The Lord of the Rings films introduced me to a whole new world of western cinema (and Orlando Bloom, who was and still is my idol), which led to Kingdom of Heaven, which led to me studying the crusades and European history, which formed the person I am today. But while I enjoy multiple fandoms, Middle-earth is still the place that makes me go, “I’m home”. It’s a comfort when, in uncertain times, I can revisit this place that was the root of so many daydreams. I know a lot of people didn’t like what Peter Jackson did with the Hobbit films, but I loved every moment of them. It was like revisiting the best parts of my childhood, but with a different perspective. With each movie, it felt like coming home to a safe and happy place after a long time away, and it would always be there waiting for me, no matter how far I went or how lost I felt.

At Hobbiton in Matamata, New Zealand, October 2018

More than that, Lord of the Rings introduced me to the amazing people of the fandom, who were always so eager to help out a young writer with advice and encouragement. I would not have learned so much about writing (and about the world) without having come into contact with these people. I’ve met with some of them in real life over the years and, let me tell you, online friendships are real.

My views of Tolkien’s epic saga have changed as I have grown (up, I hope, but that is up for question). I don’t always agree with the Professor’s worldview (technology is no bad thing, after all) and while I will always love Legolas, the character who intrigues me the most now is Boromir. Coincidentally, I am on and off writing a girl-in-Middle-earth type fic featuring a Boromance, something that I, as a Very Serious Writer at the age of seventeen and eighteen, swore I would never write, and I’m in the middle of looking for a good Boromance to read. Do you have any suggestions?

Do you have a fandom that you feel like you can always come home to?

2019

2018 was a year of firsts for me. I moved out of home properly for the first time, I visited North America for the first time, met some cousins for the first time.

For 2019, I’ve just started rewriting a first draft for the umpteenth time. For thirteen years, I’ve been calling myself a writer and I have been writing, more or less consistently, but I don’t have much to show for it except for some fanfics. Which is not to say it’s insignificant because fanfiction is where I learned my craft and something I can still turn to when I feel like I’m stuck and moving nowhere. But this year, I’ve started outlining a more defined version of the fifth epic storyline I’ve ever come up with and I am determined to actually complete an outline before I write. As of today, I’ve gotten up to outlining the first half of the first book. I’m envisioning a trilogy so I’m one sixth done. Anyway, I’m not allowed to actually start writing until I’ve finished the outline so even when I get stuck, I still have a vision of what the next thing to happen will be. All my writing-by-the-seat-of-my-pants attempts haven’t worked out so as much as I don’t like planning (and suck at it), I’m going to give it a go.

In terms of self-care, I haven’t been writing in my journal, and that’s been a bit remiss of me, considering I’ve been in a depressive funk for the last couple of months. But I just couldn’t motivate myself to pick up a pen and work through it even though I know it works. That’s depression, right? So I’m going to try and do a little bit of writing every night before I go to sleep, even if I don’t think I’ve got anything to say. I’m not sure whether typing would be easier, or whether it should just be old school pen and paper. Saying it out loud now, it feels a bit superfluous. If I say I’m gonna do it, I might as well just do it, right?

I’m also determined to do yoga consistently. Last year, when I moved out, I stopped going to classes because a) rent is expensive and I don’t want to spend and b) I’ve been so busy that when I get home from work, I just want to crash instead of going somewhere and trying to look for a parking space. Then I discovered Yoga with Adriene on YouTube and I’ve been doing her videos a couple of times a week, more or less. I’m going to try and do a little bit every day from now on. If you’ve always wanted to try out yoga but have been a bit intimidated by classes, or haven’t had the time, I really do recommend her channel as she’s got lots of great videos for all different levels and all different time allowances. I got a budget mat and a block and I do all my yoga at home. Maybe someday I’ll go back to classes for the social element but for now, it’s enough to know I’m doing something.

Learning to be happy

Long time no blog. I don’t know if anyone still reads this. However, looking over my previous posts, I find myself wondering, “Do I really whinge that much?”

I’ve never been what I would call a ‘happy’ person and this is both due to external and internal forces. Externally, enjoyment and happiness weren’t a big part of my childhood growing up with the pressures of culture, religion and academic excellence. Sometimes I wonder if it’s in my blood. Throughout history, Chinese women haven’t had a lot of agency or control over their lives, so they turn to nagging as their only avenue to get what they want because everything else is taboo. A daughter learns this from her mother, it gets passed on from generation to generation. My grandmother is a great complainer. So is my mother. And so am I. If something isn’t exactly as we want it, we lose the plot and we talk about it incessantly with such melancholic tones and sighs that we cause other people to lose the plot. Usually, that means children and husbands.

But I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to nag. If I do become a parent, I don’t want to be the mom who nags, nags, nags about the most minuscule and trivial of things, such as not putting the dishes away in the right place, using too many bowls, having one crumb on the bench top overnight etc. Complaining, however, is like breathing or drooling in my sleep; it’s something I fall into naturally and it’s so normal in my life that I’m afraid I won’t be able to catch myself falling into the habit.

How do you learn to be happy? Perhaps ‘happy’ is the wrong word. Perhaps ‘content’ is more of what I am after and more achievable; being in a place where I’m not always miserable, not always wanting something else because my current situation is not bearable. Content in myself, my life.

I’m going to try and focus on the little things that make me feel good, like the wind on my face, the clear sunlight and blue sky on a winter morning when I drive to work, rain on a tin roof, the smell of incense, candles at night, a warm bowl of soup to put my cold hands around, a good story, a soft blanket, laughter with colleagues, a conversation that goes beyond the smalltalk, a job well done, pants that don’t squeeze in all the wrong places, soft fluffy socks, relaxing yoga poses, a beautifully crafted sentence, a smooth pen on creamy paper, the smell of my favourite shampoo. In short, I’m going to try a little Hygge.

Because I have got to make some changes in my life. I can’t continue that spiral of negativity, not when I have depression and not when it makes me so despondent and so crazy. It doesn’t mean I have to stop being angry about the injustices of the world. A part of me will always regret what could have been if I had been born to a liberal westernized family that doesn’t treat bad science as gospel or think breaking a child is as good as raising a child. But maybe I can start accepting it and moving on and away from it all.

Call it by its name

Learning the term ’emotional abuse’ has been a revelation. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to understand why I am the way I am. I’m anxious around people, I put on an act in public, I have a hard time letting people get close to me, and I’m always so angry. Anger is my natural state. I’ve been that way for so long I don’t know how else to be. Because anger was my sword and my shield. It stopped me from breaking, stopped me from getting hurt as badly as I possibly could have been. Realizing why may be the key to me finally becoming a little less angry. Still, it gets me so mad when the same people who emotionally abused me as a child still try to do the same thing by telling me what a horrible child I was — to justify their own behaviour — and how I’m a horrible, selfish person now for “expecting perfection from everyone except myself”. Her words.

To be honest, I don’t even know where to start with this. Some of my earliest memories as a kid involve being stuck down a toilet, feet first, and being absolutely terrified. My feelings about all of this is so messed up, such a jumble, and to add to that, my abuser accuses me of abuse when I confront her about all the times she threatened physical violence or manipulated me.

It’s not okay to threaten an eight year old child with breaking her arm.

It’s not okay to slap a five year old who’s complaining about her little brother taking her colour pencil until the five year old’s lip is split.

It’s not okay to try and destroy your daughter’s dreams and passions by denying her the opportunity to ride, trying to tear down the pictures she drew of horses — because who has time or money for posters, right? Let’s ship half a ton of maths textbooks over from Hong Kong to New Zealand instead.

It’s not okay to threaten to burn your teenager’s novel manuscript.

It’s not okay to take away the pictures she cut out from newspapers of her favourite actor, the only person who ever inspired her.

It’s not okay to expect your kid to be three years ahead of all her peers in mathematics.

It’s not okay to call your kid stupid and lazy every time she can’t do a maths problem.

It’s not okay to deprive her of sleep until she redoes them until she gets them right.

It’s not okay to always belittle and denigrate your kid, comparing her unfavourably to anyone and everyone.

It’s not okay to try and gaslight that kid when she’s grown up and confronting you about your behaviour.

It’s not okay to attribute your obsessive compulsive over-cleaning of everything everyone in the house owns to ‘love’ and trying to manipulate everyone into feeling guilty when they point out that you should probably stop because nobody likes living to your cleaning schedule.

That’s not parenting. That’s not love. That’s emotional abuse. And it’s no excuse to say that you did it out of love because you didn’t love me. You thought you did. What you really wanted to do was possess me, saddle me, put a bit in my mouth and yank on the reins to have me dance to your tune.

Some days are better. Some days are worse. I’m 28 now, and I still feel like that kid sometimes. I’m riddled with self-doubt, suffering from imposter syndrome, checking OCD, and a paranoid fear that I might have hurt somebody. And I’m angry that I feel that way because I now know why I have these feelings, but I can’t seem to rid myself of them.

Not finishing my Goodreads challenge

I’m not going to finish my Goodreads challenge this year and I’m not sure how I’m coping with it. Actually, I don’t really think I’m coping since I’m angsting about it.

In 2017, I thought I could do 60. It’s only a few more than 52, right? In previous years, I’d gone for one book a week. That wasn’t unmanageable if I regulated my social media times and made reading a priority.

But then work got crazy, I started books but didn’t finish them. My book slump spiralled. I panic-read some comics and graphic novels to keep up, and then, towards September, the only thing I felt like reading was the next book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series, Oathbringer. The usual types of books that kickstarted my reading didn’t work. I found romances to be too shallow, even when the premises seemed promising. Same with YA. There was one book that I wanted and it wasn’t in my grasp.Continue reading “Not finishing my Goodreads challenge”

Celebrating Jolabokaflod on Summer Solstice

I hate Christmas. I’m not just bah-humbug about it. I really hate it; the sentiment of it, the disgustingly cheerful music that goes down like lukewarm fake blood made of cherry and cola syrup, and the panic and rush to get everything done before then.

Above all, Christmas reminds me of how a certain religious cult massacred people of other faiths and appropriated all their winter solstice traditions from their pagan cultures and called them ‘Christian’. In this day and age when everything and anything seems to be cultural appropriation, I’m surprised nobody has mentioned this. (I mean, people can’t really say that 25th December is about the birth of a certain unemployed carpenter with narcissistic tendencies when they’re surrounding themselves with pagan trees, pagan cakes with coins baked into them, pagan popcorn chains, pagan gift giving traditions, pagan use of mistletoe and holly, and so on and so forth. It would be nice to get some recognition for the pagan past.)

There are, however, certain aspects of Winter Solstice celebrations that I do enjoy, like eating lots and having days off. These past two years, I’ve been reading about the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod (literally: Yule Book Flood).

Hodges and Figgis, Dublin — Sci-fi and fantasy section in Hodges & Figgis bookshop in Dublin, 2016

Continue reading “Celebrating Jolabokaflod on Summer Solstice”