I’ve lived for more than two decades, but I still think my story that started from a nameless tiny town in China was like an unbelievable story filled with an unexplainable sense of asphyxiation. Maybe if you’re a foreigner, you may lost your Orientalist illusion of a mysterious Eastern Country by reading this text. It’s real life, the BLOODY life from the first view account of some really traumatized person.
I was born in an isolated town in China, where the society was semi-primitive (populated by several large clans in the surrounding villages). My parents were hyper-conservative and an absolute fit of Asian parent stereotypes: obsessed with over-education and hyper-paranoid. When I was young, I was forbidden to play with other kids in the community, for fear that I’d be run over by a car or be kidnapped. I’ve literally lost the critical period of learning how to deal with others, that’s probably why I never learned how to socialize properly.
Just like stereotyped, they invested a ton in my education. I started to learn English even before I could speak Mandarin properly (despite my mom trying to speak Mandarin at home to reduce the influence of dialect on me, my speaking is still heavily influenced by dialect speakers since my environment has barely a Mandarin speaker).
My very first “memory” of this world is about kindergarten. I never appreciated it. Instead, I thought that life in Kindergarten was the first torment for me in my life. I still remember the dystopian and surreal architecture, being a repulsive conglomerate of artificially, unnatural colored Kindergarten compounds (based on the false assumption that kids love highly saturated, colorful things) surrounded by faded Soviet-style buildings with aluminum chimneys. After nearly 20 years I revisited my kindergarten and the nearly unchanged architecture reminded me about the reproduction facility that runs Bokanovsky’s process in Huxley’s book Brave New World. I saw the lawn where kids massacred ants and bugs by various means for fun.
Continue reading “Tired and Traumatized by this Country as Someone Born in China. Hope that you Foreigners can Understand the Life of Young People here is not like your Imagination”




