today i was attending a lecture on the situation of tibetan women during the years. it started in 1959 with the flight of the dalai lama to india and went on, regarding both the situation in the tar as well as in dharamsala. there was a guy attending that class, ethnic chinese, who was heavily offended by the lecture. i know him, he considers himself a westerner, although both his parents are chinese (hong kong chinese, that is). he has german citizenship, lived in london for some years etc pp and still he got so angry because he felt like the situation wasnt shown objectively and it was all the usual china bashing. it was concentrating about the restrictions tibetan women have to go through, but not only in china – in fact, according to that lecture, the social situation was similar in dharamsala and china, but china held some more physical restrictions for women.
i dont want to go into details, it doesnt really matter nor do i want to offend any chinese. its not what this entry is to be about. i dont want to talk politics here, but identities. that chinese guy clearly sees himself as westerner, being raised in the west, and still he reacted strongly emotional and what he felt was an assault on china, like most chinese i know would have reacted. its nearly impossible to talk about the tibet topic with chinese, because there has been so much criticism in the west that they have started to feel all that westerners have to offer about the tibet topic is an assault on their country and therefore on their identity.
this whole incident just tore all those old wounds of me wide open again. you wont believe it, but i truly envy those people. i envy them because they know where they belong. they have a home, an us. i wish i could have something to cling to like they do. there is no us i belong to. what exactly am i? can i be something on my own? isnt every human a social being and therefore has to be seen in relation to the environment?
simply put, is the western view of human as inidividual who by birth has certain characteristics true, or isnt the asian view of the human as a blank page where life and society leave their writings on the more accurate one?
all my life has been an identity crisis. i never fit in anywhere, i dont know where i belong. i know the culture that has coined me but at the same time i know that i despise A LOT of this culture. from early on i dreamed of emigrating somewhere – its almost 15 years now. and yet i havent found a place to emigrate to…. will there ever be a place where i truly feel at home? where i can be comfortable with myself without thinking all the time about how to behave, what part of me to show without having people judge me?
its not that i didnt try to find a place like that. im fluent in english and german, intermediate in french, lower intermediate in chinese and spanish and have some basic knowledge of a lot of other languages (cantonese, indonesian, tibetan, vietnamese, japanese). i also spent a lot of time learning about foreign cultures. i dont know where i want to go but i know i dont want to stay in this place for my life. but yet im damned to see the flaws in every places, i can never truly admire or love a place.
sometimes i think if this isnt truly symptomatic of me. im always trying to see both sides in a conflict, always trying to be balancing and mediating. i also try to understand people, why they react the way they do, constantly analyzing ( no, im not studying psychology). i wonder if i can really love someone this way. or if that destroys everything from the very beginning. always thinking, never being simple. never enjoying.
and again im sure i didnt get to the point. im good at dealing with words, but when it gets to the important issues i never get myself communicated. just screw everything i wrote, its probably just some random whining. ill probably delete it later. for now i just had to let it out – or at least try to.
sometimes i feel crippled by all those thoughts i never get communicated. not that there is anyone i could really talk to about this. at least i feel i know no one who could possibly relate to what weighs me down like this, and probably this whole entry is simply emo-shit, what will eventually be the reason for it being deleted. but for now i have to publish it somehow, like helplessly screaming out things that are insignificant for anyone. probably better to have it lost in the sea of anonymous internet posts than annoying my friends with it.