Tired of tags keeps me from heading down

Attempting to use anthropological research as a tool of self-discovery can be painful, lonely, empty, and contradictory. I fled from the Han society and entered the aboriginal community. Perhaps it is to find a reassuring solution to his chaotic identity by knowing how to re-establish the subjectivity of his own nation by understanding the ethnic groups that also encounter the problem of identity.

A, who came to work in the tribe, took me to a campsite today, where a group of high-ranking prosecutors and their families gathered. When A introduced me as a friend of a certain family, they immediately blurted out: "So you are not aboriginal!". A continued: "No, he is German."

Right now I feel like I'm almost on the run. The eyes of a group of people fell directly on me, and their scrutiny eyes did not shy away from showing what I am/what I am not. I almost felt out of place and every word they said was wrong.

Running from the plains into the mountains, just to escape the identity of the Han Chinese. The imagination of Han society suffocates me. Someone told me to accept who I am, to be proud of who I am, and I think such people are either not traumatized, or the victims of violence against them are not from their own culture. I came to the mountains, trying to keep others from defining who I was. Fortunately, because of my mixed-race status, almost few people in the local area call me a mother-in-law (that is, Han Chinese, which I am very grateful for). Instead, they introduce me in a more chaotic and diverse way. Until now in the tribe, when most people talk about me, they call me by my first name (at least as far as I can hear), without any identity. In the tribe I seem to find a belonging, not me but mine. When my host family joked to outsiders that I was their daughter, or that my children called me my sister, although I couldn't be a "true" Aboriginal like them, I seemed to have gained a new Identity, escaping from the chaos to an identity that I can breathe.

Since I was a child, I knew that most people will habitually find out the difference between you and them, and then distinguish between you "German" and "us", you are the forever outsider. This kind of division would be fun when I was a child, and then I would cater to them to make myself a little more "foreign", and then I would speak Taiwanese and wear blue and white slippers in order to establish myself as a "true Hong Kong" Taiwanese, trying to make myself look I got up very Taiwanese, until the identity of "Taiwan" stung me.

When the world you believe in suddenly betrays you, how can you rebuild your world, or even yourself? I looked at my broken self and tried to put myself back together piece by piece, but I often broke down and cried because I didn’t know where to put the pieces. I thought of Beha, the author of Anthropology of Sadness, describing how she saw her son sitting in the audience in an anthropology lecture, and how she wanted to put a net on her son to keep him away from all sorrow and pain. I cried when I saw this. How I wish I could go back to where I was when I was four, hold her tight and tell her that your experience will make you feel pain when you think about it all again, feel your dual identity being perfectly pulled and integrated into the trauma A tear in the veins of memory, but I will protect you.

Traumatic memories were brutally connected to the culture of Taiwanese Hokkien people, and at the same time, I beautified another German identity into a beautiful secret garden of childhood. In this perfectly protected secret garden, the abominable "South Fujian culture" broke into the secret garden and ruined my childhood. I looked at the Hokkien who hurt me on one side, and the secret garden that was destroyed beyond recognition on the other side, so I couldn't find who I was anymore, I had no place to stand.

The Secret Garden cannot be rebuilt because it was built on the love and protection of my family, on my ignorant imagination of Germany. My grandparents are gone. Germany is a land that I haven't returned to for more than ten years. I don't know anything about it. The secret garden of childhood is forever sealed in memory with stains. Perhaps this is the only way to grow trauma, to find that what I once thought was beautiful is actually a scam, and I have become an accomplice in deceiving myself. How unforgivable. Every cell of mine is saying to him/them "why are you doing this to me", every cell of mine is yelling at me: " Why are you doing this to me!"

Germany's happiness, beauty and respect for my representative correspond to the repression, misogyny and oppression of the representative of southern Fujian. I've been told it's not a cultural issue, it's a gender issue. But when I am deeply immersed in this culture and deeply oppressed by gender, how can I not associate culture with gender issues? In fact, I know the ugly side of my German side. When my mother told me that my favorite relative when I was a child was actually a Nazi; After refusing on the grounds of racism, thinking I might as well use my grandfather's surname.

All the goodness of childhood at my grandparents' house, the flowers and apples and the pond, and the unbelievably big turf in the backyard. When my grandmother saw that I was as rude and careless as hers, she stood with me unconditionally; when we picked wildflowers on the roadside to give to her grandmother's smiling face; Fully informed yet cooperating with the heartbreak of being cheated out of our show, it made us laugh out loud. These beauties are real. But why, why can the pain of trauma completely cover up all the beauty, and make me hate the "painful Fujian" that stands on the opposite side of the beautiful German imagination?

Life in Taiwan occupies almost all of my life, ups and downs. I have tried to become a "foreigner" in the eyes of Taiwanese, and I have tried not to be anyone in the eyes of Taiwanese (but just an ordinary Taiwanese), neither success nor failure, but added a lot of jokes after dinner. , but everything seems absurd when the trauma is aroused. I clearly see myself erroneously bringing trauma-related memories into identity and culture, clearly drawing a false antithesis so that I have a support and a specific object to vent to. I clearly know that all these imaginations are false, but I can't help but indulge in it, and I don't know how and I don't want to come out.

There is no place to stand. What's mine makes me miserable, refuses to admit it, and what's not mine will never really be me even if I want to mix in. I thought of the book The Orphans of Asia, and also thought of a family member who told me that after going down the mountain into the city, all his classmates died either by suicide or by chronic suicide of alcohol, and he was the only one left. I think of every single person in the world who suffers from identity pain and the moments of joy that alcohol can bring us. We find identity in the cracks, or get lost or give up. To those who find a place for themselves, and to those who are in chaos (as in my article), living, suffering, and not knowing why they are here but can only laugh. I deeply remember the phrase "to live is a kind of resistance", and I smiled unconsciously when I saw it. It's ridiculous, just like life. I'm still alive and I'm watching you. "Look, you make me suffer, but you can't kill me. Every day I live, I look at you and laugh at you. Look, I'm still alive!"

Be funny!

It was a snowy day. There should be a good snowfall to cover all the ugliness.