Borger@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
Oh yeah, this is super relatable.
I have a very complicated relationship with my heritage. (I come from a Middle Eastern country.)
As a teen I would stay up at night wishing I was white (because my white friends’ parents were OK with me being queer. They showed me a kind of love my life was so sorely lacking in.)
Whenever I’d come home I’d have to put the proverbial mask back on, but no matter what, I couldn’t work my way out of being a disappointment to the family. I felt like a prisoner in my own house and I knew other people had it different.
My mother also used to throw my medication (antidepressants) away because “chemicals bad” and it’ll “ruin [my] brain”, essentially. And so I’d deal with withdrawal too.
I was victimised by a combination of difficult life circumstances, and (really, mostly) a rigid, conservative, and intolerant culture.
As an adult now, my feelings about this are not so black and white; I am proud of where I’m from. But I do feel for younger me. And I’m still damaged from my childhood. Always will be.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Oh yea this is a big part of it.
Idk why, but like everyone in my extended family seem to just distrust psychaitry. Nobody takes depression seriously.
Apparantly, one of my uncles/aunts/cousins managed to “get over depression” without taking medications, now my mom is using that as a role model. Like… the fuck.
I’m called weak for not having the “willpower” to “just get over depression”. The fuck lol.
Like… I read about some of the international adoption thing and, despite the potential problems that could cause, I feel like some random white European/North American/Australian family would, statistically, probably be more understanding and tolerant of depression, more empathetic. Like I know I probably sound a little bit “internalized racist”, but it’s not really about the race thing, its the extremely conservative culture of a lot of Asian families. Like you go to my home village… omg people like just gossip and badmouth about that one family with the disable kid and think of him as a “burden” to the village. Like they’d have false pity, like “omg so sad” … “so sad that this useless eater is wasting resources”.
This is why, Taishanese (台山话 a variant/“dialect” of Chinese from Taishan, Mainland China, not to be confused with Taiwan, which is a different place) is kinda a dead language in my eyes.
Its just… (1) my parent never really spoke Taishanese to me and (2) a speaker of Taishanese is probably rural, and very conservative. Nobody in the cities uses that.
So while I can understand it, I just don’t care for it. I don’t wanna speak it.
As for Cantonese… I guess I can think about Hong Kong and how there are a lot of more liberal open minded people there. So maybe I wanna hold on to Cantonese. As for Mandarin… well there is Taiwan… and I just… hope that like out of 1.4 billion people, that there is a silent majority out there that wants a better government than… you know… the current one. A lot of Mandarin speakers are urban, more educated, a lot of intellectuals At least I hope there are alot of intellectuals out there that secretly wants change.
So… I guess I’m trying to make up the reasons to justify keeping Cantonese and Mandarin. I try to remind myself that my parents and the authoritarian government of China don’t own these languages. But its hard to get rid of the subconscious negative associations.
As for Taishanese, yea I lost hope on that. Its pointless. Statistically, 99% of people speaking Taishanese are gonma have extremely fucked up rural conservative views.