Flag is ROC technically, but westerners all just call it “Taiwan Flag” nowadays. That flag used to be the flag of actual Mainland China before 1949, that’s when the CCP took over.
I’m actually from mainland China, currenly overseas residing in the US. Flying the 5-star red flag (PRC flag) makes me look like a CCP shill, flying the star-spangled banner (US Flag) makes me look like a right-winger, so the ROC flag is the only one I feel comfortable using as a flag, the closest I can identify with.
I have a story of when I “ran away” from home when I was 6 year old due to sibling violence… I mean honestly you can just search through my profile and find a lot of stuff.
Trauma dumping on the internet feels better than therapy honestly lol
SarahFromOz@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Are those siblings with you today?
I will look for the story.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yes I’m still living with my family of origin, I never developed the self-esteem and confidence needed to be independent. Felt anxious and depressed having to deal with this family for so long I got so used to it.
(Also notice how I shifted and say “this family” instead of “my family”… yea I sometimes do this in my head…)
I don’t how how to feel safe being alone… I’ve just relied on my parents to provide me that feeling of comfort I actually feel scared to let go… I couldn’t deal with college, so I had to move back. Separation anxiety and depression. So idk how to even handle a job, feels so overwhelming. It’s not like I don’t want to, it’s that I feel so exhaused I have no energy to do it. The last summer job I had made me so depressed since I just can’t stop thinking about all this system… every day everyone have to just work to death for money… my parent have a small bussiness and so they constantly spew “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” bullshit since they made it, and are threatening to withdraw their support… so I just feel even more scared… even threatened inheritance… constantly get called “lazy” for my depression… that this family caused… sometimes I look at google maps of a bridge nearby and jumping off of it seems so enticing.
I was never supposed to be born. One Child Policy was in effect. I was just the result of PRC government failing to enforce their policy, my mom wanted an extra child because she told me that she really like to have babies for some reason… idk… maybe she’s afraid of being alone when older? She said partly she wanted me because she wanted me to be my older brother’s playmate…
So I think how it happened was that: CCP didn’t know about me until I was already born, too late to “terminate” me. Some people found out but never reported it. Also she was not living where her Hukou was registered. Hukou was in Taishan (rural), she went to Guangzhou for work. So they don’t enforce it as harshly because of some jurisdictional issues that I still don’t fully understand, like it’s not “their people”, my mom didn’t have Guangzhou Hukou, so they felt it’s outside of their responsibility so they didn’t care as harshly as those registered under them… or something like that I think. If she was back where her Hukou was registered, then they would have enforced it more strictly and I would never exist.
So anyways… I’m an “illegal child”… parents had to pay lots of fine… somewhere like ¥20000-¥30000 Renminbi, I don’t think they even remember the exact amount anymore. So I only got my legal papers after the fine was paid. Without it I could never have had a passport to leave China so I’d probably be left behind or something. So thankfully my parents actually paid the fine to get my papers.
My dad has 3 sisters (all born before One Chils Policy I think), they are all in the US. The oldest sister filed the petition in the 1990s for sibling family-based immigration, it was approved in like 2010… a long ass time… I wasn’t even born when the original application, they had to add me in later, and that required the PRC government being willing to issue my documents, whihc required the fine…
So yea, after my mom gave birth to me, they took her to do a surgery to make sure she can’t be giving birth to more children “結紮” is the word mom said, I think it translate to Tubal Ligation or something… according to wikipedia
So we are the only two. Both male.
Most people have one child. Rural people can get an exemption if the first child was female. But first born is male means no exception. So two male children is like rare. I think its rare, I don’t have stats on it. My maternal grandpa was so happy about it… male-preference and all, since all his kids are female (my mom had 2 sisters, and then their kids are also female I think)
There is a “timeline” out there where my older brother is the only one in this family. He must be happy in that world, without my existence that “annoy” him.
The whole incident, copy pasted from a previous comment:
I was Guangzhou, China. Ran away from home after my older brother was chasing me around the house… i don’t remember what instigated it, allegedly I touched his toys? and he didn’t like it and got mad at me and wanna beat me… grandma was home and didn’t do shit since she’s old af, so I just… ran to the door, opened it, rans out the apartment, down the stairs, into the alleyway of my building (not really a “street”, not much cars or traffic, you’d have to walk like 10-20 minutes to get to the main road), and my building was next to 白云山 so I just went there up the mountain… instead of going to the main street…
IDK why I did that. I was 6 years old… decision making ability wasn’t the greatest…
I didn’t wanna be followed by grandma… I was angry… I wanna get away from home… so going though the path in the mountains with the twist and turns would lose anyone following…
Before that incident, I went to 白云山 often with parents… so that’s probably why I felt comfortable venturing there…
so… yeah… a 6 year old boy in around the late 2000s… all alone… crying… prime target for a would-be kidnapper…
I was told that kidnappings were a widespread thing that authorities didn’t/couldn’t do much about… mom later scolded me about it… I got so terrified after that incident…
so, anyways… then I took a path that exited the mountain near my school which was also right next to the mountain area, it was an off day, no school… I think I only went to that area because that’s the only exit from the mountain that I knew of… cuz sometimes my parent or grandma… whoever was watching me that day… would take me trough that shortcut by the mountain to school to save time from the “normal” path through the city area…
So I then went towards the main street 广州大道北 on the alternate alleyway… and ventured into the big city… I took a bus to my mom’s work place at her electronics store in a mall… bus driver didn’t give a shit, probably assumed I’m someone elses’s kid…
Got there, mom wasn’t at work…
So then I took the bus home… missed my stop cuz I fell asleep… like holy hell I fell asleep, someone could’ve grabbed me and claimed they were my parent and I doubt anyone would intervene…
So I walked back that 1 stop of distance back to the stop I was supposed to stop at and it felt like it was 30 minutes away… felt like an hour to me… then I saw mom with a bunch of cops and we got reunited…
Mom got alerted by grandma so she got off from work to report me missing… that why she wasn’t at work when I got there
I was gone for probably several hours… could’ve been kidnapped and possibly murdered for organs at any time. My mom told me about that young boys that would get organs harvested by traffickers and girls would get sex trafficked.
I still have trauma from that day… mom blamed me because technically I ran out of the house on my own free will, but it was my older brother who made the house felt unsafe in the first place… he’s 5 years older than me btw
SarahFromOz@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You are a really good writer considering English is not your first language!
Have you considered writing as a job? It suits some people more than traditional office jobs do. Problem is how to make enough off it.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Lol, thanks, but no need for the compliment really, since I came to the US when I was 8 years old, this is not really “excellence”, this is just the standard expectation. If I didn’t have this proficiency, then that would actually shameful since I came at such a young age.
On the otherhand, my Chinese never progressed beyond 2nd grade level… that’s when my education in China stopped since that’s when I left with my family.
I can understand basics. I can read basic characters.
But once you throw in a few complex words like “embryo”, I’m gonna struggle and need English subtitles to understand a tv show. If I see a wall of text in Chinese… it makes me have a headache (figuratively), and I talk like a 2nd grader lol
I’m the only one in my family that really prefers English. Everyone use Chinese in their phone system language, I use English. My brother being 5 years older has a more noticible accent, and he has a weird racial supremacy ideology thing so he just stuck with using Chinese as the system language.
So now I feel this weird language barrier in my own house and I can’t express my thoughts well, my mom doesn’t exactly understand that much English… I mean she does, but not well enough to get into deep conversations and emotions and stuff.