Starting Over Again Under an Alias
I blossom when safe in the dark
I am a storyteller who has always relished pinning my tumultuous thoughts and feelings down in words, sharing them with an audience. I’ve had many attempts at self-expression which have always phased out for some reason: blogging with moodiness as a teen, writing pensive Facebook posts in university, writing weekly email updates to friends in a mailing list that nobody asked for while begining adult life, sharing my anguish over miscarriage and mothering with postpartum anxiety on Instagram, starting my own artist website…
But lately, I’ve come to realise that I have always held back in fully expressing myself, in revealing the darkest and most traumatised layers of my being, for fear that my abuser will find my writings and abuse me again.
Earlier this year, I received a diagnosis of complex trauma (C-PTSD) due to life-long abuse from someone close to me, with the last abusive episode happening while I was a mother craddling my3-month old infant.
My abuser happens to be my mother.
My mother abused me. My abuser mothered me.
I could sit with this tangled reality forever. I have to live with this forever.
I have lived in constant fear, and told stories in trepidation, that she will find my truest voice here. A voice calling her out while answering a call of my own. To write, to speak up, to articulate pain and resilience, to heal not just on my own but with a community of others who are hurting as well.
“Where do you think this fear comes from?”
What a good question from my therapist. I know exactly where it comes from.
[CW: corporal punishment, physical & emotional abuse]
I was 10 going on 11 when Ma read my diary for the first and last time. The invasion of privacy was horrifying in itself, but it was what she did after reading my diary that caused me endless discomfort with expressing myself honestly.
She caned me mercilessly, and then ignored me for two whole weeks.
A beige rattan cane just under a metre long with a pastel-coloured plastic hook on one end, which once swung lazily in the breeze hanging from the store front of our neighbourhood grocery store, above baskets of large white onions and dried red chilli. It would come home with us one day, along with the week’s purchase of kitchen ingredients, and then hang rigidly from our kitchen door along with other canes as a menacing reminder of discipline in our house.
Whenever we angered Ma, she’d snatch a cane at random and start thrashing us with all her might, charging it with all her shivering rage. I still can’t decide which was more tolerable: to be asked to hold out our hand while she aimed her fury towards a single point on a palm repeatedly , or to have the cane rain on our limbs haphazardly. Either way, you could never run or hide, and you would never emerge unscathed.
Context is important, so perhaps I should explain a little why she decided to read my diary in the first place. Okay, maybe I should explain a lot, because this goes way back to before I even started school.
“You are a born loser,” she’d tell me over and over again, for as long as I can remember. She was convinced that I was a slow learner and unintelligent, from comparing me to my older brother, from feedback from kindergarten teachers, from comments from everyone around her.
You are a born loser, but that is okay. You just have to work really, really hard. Remember, 笨鸟先飞。 The stupid bird has to take flight before all other birds.
I’d nod, detecting nothing but kind concern in her voice, and a belief that I could keep up with all the people we thought of as outstanding, like my older brother and my peers.
In truth, it was always a struggle to keep up with everyone else, and it didn’t help that my parents were eager for me to participate in the most competitive programs. There was a need to prove that I, the slow one, could make it just like everybody else around me.
Schooling? Work towards getting streamed into the top classes and institutions through examinations.
Piano playing? Audition for and stick with a rigorous program aimed at nuturing child prodigies.
Swimming? Train with a competitive swim club.
My childhood memories are tainted with perpetual exhaustion from trying to keep up. In classrooms. At the piano keyboard. In chlorinated pools. I was consistently told — and admonished for — how mediocre I was, and yet I could not be excused from demonstrating excellence.
And of course, there was the caning. There was always the caning. For mistakes in practicing scales. For scoring below 90% on mock exam papers. For withholding exam grades from Ma when they were anything less than an A*. For watching television in secret when my parents were out. I was not only a born loser, I was also deemed a deceitful child.
The day my mother decided to read my diary was preceded by yet another incident of discovering I had watched television while my parents were out — a forbidden fruit I could not stop gorging on when given the chance. Worse still, when Ma confronted me about why the television was warm to touch, I denied my sin. Cane marks formed all over my arms and legs immediately, while she shouted at me until her voice was hoarse.
为什么你这么爱讲骗话！Why do you love to lie so much!
I thought she had got all her anger out by this point, but it turned out she wasn’t done. This time I had pushed her over the edge. She stormed into my room, picked up my diary, and scanned the pages for more evidence of my irredeemable behaviour.
And there it was, another conduit for channeling her ever-mounting rage: a passage I had written — as a 10 year old, mind you — about feeling so tired at swim practice that I could have fallen asleep in the pool.
You ungrateful, lazy child! How dare you write this!
Anyone who has been caned before will never forget how it unfolds every time. The swish of the rod as its flexible body bends swiftly through air like a whip. The resounding smack when stiff rattan lashes against soft flesh. The stinging pain that reverberates from epi-centers marked by skinny rectangular red welts. And no matter how much experience you gain from being on the receiving end, it never gets better. It is always unbearable.
I thought the worst was over, and that by the next day we could go back to our usual parent-child dynamic of her being stern and me being meek and compliant. When I realised she wasn’t speaking to me, and she would ignore my presence for two weeks, it broke me completely.
I wished she would cane me every day instead. Call me every demeaning name ever attached to me. Glare at me while dishing out her delicious Cantonese soups at dinnertime. Tell me how beyond hope I was in every single way. Anything at all, but this.
She would begin speaking to me again when the frost thawed in two weeks.
I would never keep a diary ever again.
Although I would go on to blog in my teen years, and share vulnerable truths about myself on social media as an adult, I was always conscious of Ma coming across my words and seizing reasons to rip me apart.
A few years ago, she texted me after reading my Facebook post reflecting on the lows of my miscarriage, saying she hoped that I could walk out of my fog of depression. I replied back as gently as I could, saying that it wasn’t helpful for me to be rushed out of my low moods, and that it was important for me to tell my truth. She then retorted: 从现在开始我不再管你了。 From now on I wash my hands off of you.
Since then, I’ve learned to exercise extreme caution when sharing my stories on social media, especially since Ma and I share so many mutual contacts. As long as my real name is attached to my writing, I know she can always find her way to it one way or another, leaving me perpetually exposed to potential abuse.
People who have never been abused may find it hard to understand what re-traumatisation feels like.
It feels old scabs being torn open. Fresh wounds inflicted upon old injuries. Sharp pains and dull aches inextricable from one another. A haemorrhage impossible to stem.
I’m tired of bleeding.
I want to bloom without limits.
Have you ever tried creating an alias, a pen name, a pseudonym?
What a curious activity it is.
I tried going down the anagram route, but there were too many vowels in my name to contend with.
I tried tongue-in-cheek translations of my name from English to Mandarin to English, but didn’t feel like it captured who I was as a person.
What a shame, I thought to myself. I really did love my name after all, even though I was named by my abuser.
She named me after a celebrity’s wife whom she found beautiful, but I identified not with that woman but with the origins of the name. A flower known not for its colour nor form, but for its unapologetic scent.
My mind began drifting to one of my favourite Mandarin songs from the 1940s: 夜来香 ，The Evening Primrose. A song from my childhood when listening to Ma’s favourite Chinese radio station blasting old classics. A song I never knew the lyrics to but could hum the melody perfectly. A song I had completely forgotten, until I watched Ronny Chieng’s Netflix comedy special Asian Comedian Destroys America and heard the opening song choice of 夜来香 . I wondered if he too was nostalgic for those growing up years of listening to our parents’ favourite Chinese oldies, and it brought me back to the ’90s again. A time of innocence, simplicity, and sadness. An unmistakeable tinge of a faded polaroid with sepia tones.
I searched for translations of 夜来香 ceaselessly, and beyond “The Evening Primrose” , I found “Fragrance of the Night” as well as other scientific names in latin, all of which generated much robust debate amongst fellow sleuths who were also searching for its flower of origin in English.
In my search for a satisfying translation and potential alias, I realised that I already possessed what I was looking for beyond a name.
We are both night blooming flowers, blossoming in stealth, opening up in the dark and giving out all the fragrance we have. We claim space when no one is watching, with an essence that is undeniable even when invisible.
Even if you do not know my name, you will know my presence.
I am not a born loser.
I am a night bloomer.
Today is the first day I write as Night Bloomer.
Today is the first day I will be unburdened by fear after giving out my story to the world.
I blossom when I am safe in the dark.
May there be many more storytelling days like this.
