Last week, I found out my aunt (the one who lives in my house) will be going to China in September to visit her dad and my mom wants to go with her. Can you imagine my reaction?

If I could, I would have jumped for joy and howled at the moon (yeah, like the image). Even if it’s only for a week, it would mean I’m a jailbird getting paroled. Think about the freedom, I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, I can cook whatever I like, and eat on my own schedule.

If you’re visiting my blog for the first time and this is the post you’ve landed on, all you need to know is my mom and aunt live in my house and no one can seem take the hint that I want to be treated as an adult, given the freedom of an adult, and desperate for alone time to myself. Nope, everyone (family members) wants to tag along wherever I go and wants what I have.

Anyway, over the weekend, my mom has been oscillating between going and not going to China. She is caught in the middle of wanting to see her father and not wanting to see him because of her deep hatred for him that’s rooted back to her childhood. She has also been trying to convince me to take her place. “Come on,” she said, “I’ll buy your plane fare and get you into a 5-star hotel suite.”

Ever since my trip to Taiwan in March, I’ve swore off riding planes because of my knee-pain. It’s excruciating for me to endure even a short 90-minute flight, let alone a 12-hour flight. There are so many reasons I don’t want to go to China like:

• I don’t want to be mosquito bait
• The humidity and the weather
• It’s not a travel trip. It’ll be like a book tour – visiting relatives I don’t remember.
• Visiting my mom’s dad who did not remember me the last time I visited, not because of dementia, but because I’m a girl.

I’ve already declined the offer at least 5 times, yet she persisted. “Why don’t you want to go to China? Ben’s daughter loved it when she visited in June.” Ben is an acquaintance who lives a street over from us. Like me, his now-college-age daughter moved to the U.S. when she was 10-years-old but unlike me, she was raised by two first-generation Chinese parents.

Until my mom and I moved to Utah, I was raised mostly by my Caucasian step-father. He taught me everything I needed to know about the American culture like MTV, classic rock, music, and all kinds of things I wouldn’t had learned if I was raised by Chinese parents.

“I’m different,” I told my mom, “I was never one of those Chinese kids.” It’s true, even at school, I never fell into any Asian group. I was always that odd kid that sitting in the playground people watching.

Even though I spent my first 10 years in China, it was hardly a happy place for me. There was no love at home and I was constantly being bullied at school. When I moved to the US and felt how loved and welcomed in my step family, I immediately fell in love with my new family.

Though the 4 months I spent in China in 2017 was in some ways, fun, I felt like a foreigner there. It was like no one understood me. My aunt called me a “dog” when I chose to make double meal portions and reserve a portion for the next day. “Only dogs eat leftovers,” I remember my aunt said. A few of my health problems also popped up during that visit, which it would never surface if I was in the US.

So, no, I will not be visiting a place, in which I have more bad memories than good, where there’s little to no love for someone like me, and where mosquitoes run rampant with who knows how many diseases. Maybe that makes me different from other Chinese American but the US is where my heart lies and I’m staying.