is this home or hell?
I watched Stray Gods by Weish last night, and I'm still processing what an extraordinary experience it was. I had read the synopsis beforehand, but I didn't truly understand what the show was about until I was standing there, fully immersed in it. The post-show discussion captured something important: this is a show experienced first through emotions. Even without prior knowledge of the story, you can follow the narrative arc to its conclusion, and it feels complete.
It was deeply affecting in a way that has left me questioning things: What does it mean for me to be so estranged from my ancestry? Do I want to learn more about my past?
The answer, surprisingly, is yes.
I asked my parents about my dialect group and my delusions were crushed, I am most definitely not Hakka - my mum is from Sichuan and my dad is Teochew. Unless I go for those DNA tests but that's unlikely. Still I do relate to the desire of having somewhere to belong, of going out into the world as if there's a hole inside yourself waiting to be filled.
But maybe it's not really a hole. Maybe it's just a part of who I am—not knowing where home is, the search itself is part of being human.
I was desperately trying to memorize the lyrics as I listened, to capture and record them afterward. But the words have twisted in my brain, and even watching people re-share clips on Instagram doesn't feel as real as being there in that moment, eyes closed, feeling the music wash over me. There's something about the choral aspect—it's not just Weish's voice, but everyone in the ensemble coming together to transcend that moment—that simply can't be captured digitally.
My favorite song has to be one of the final pieces, where the lyrics went something like: "I have no more songs to sing ... why would God do this? I have no more left to show." I can't remember the exact words, but in that moment, it reminded me of an illustration I once saw of a bird, dead tired, lying flat on the ground with the caption: "there is nothing left in me and yet I still continue on." The ghost of that bird lifts itself out of the physical body and carries it forward.
I wonder if that's what ancestry is—when my current physical body is so bone weary that I don't know how to carry on, something deep and older than myself shows a way forward. You didn't live this long to only live this long. You are meant to see other things, different things.
It's funny because I remember going to L for a tarot reading last year. They told me the year would be about homecoming—going into my ancestry and finding my history. I refused to listen because I wanted to dig my heels in and continue with a job I knew wouldn't last. That prediction is proving accurate in ways I didn't expect.
I've never been interested in digging deeper into my Chinese heritage. I've felt such disdain for this part of myself that I've been trying to outrun it. The way I was taught Mandarin as a child was so divorced from any personal meaning—I felt only disappointment at my inability to grasp it, and shame at my failures. My mother would say that teaching me Chinese was like "puking blood," and I'd think: if it's so painful, why do it? No one is forcing you.
I think my struggle with the language was partly childish rebellion. I knew how much being Chinese mattered to my mom, and there was so little I could do to exert my own agency, to feel like an individual separate from her. All I could think of that would hurt her most was to be bad at Chinese.
But what if I had been met with patience instead of shame? What if she had shared what she loved about the language, about being Chinese, instead of focusing on my failures?
When JK said the show to him was about grief—about multigenerational lineage that gets cut off because lose touch with out mother's tongue, because we don't know where we're from—I felt it viscerally. I wonder if the lost, confused aimlessness I feel about my life stems from having no roots, no place I can call home. How can you build anything on no foundation? How are you supposed to build on thin air?
It's remarkable how this show has brought up so many emotions and made me curious about my ancestry when I've spent years running from it. I used to hate history—in primary school, secondary school, I was against learning about the past in any form. Now I wonder if my resistance to history, both personal and global, came from associating so much hurt with my own past. I didn't want to remember the painful moments because they ached too deeply. Growing up alone, being the weird girl no one understood, having nowhere to belong—why would I want to revisit that?
But things have changed. I can see now that just because there was pain in the past doesn't mean it was all pain. There was love too—complicated love, but love nonetheless.
Maybe learning about where I came from will help me understand where I should go next, or help me make sense of myself.