How through writing about the family, she finally found the understanding of her brother’s behavior, and, helped her resolve the issues she had toward her own, family…off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
There’s, enormous pressures that fell on Tang in writing out her family’s, secrets, although she’d gained consent from her older brother on her plans to write, and he’d told her there would be no issues, “but writing about the handicapped person, I can’t just get the oral consents from him”. Tang had done many reports on handicapped persons, and knew the matter of ethics, and so she doesn’t writing “the story of her own home”, instead, she’d written out the perspective of the world from her brother’s views from a reporter’s point of view.
She’d interviewed former classmates, school instructors of her older brother, and had the artists decipher her older brother’s work, through the various angles, she’d made her older brother’s life become three-dimensional. When she sifted through the information from the interviews she collected and began writing, she’d returned her older brother to a “complete person” who experiences the many emotions, with his own independent thought processes, and not just from the angle of a “schizophrenic patient”.
Writing is more than documenting, but it’d become an opportunity for her and her older brother to connect to each other, to help the family find closure. Through writing, Tang saw her older brother’s artwork, and had the artist decipher her older brother’s art, which helped her older brother to get an exhibition of his work, and won the awards. This made her parents proud, and on some levels, it’d helped soothed the regrets that her parents carried, for her older brother’s mental illness.
After the book was published, she continued in contact with her older brother, shared with him the feedback she got from her book, and, continually displayed her older brother’s artwork in the independent bookstores, the cafes, and helped her older brother with the titles of his pieces.
Through writing, Tang publicized her “family’s secrets”, broken down the shut-in system of her family, for her, the depth of the meaning of this, is that she believes that her older brother should be viewed as a “complete person of worth; her older brother’s psychological illness had been covered up for thirty years, this was a disrespect and the invalidating of his value and worth as a human, being.
Tang’s older brother started experiencing his symptoms at age twenty, by twenty-two, he was expelled from the university, at age twenty-three, the whole family immigrated to Canada, and her older brother’s illness became the elephant in the room since, a secret that the family kept, and not told anybody outside. At the same time, Tang was between sixteen to nineteen, just immigrated to Canada, in the stage where she was fighting to survive in the high school years, very pressed to acculturate herself into a different culture and interpersonal relations.
Nobody explained why her older brother was behaving abnormally, as her older brother got mad for no reasons at home, screamed, or behaved in a way she couldn’t understand, she only felt fear. Later, as she graduated from university, returned to Hong Kong, working as a reporter, a lecturer of university, until the moment she began to write, the relations with her older brother was “lost in contact”—lacking all reasonable explanations, without any emotional connections whatsoever.
Tang said, she is currently in the best stage of her, life right now, because she had an older brother the family needed to hide as she became adult, she’d never been happy, but because of writing, she was able to unlock the family, and also, sorted through her own thoughts, and she’d let go of the years’ worth of burdens she carried, the feelings of being wronged, and found brand new connections with every member of her, family.
And so, this is what it took, for this woman, to finally resolve the issues that she has with her families, as she’d grown more mature, and learned more about why her older brother behaves like he does, she is better able to understand, and empathize, and that can only come with, age, and maturity.



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