It would be nice, if I finally hooked the website up to the merchant processor - stripe, and then, show my mother MY BUSINESS. LOLOLOLOL
Ok so here’s the thing: my mother put so much value on me for sex, that for me to turn around and go, hey mama, I now run a business selling vaginas for broken vaginas like mine…
She would go nuclear and disown me? Or would she think I finally lost my shit and was gone in the head? Would she even connect the dots to where she cemented my sexuality growing up?
It’s funny. Maybe that would be cruel to her. I don’t want to be cruel to her, I feel sorry enough for her as it is.
I worked out that when my mother married my father, it was three months after they met through ballroom dancing (my dad was a champion at ballroom, earned gold bar medals from Peggy Lane’s school she’s supposed to be dead famous, but anyway, dad had loads of medals) I worked out the reason why they married, was because she was one month pregnant with me, on Christmas Eve, and I was born 8 months later.
Mama told me the horror stories around my birth and wow did she over dramatize. She said; a woman dressed in white came to her in the night during a storm (mama has phobia of lightening) and scared the living crap out of her so I was born.
So apparantly my father got permission to marry my mother, and all went well until I was one year old. When Princess grandmother came to visit, with one of her sons and a late dowry for my father.
I remember a Chinese uncle called Julian, or Jusan, holding me up by the hands like a puppet, stepping me over big stones on the beach, and I had fun, and mother and grandmother were somewhere on the breakwater behind us.
Mother was shocked I had this memory! Because I was not yet walking. And she pulled an album out, flipped the pages, and showed me a group photograph of Madam Wilhelmina, mama, and the strange happy uncle that held me in his arms like a rag doll. It must have been my father taking the picture.
But I had a memory of it from my side… and mama told me her side. Madam Wilhelmina had brought with her a dowry for my father, but was shocked that he was an ordinary man, however, she was happy that mama was safe away in England.
Mama had opposition to Princess grandmother, and accused her of getting rid of her, and accused her of disliking my father for being a commoner. And she shouted the dowry was meaningless. Take it back. You have tried to remove me from the family all my life, now you have what you want!
Wilhelmina, told my mother, the dowry also included her brother, she was supposed to take care of him, as he was no longer safe over there, and was out of control. Now my mother told me many stories of playing with her schizophrenic brother, with the ditch people, catching lizards, they were both kind of shameful for the family, but my mum and Jusan had fun with the commoners.
Apparantly Jusan was unaware the whole time of the conversation, which blew up anyway, and Jusan returned with Wilhelmina to their increasingly dangerous situation over there. It was the last time my mother saw either of them. My mother solemnly told me, that her Princess mother, terribly regretted her decisions, and out of all the 7 children, my mother was chosen to succeed the mansion and businesses and land. Because, all the children were despicable people, and Jusan would only be safe in England.
Apparantly oldest sister, Mina or Mimi, was now a drug trafficker doing dangerous things and flirting with dangerous people in the Hollywood world. She had become an actress or something, but was thoroughly corrupted and evil. Jusan was costing tha family too much money so she had him murdered.
Then oldest sister found out mother was the succession so, she had Princess grandmother murdered, paid some mercenaries to stab her to death, right on her own doorstep for everyone to see. The jewelry shop was raided and the safe ransacked of all the gold bars. It was eldest sister who orchestrated the whole thing, and she bought off the officials to hold my mothers passport when she would come back for the funeral.
My mother barely made it back. And she had no power or control over her sisters who had already scurried the families wealth away. So after escaping this lot, she became bitter for revenge against her sisters.
Then one by one, each sibling was murdered off, by denouncing each other, until my mother feared talking to officials, that they might kill her off next. So that’s why my mother sold me over and over, to get the officials to win back her estate.
However, the estate as far as the government was concerned now belonged to them, not anyone Chinese, and Mina had done all their dirty work and was now exiled.
Politically the family had to denounce their titles around 1949, change their names, adopt Dutch names, and disassociate from China. So the communists were now of no help, as they had once helped my mother escape the first bout of uproar.
A pit had been dug infront the house, and if the communist Chinese had won in reclaiming the Chinese, the family would be in executed. It was this event, that my mother had made her escape as a veiled Muslim servant, because nobody recognized my mother as one of the family being rejected number 4, who lived outside with the servants.
Her father, was a double agent working for the Communist and the other side (can’t remember the name - but Princess mother married into communist Chinese General to save herself from the eradication that followed. It was a political marraige) and he secured the passage for my mother, but she was the only one who could leave safely, as all other members of the family were known with public status of nobility, even without title.
Sadly, these last few memories my mother has tarnished the potential last relationship with her own mother, as my mother had not learned to be lovable or forgiving in anyway.
When my mother told me these stories, I believed that one day, she would turn on me, simply because there was something evil in that family that would be passed down.
It was only 10 years ago I discovered the true identity of Princess grandma, because, I hadn’t thought about those stories in a long time, and suddenly while I was living in the Philippines in a mansion, I wondered who they were.
So I googled the Chinese mansion of Medan, there was only one, and like the government had told my mother (in many attempts to bribe them) the ambassadors told her the mansion was now, a museum. And there it was. A museum. The stories had been true. And the family line, was traceable through Princess grandmother’s memoirs.
Shocking. It’s taken me 10 years to finally figure all that shit out. And realize, everything, the huuuuge female trauma of being bargained for peace or property. It had been a cycle since before Princess grandmother, since she was born from a pirate girl, who married one of the nobles given title by the emperor. And so on and so on I could trace it back, until I read the stories of the female pirates of the south China seas that bargained peace with the emperor by giving their daughters to his nobility so that he would keep their earned riches from safe passage fares and taxes earned from the Dutch and other Westerners passing through.
So, dammmn everything made sense, and even now moreso with my strange dreams and visitations in the night.
I feel like I have understood generations of their pain, and will acknowledge the sacrifices they made, because here i am now.