正常

So last night while we were in the car on our way to River Angbao, I asked my grandma if she'd still  love me if I decided to become a man. And after some hesitation she answered with all the certainty a questioning individual would need, that she'd love me no matter what gender I'd choose to be, that I'd be her grandchild no matter what.

'Pretty damn open-minded', I thought. Then I pressed her with another question - What if I decided to marry a female?

Okay this one opened the floodgates.

And for the next five minutes I heard a mix of all this on repeat and shuffle:

"It's not normal/ don't hang out with these people / what have people been telling you/ it's not possible / they're weird people / 变态 / don't listen to this kind of nonsense / only men and women can marry each other / there can be nothing more than just friendship between 2 people of the same gender / what do you mean its genes / there's no way it can ever be my genes, my genes are perfectly fine" 

and so on and so forth.

It broke my heart a little to hear my grandma say all this so harshly.

Of course, the older generation wasn't exposed to all the liberated thoughts we have now, the openness of the LGBTQ community and the increasing acceptance of it. My uncle explained that anyone who even suspected they were gay would do whatever they could to suppress it or risk being exposed as an abnormal freak - I understand. Being ostracised by society and supposedly shaming the family isn't exactly on the top 10 things on most people's bucket lists. Think Mulan.

The whole time though, my grandma stressed the abnormality of being homosexual, and how normal our family is - in that we need to maintain this accepted-by-society-sort-of-normal. That truly made me wonder how many skeletons our family have kept in our closets in order to maintain the sort of normalcy we've achieved.

If only we knew, and if only she knew.