Me and Cleaning

Growing up, my house has never been the tidiest. This might be something you realized when visiting my house now in Watford. Although never a slum, my parents had always kept a somewhat chaotic home. Cleaning was seen as a great chore that was necessary for ease and health that no one enjoyed, and myself seldom partook in. In fact, I did little to no housework growing up. When asked, I would often throw a tantrum. Looking back now, of course I am ashamed – but in an otherwise strict household with an Olympian focus on grades and extracurriculars (which both annoyed and regularly embarrassed me), it felt like the only rebellion I had. I revelled in the fact that my room was messy, and I took great pleasure in refusing to clean – it was the only aspect of my home life I had complete control over.

My parents are first generation immigrants from China. I often wonder when they moved here whether they were aware of all the sacrifices they (and therefore me) were making. The most obvious one, of which I'm sure they were aware, was leaving all their family and friends behind to enter a foreign country that was, at the time, biased and unforgiving. It was little wonder that their friends (and mine in early childhood) were few and far between. In these early years, the number of guests in the house were insignificant and, by extension, our house pride. We had very few decorations and furniture were as cheap and minimalist as possible – although this could be due, in part, to my father's strict frugality. We also moved around a lot and in general our houses were not something we particularly cared about and they never truly felt like homes, and this by-product of emigrating has only dawned on me recently, and the impact of which on me I'm still unravelling.

Things only got worse when my father's parents came to live with us. They were simple people, subsistence farmers from a rural Chinese state and had grown up with little to nothing. They were largely illiterate, had about ten teeth between them and always smelt of tiger balm, which they religiously applied, believing unwavering in its medicinal qualities. At the time, although they loved me easily and simple-mindedly, I was ashamed of them. I remember them taking me to school where they, in their tattered clothes (they refused anything new, saying it would be wasted on them, choosing instead to darn and re-darn their old rags) would stand out like a sore thumb, weathered and tanned faces in a sea of bright-eyed and smoothed-skinned Caucasians, who did not, nor have any desire, to understand. This was unacceptable to me, as I was already the only Asian, and all I wanted was to fit in.

They also refused to let go of their agricultural roots, digging up large patches of our pretty garden behind my mother's back to plant cheap oriental produce that never seemed to fully flourish under the feeble English sun. Despite my mother's outcries, they also stored their urine in empty used plastic milk cartons to use as fertilizer, and did this far into my adolescence.

This all made it very hard for me, a young girl, already ashamed of her heritage and struggling to understand herself and her place in society, to love them. Needless to say, even when I entered secondary school and made friends that I still have now, they were never invited to my house. I regret this as I think they were (and are) open-minded, and I did not give them enough credit, but I was too ashamed and keen to keep the details of my home life secret (including my father, but that is another matter entirely). And with this lack of guests, there was a lack of need to keep things clean and tidy.

Things did not change when I, at the age of sixteen, entered Westminster, a private sixth form in central London. My mother and I had moved out, finally escaping from the suffocating grasp of my father, and we were freer and happier than we'd ever been. I entered the school cautiously – I knew by then what it felt like to be ostracized, to be an outcast, and I was determined it would never happen again. Although we no longer lived with my grandparents and their milk gallons filled with piss, there was a new reason to feel ashamed – by my relative poverty. This new house my mother had worked so hard on securing and decorating by herself was, I'd realized, not good enough, attending a school with £27k a year fees, surrounded by sons and daughters of successful businessmen, lawyers, aristocrats. My first boyfriend's house was in Chelsea and was made up of two million-pound neighbouring houses that his parents had bought and knocked the wall down between, and had a lift and a housekeeper and was filled with tasteful statues and even a topless oil painting of his mother. How could I possibly invite anyone to my paltry house? Would I not be ousted as an impostor and made to again play by myself on the swings? Keen to guard my terrible secret, I again neglected to invite my friends into my home. My schedule was also extremely busy – I left home at 7am and returned at 10pm. These factors meant that I never gave cleaning a second thought. I was already so used to dirty bowls on my dresser and dirty clothes on the floor.