Home Locks: The Behemoth of Chinese Families

2025 Openbook Best Book Award: A Hong Kong Family That Immigrated and Then Returned.
Unveiling the wounds sealed away for many years

The truth is murky, and family is a complex mix of love and hate. I reviewed my interactions with my family. The emotions that surfaced in our communications were a complex mix of fragments. The bonds of kinship were real, but so was the suffocating feeling of immense pressure. The behemoth that is family often both nourishes and harms its members. —Author Tan Huiyun

To outsiders, this was a model of a happy family. They immigrated to Canada before 1997. The author later returned to Hong Kong to study and work, becoming a highly regarded journalist and a lecturer in the Department of Journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

However, she was constantly tormented by the stark contrast between the outward appearance and inner reality of her family of origin. Her brother already had emotional problems before leaving Hong Kong, and upon arriving in Canada, he was unable to continue seeking medical treatment due to various culture shocks and the Chinese family's emphasis on saving face.

The family members did not actively integrate into the immigrant community. Their isolated living quarters fostered a tense yet boundless interaction, accumulating into an overly entangled and unhealthy structure. During each visit, the author could clearly sense the family's situation deteriorating, but her parents chose to avoid the issue. Her father, while proud of her professional achievements, also demanded that she not mention the family's situation or her brother's illness in her reports. This was a gag order imposed on his youngest daughter by the father, the authority figure in the family.

Because of their age and the pandemic, the elderly parents were no longer able to take care of their middle-aged son who had been ill for many years, and the illusion they had been trying to maintain was finally shattered.

In 2020, as Hong Kong people once again migrated abroad in large numbers due to the dramatic changes, the author went against the trend and returned to Hong Kong with three elderly, infirm, and sick family members. She had to face long-term care for two people, a mentally ill brother who had been trapped for nearly 30 years, and the physical and mental stress and pain she had accumulated from being in this family for so long.

This book is a deep account and dissection of journalist Tan Huiyun's own family, retracing the various things her family had missed, reconstructing those lost past events and her brother whom she could never truly get close to or know, and also recording how she turned around her family's nearly thirty-year predicament in three years.

The author argues that the reconstruction of family history is very similar to transitional justice within the family. When old values ​​or authority are eliminated, the first thing to do is to acknowledge what happened and allow the oppressed and the weak to openly recount their experiences.

Special Recommendation
Can I give you a ride/life?

It's like reading a thriller, only every character is more realistic and every confession is more brutal.

Tan Huiyun wrote all of this with the precision of a scalpel, dissecting the ox, listing bones, flesh, tendons, heart, liver, spleen, lungs, kidneys... under the sunlight, so meticulous that even a passerby could understand the fatal details. I know that her calmness was just professionalism and restraint. To dissect her family of origin and everything related to her life, she had to cross the purgatory of emotions.

We have all been the ones being cared for, but not everyone will become a caregiver.

In Chinese society, writing about the misfortunes of one's family of origin is extremely difficult; even a slight misstep can be off-putting. What drove Tan Huiyun to break free from her shackles? Why was she willing to endure emotional turmoil to dissect, organize, and analyze the situation? Reading the end, I was reminded of my own gradually improving driving skills while caring for my family: I used to be terrified of driving, but after my mother fell ill and needed a wheelchair, I gritted my teeth and learned how to handle that massive machine, enduring unspeakable anxiety and disapproving looks. Later, I overcame my fear, and my driving skills improved. I especially enjoyed driving people home, as if trying to make the best of a bad situation.

I had this feeling when I read Tan Huiyun's work. If you can understand her heart, this book contains the kindness of "give you a ride"; however, kindness varies in degree. If you can understand that she wants to show how to prevent and cope with misfortune by revealing her own family's unhappiness, this book actually contains the saving will of "give you a life," making it a book that parents should read. — Zhuang Meiyan (playwright)

About the Author

Vivian Tam

Senior Lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and an independent journalist. Author of books including *The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: People and Events of the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement* and *The Desire for Words: Responding to Feature News of Our Time*.