Why doesn’t sadness make me cry anymore?

On my strange and changing relationship with tears

The home we’re leaving behind

When the going gets tough

At six o’clock on Saturday morning, Mike and the boys and I were standing at the Singapore Airlines check-in counter at Beijing Capital International Airport, checking in for our final flight out of China. I watched as the check-in guy flicked through Mike’s and the boys’ passports and found their Chinese visas, and then flicked through mine. And then flicked through mine again. And then looked at me inquisitively. And then I remembered, my stomach lurching, that my Chinese visa was in my old passport. My expired passport. The passport that I’d packed in one of fifty or so boxes that were now on a boat bound for Bali.

The guy handed back our documents. “If you don’t have a Chinese visa, you can’t board the flight. Next!”

Leaving China is not like leaving other countries. You don’t just need a visa to get in. You also need a visa to get out.

Suddenly my mouth was dry, and I had to fight back waves of nausea.

“Hang on, sorry,” I said, holding my place at the check-in desk. “We have to get on this flight. Our visas expire tomorrow.”

The guy asked where my old passport was now. I told him. He asked if we had diplomatic passports. Not diplomatic passports, I said, but diplomatic visas. Which were expiring the next day. Did we have Ministry of Foreign Affairs cards? We did have, I said, but we’d had to surrender them the day before. Could we call someone who might be able to provide proof that we’d surrendered our MFA cards? No, I said, because we’d had to surrender our SIM cards. I didn’t bother to mention this bit to him, but that meant that we also no longer had access to WeChat Pay, and we didn’t have any cash, and we’d given up our apartment keys and the access passes to our compound. We’d left everything behind because we were never supposed to be coming back. And now this guy was telling me that I couldn’t get on the flight.

I felt my jaw tighten as I became grimly determined to get through this experience, to show my kids how to be calm in the face of a crisis.

After making many phone calls, the guy told us that he’d check in our luggage (eight heavy bags because we were carrying our lives with us to a new country), but he couldn’t promise that the Immigration team would let us board the flight, so our luggage would be offloaded again, and we’d have to collect it from Lost and Found before leaving the airport.

For the next two hours, we went through the motions of preparing to board an international flight that we had no real expectation we’d be allowed to board. We went through security, and I unpacked and repacked all the laptops, iPads, camera equipment, external hard-drives and notebooks that I was carrying in my hand luggage to ensure they wouldn’t be lost in transit. Mike and I talked quietly, over the boys’ heads, about what we’d do if I wasn’t allowed on the flight. We decided that he’d take the boys to Bali, and I’d make my way there when I could. My jaw clenched tighter. We got to Immigration. The flicking-through-passports process began again. We were taken out of the queue and brought to a separate place behind the long row of Immigration desks and told to wait. The boys sat on the floor. There were fifteen minutes remaining until our flight would start boarding. A Singapore Airlines official came over and asked us whether Mike and the boys would board the flight without me. We said yes. I squatted down, a fake smile on my face, and told the boys that their dad would look after them all the way to Bali and I’d join them there when I could.

And then an Immigration official came over and gave us our passports and said we could all make our way to the flight.

It was then that my jaw unclenched, and I burst into tears.

“Why are you crying?” Viggo asked as we hurried towards our departure gate.

It was a good question, and one that I had time to contemplate on the five-and-a-half-hour flight from Beijing to Singapore.

Relief and release

I’ve had lots of experience of crying in airports. When I was twenty and leaving Australia for the first time, my dad, my brother and sisters and a small group of lovely friends came to wave me off. When I’d talked about my travel plans before that day, my dad had always said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it.” Now, as I readied myself to go through the departure gates, he said, “I’m seeing it, but I still don’t believe it.” I cried hugging him goodbye. And in the 34 years since that day, there have been many sad airport goodbyes and many happy, tearful airport reunions.

Just before our emergency flight out of Fiji three years ago

It occurred to me on Saturday’s flight, as I allowed the relief to settle into my bones, that I’ve never seen tearful farewells or reunions at an airport in China. For the first 18 months of our stay in the country, of course, travel was incredibly difficult, if not completely impossible, as the Zero Covid policy maintained its grip on the population. Things have been much easier in the eighteen months since the policy was lifted and people have been able to get on with their lives again, but I wonder if the sheer weight of the population and the general stress of day-to-day life in Beijing keeps people’s emotions in check, just as mine were kept in check when I felt that I had to maintain my composure at all costs, and hold it together for the sake of my kids.

So what does make me cry?

It’s never the things that I think will make me cry that make me cry. Like saying goodbye to friends. It was hard saying goodbye to friends who have become family in Beijing – we’ve all been through so much together – but I think I was buoyed up by the fact that we’re moving to a place that so many have promised to visit. The only farewell that made me cry was that with our ayi, who’s been in our home, quietly and calmly taking care of us for the past three years. I doubt she’ll be coming to Bali, and I’m not sure when we’ll ever be back in Beijing.

Crying, to me, is a mark of our humanity, and the times at which I’ve been able to access my tears are probably the times at which I’ve been my most human. I cried all the time when I was a kid – I wore off the faces of my Humpty Dumpty doll and Humphrey B. Bear pillow by shedding so many tears on them – but it became harder to access my childhood tears after Mum died and we were all told to be brave.

Having said that, I did cry a lot in my twenties. Life was so dramatic! Everything was poignant and beautiful and tragic and passionate and overwhelming! I wanted to experience everything, to feel everything, to never let an emotion pass me by unexpressed. Sometimes I’d decide that I needed a good cry, and I’d think sad thoughts until it happened.

I don’t have access to my tears in that way anymore. The thoughts that could make me cry now are ones that I can’t bring myself to go anywhere near. The closest I get to imagining the truly awful stuff is by reading other people’s stories. Rob Delaney’s A Heart That Works and Abi Morgan’s This Is Not a Pity Memoir are almost too poignant for tears. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet can leave me in pieces for days.

I’m not sure what sort of things do make me cry these days. Let me cast my mind back…

-              On the first night that Mike and I spent together in Jerusalem fourteen years ago, we went out for dinner at a restaurant in the city. After dinner we went for a walk and found ourselves in an art market listening to live Klezmer music. I was so happy and excited about having made this big move with a tall handsome man that I barely knew, and everything in old Jerusalem was new and fascinating and beautiful. The music reminded me of my dad, an avid accordion player. As we stood on the corner of a square, I looked around and saw an old man dancing with a little girl, presumably his granddaughter. They were both laughing and beaming with happiness. Mike looked at me and said, “Oh, my God, you’re leaking!” It was the first time he learned that happiness and beauty make me cry.

-              When Mike and I had visitors in France, we’d often take them to the beautiful Alpine town of Annecy. Once when a beloved friend was visiting, we were in the town’s cobbled streets when we heard drumming. We followed the sound until it led us to a group of young blind kids, beaming happily under the arches of the ancient buildings as they beat their drums in gorgeous unison. Mike was slightly bemused by the tears streaming down my friend’s face, and my own.

-              A few weeks after my dad died, the boys and I were invited to a friend’s apartment for an evening of Christmas carols. I warned my friends that carols sometimes make me cry. Trying to be kind, and to shield me, they said, “That’s OK, you can just stand over there in the back where people can’t see you.”

Writing that little list has just made me aware of a couple of truths. One is that live music often has the power to move me to tears. The other is that, in our culture, we’re often ashamed of our tears, and try to hide them as though they’re a sign of weakness.

I don’t want to be ashamed of my tears anymore. I’m so moved, when I listen to podcast interviews, when people feel free enough to tell their own stories through their tears. I’m not talking about anything mawkish or sentimental. But I love it when people cry when something is sad, just as they’d laugh when something is funny. And sometimes when they do both within two consecutive sentences. I’m not afraid of other people’s emotions anymore, neither do I want to be afraid of my own. I want to have full access to my own humanity and be more willing to wear my heart on my sleeve again, just like I did when I was a kid (although hopefully with slightly less hysteria and an acknowledgement that basically life is good.)

For all the hardships, I’ll always remember China with a smile

So tell me… How about you?

I’d love to hear whether you’re someone who cries easily and wears your heart on your sleeve. If not, is it just your nature, or do you think it’s because of cultural norms and expectations? Do you think that tears should be on public display, just as laughter is, or should our tears be saved for the privacy of our own homes? I’d love to know what you think. Are you more likely to cry out of sadness or joy? Please let me know in the comments.

Mxxx