“Asian parents don’t love each other!” a friend in high school boldly proclaimed in the cafeteria.
Yes, this was a very generalizing statement about the nature of traditional Asian marriages, but I thought about it for a while. And it was said from my friend, a first-generation Asian-American, to myself, also a first-generation Asian-American. It was a critique on the overall prioritization of duty and obligation over actual love. While I won’t say that the marriage between my parents was completely loveless, both my parents definitely pushed through much marital strife out of a desire to make things appear harmonious, to keep the family together, and because they saw it as their duty to just “deal with” all their frustrations so we could have the whole family under the same household.
Anyways, duty and obligation not only take precedence in a marriage but in the relationship between Asian kids and their parents. Communicating with grandparents and relatives in China was always a duty. Speaking and learning my native language was a duty. Having a fierce commitment to my education was a duty, as was doing what my parents wanted me to do.
At various points of my childhood, I had to visit China to visit and see all my relatives. I envied my friends who could just drive 30 minutes to see their grandparents, but I would travel across most of the Hunan province of China to talk to a lot of relatives. To this day, I struggle to tell you exactly how related everyone we talked to was, but I had to try to make nice with them in my broken Chinese regardless. My parents wanted me to know the family and extensive network I had that I never even knew about, and know that a lot of people always loved and supported me, even if it was from a distance.
I learned Chinese before I learned English. Now, I excel at English and can barely read and write in Chinese, only able to speak and understand it. I didn’t learn English until I was four-years-old, and it was then that I was so behind my peers in reading that my school considered whether I qualified for English as a Second Language (ESL) services. When I got older, my parents made me go to Chinese school on Saturdays to reinforce my native language, because they wanted me to still know Chinese as much as they wanted me to assimilate to my American peers. I know now that sending me to Chinese school was an act of love since it was the only way I could maintain at least some language skills to passably communicate with most of my extended family that didn’t know any English.
My mother loved me in the way the best of moms did. She dropped everything for me when I needed something, from a ride to an extracurricular to just driving me to the grocery store when I really needed something. Running was the most important thing in my life in high school, and it was only through my mom that I never missed an important meet or practice. She wanted to do everything she possibly could to support me and make sure I had what everything I needed. She was the mom who got all in my business, always asked me a lot of questions, and rolling out all the food we had for my friends that visited so we would be known for our hospitality. She still calls me every other day to check on how I’m doing. She laments when I don’t call her back as consistently as she calls me, as I’m expected to.
Now that I’m older, the duty is to become a doctor as the “golden child” of my family. I’m a teacher and I love my job, but the pull of what’s expected of me looms very large every single day. I take my life one day at a time, but I struggle with the more traditional expectations of duty versus where my heart and passion lie. I cringe at the thought that my life choices can be seen by the larger, status-obsessed Asian culture as a trophy for making my family look good.
Look, a lot of people want their kids to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers. But when the entire pride and hopes of your family hinges on you making a prestigious career choice, well, you can imagine the pressure that puts on you. It is much easier said than done to be like “this is my life and I’m going to live it the way I want” when you grow up with the traditional and conservative expectations of duty and obligation of an Asian family. We talk about unconditional love frequently, but unconditional love is the exception rather than the norm, in my experience, in a lot of Asian families. I struggle with whether it is that way in my own, although I sincerely hope it isn’t.
Two of my uncles had their marriages arranged. In some weird way, my parents have tried to do the same for my brother when he’s had problems with his relationships. I keep my personal life and my family life very, very separate with firm boundaries. I know that can sound like an oxymoron, but I tend more to tell my parents nothing about my relationships, my friends, and personal interests. Our values simply occupy different worlds, from my perspective. They wouldn’t understand the things I struggle with and wrestle with because they believe the singular focus of my life is my work, career, and academics.
For me, love was often tied to results. It was tied to good grades or an SAT score, the college I got into, or career choice I made. Love was conditional in the way that it was often tied to prestige or making my parents look good. Love was sometimes expressed in the form of tough love. We moved every year until I got to high school, moving to “better areas” and “better schools” because my parents wanted the best for myself and my brother, but also out of convenience for my dad’s ever-shifting employment.
My friends who grew up in military families have complicated feelings on how often they moved and changed schools. Some loved traveling new places and meeting new people, and some hated the fact that they would move away from their friends every two years or so. I was definitely in the latter category. I hated the fact that we moved away from my best friends just to go to better schools. I protested, yelled, and expressed my frustrations any way 6 to 13 year old could, but the decision was never left up to me.
Everywhere we went, I got good grades and stayed out of trouble. The only escape from the marital strife and results-oriented love was video games, so I got absorbed into MMORPGs. Part of me resorted to video games as a coping mechanism: even though my friends were evaporating out of my life, the games never would. I think my parents knew how much myself and my brother struggled with moving but saw it as the necessary evil.
Growing up, we had a very laissez-faire policy. Everyone occupied different hours, in the sense that my mom would often work nights while my dad would work during the day. We all stayed in our respective areas and barely interacted at points during the day. Any time we did gather together, conversations often revolved around whatever made Asian families look good: my dad’s latest success at work, what Kevin or Aaron, children from a family friend’s family that I was constantly compared to, were achieving, or why I wasn’t achieving as well as Kevin and how that made my dad look bad.
I don’t know if I can necessarily blame traditional Asian households or even my parents for the disconnect between their values and most of myself and most of my Asian friends that grew up in the States, “Master of None” is perhaps the show that most closely represents the Asian-American experience in America — and the what I wished the most of what the protagonist, Dev, had was a father that was supportive of his choice to be an actor.
The show clearly shows the sacrifices most Asian parents had to make for their kids to have better lives in America. These sacrifices in my life include being distant from the closest of family members, coming to a country where you don’t speak the language well and have no money. To this day, although my family has better financial means, my friends, when they meet my parents, frequently talk about how they understood absolutely nothing my parents said because of their accents.
“You realize fun is a new thing, right?” Dev’s father says in the show. “Fun is a luxury only your generation really has.”
Maybe the disconnect is just communication. I don’t know enough about the struggles my parents deal with on a daily basis, and they don’t know that much about mine. Not only is it a generational gap, but it’s a very cultural one as well. In “Master of None,” Dev’s father grows up very poor and wanted a guitar, to which Dev’s grandfather flat out said no and threatened to beat him for it. Dev’s father expressed his love for him by buying him a Nintendo, bringing him to soccer practice, and buying the guitar, a lot of things that Dev himself never truly appreciated.
My parents don’t expect for me to make a career choice that I want because they never had a choice themselves. They chose the paths to secure a better future for not only us as their kids but their families back in China. They couldn’t make actual love and passion a priority because they never had that option themselves.
A lot of this mindset changed when my brother dropped out of medical school and went through a series of pressing personal problems and unemployment. I suspect that he never really wanted to go to medical school in the first place, but was pushed into the path after my parents forced him out of joining the Marines or going to school to become a pilot. Throughout high school, I would hear constant lecturing from my parents about how he needed to get his shit together.
It was during this time that there was much less of a magnifying glass on me because every conversation was about how to get my brother’s life together, how to get him to stop struggling. I feel bad that since my brother took up all of their attention, I felt liberated and free to live the way I wanted. For as much as my traditional Asian parents cared about their image and saving face, the one thing I respected the most is that they loved their son at the time of his darkest moments over the facades of saving face and looking good to other families.
But everything that happened with my brother made me resolute that I am not going to live to please my parents. I made a firm stance against that way of living a very long time ago. It was through my own freedom, independence, and figuring things out by myself with my friends that I came to find my voice. I have, however, learned a lot from my parents for how to love as a first-generation Asian-American. First, I don’t put familial duty and obligation as a priority in my life. I’m sorry, but I just don’t. I don’t do well with a predestined path of what I’m supposed to do.
Still, I love my parents. They struggled for a long time, perhaps, for me to feel exactly the way I do, for my independence, freedom, and following my passion and pursuit. I was able to explore my faith because of the decisions my parents made, one of the most influential events of my life. So while I refuse to live life and commit to the same values my parents do, I understand that the way I behave and think is not possible had it not been for them working every day to do the best they could for me. Call it luxury. Call it privilege. I only have it because of them in so many ways, even if we struggled for a lot of my childhood, we still kept afloat.
I might or might not become a doctor, but one thing I know for sure is that I’m so lucky to be an inner-city teacher living in my favorite city in the world — all this would not be possible had they not sacrificed so much for me. Love, to me, as a first-generation Asian-American, means living my life with the utmost gratitude for those sacrifices.
Note: This Blog is published with permission from Ryan Fan. Click here for more about him and his blog