Consider Our Lonely Father
I recently received a note from a cousin I have never spoken to, concerning the loneliness of my father, which motivated her to cross firewalls to get a message to me, namely to consider my father as I “live my best life in the West”.
The last time we briefly shared an exchange was over 10 years ago, when she had just moved to a big city in China, and located me via Facebook. Her posts shared snippets of her daily life, showing off her phone and haircut, etc., not unlike many other young women her age, anywhere around the world. But this time, she had moved back to the village where my father’s parents are from, married and a fortunate mother to a son, and her messaging (all Mandarin, with the exception of “your dad” in English) to me felt at first disconcerting, but then so many feelings and realizations surfaced.
The guilt and shame laced between the lines started to rock towards me like incoming tides. Her message translates into the following:
I am reaching you from the other side of the firewall to communicate a few things. First, I carry you in my thoughts as we are related through blood, this kind of sentiment has always lived within me, even though we’ve never really met each other, or had ever even spoken. I don’t know how you are, but I hope that you’re well. I wanted to talk about your dad.
She then proceeds to describe seeing my dad at the Lunar New Year family gathering and describing how much older he’s gotten visibly, how lonely he seems, how fragile he seems, that as if a touch could break him. She wrote painstakingly poetically. She described how around the dinner table, everyone came as a family, except for my dad, who was by himself, and how this is heartbreaking to see.
She pointed to my Western education, that while it’s wonderful that I’ve always been chasing my dreams abroad, my father is aging alone, and like every parent who is getting older in China, they expect and hope that their children will return to them, and to accompany them. She asks that I consider my future plans accordingly, that while dreams are important, so is caring for my father.
I read and reread this message more times than could be counted, and each time I arrive at a different feeling. My father was without his wife or children at the dinner table of his parents. But how did this come to be? Everyone who leaves a home, leaves for their different reasons, but how many of them leave because “better” is somewhere else?
My father also left for “better”. He was the first one to get a university education in his village, which meant leaving the village — and his parents at the age of only 16. He met my mother in the megacity where he went to university, and that was also where I was born. Following his PhD studies in England, my mother and I also moved abroad the year I turned 4. My brother was born in Canada, and my mother still lives in Canada. Collectively as a family, we have spent less than one percent of time around the dinner table where my father now visits alone because his parents are sexist. Since the discovery that I am female, the treatment towards my mother has been extremely poor. It’s the stuff that will make Western therapists and counselors go, “what’s stopping you from leaving?” So she did.
By moving abroad, my mother broke a cycle that had nothing but harm and mistreatment in store. To this day, my mother maintains that the first time my father ever spoke back at his parents was when I was born — his parents wanted him to go back to the city and have a son
with my mother, but being born in a hospital in a megacity, I was already a registered person. I existed on paper. They can’t deny me or make me disappear. But the audacity of this thought never escaped me. That in my father’s parents’ eyes, I had a very different value, and a very different life. The decision my parents took for me, which was a departure from what my father’s parents willed and wanted, gave me a very different possibility of life and perspective towards humanity.
The cousin who wrote this message was born in the age of the one-child policy, but she is not the only child. She couldn’t be, because the preference towards a son meant that her mother lived most of her years in tears before finally having one. The cruelty of being born the lesser sex falls mostly on the women who gave birth to the lesser sex. As a new mother to a son, I wonder if she knows this. I wonder if she was aware that her mother’s tears rocked her to sleep, or if that also blended in with the cultural codes so she doesn’t think of it as not okay. What strikes me is that she seems to think that I am only Western “educated”, but still bear the obligations of the Chinese daughter, which is to return (to a land that I need a Visa to enter) and care for one’s parents after one’s education.
Am I missing something? Or is this a very specific Chinese expectation? How far do these expectations extend towards Third Culture Kids? Do foreign passport bearing Asian TCKs face the same questions upon finishing school? Am I too sensitive to the moral judgment and grandstanding? Am I the asshole for not being at the dinner table?
My own re-entry into Chinese culture happened only in June of 2017, exactly 7 years ago. There was so much I wasn’t aware of, from tradition to language but especially social norms and expectations. Everything I learned was disorienting and alienating, so I understand the deep chasm that exists between TCKs and their parents.
In recent years, some of those Eastern “norms” have been introduced to the West via books such as Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, as well as Sam Louie’s Asian Honor and Passport to Shame. On silverscreens, of course, Past Lives offered a lot to the American fabric. Here I am reminded of the part where Nora commented that Hae Sung still lives at home with his parents, which also ruffled some feathers on the internet. Namely, voices coming from Asia criticizing this remark, reminding us all that filial piety is still core to Asian values, and that living with parents is in fact, honorable, not embarrassing.
But if “still living at home with his parents” could trigger such a polarized reception, what about those away from home for studies or work, and have they received such notes about their obligations to their parents?
How much are we duty-bound to direct our lives towards the care and companionship of our parents? Is this even a conversation topic beyond Asian DNA? Am I the asshole child?
After Tiger Mom narratives erupted in Western comfort zones, child abuse accusations came forth among others, but what became crystal clear to me is that it is through these English language analysis of our shared heritage, did I come to make sense of the myriad of prevailing attitudes towards one’s children and being female in China. Because so much of the Chinese culture shuns feelings, so much of what we feel cannot be said out loud, or explained, much less validated, so much of us carry these feelings, have them internalize into a cultural DNA and then inevitably pass them onto others, just like my cousin did to me. And for those of us who dare to, we seek counseling and therapy, but even this world is ill-equipped to look at us from a cultural lens, so we never truly hit the root of our pains. I hope that my writing changes this a bit.
Those who know me, know me as the one who bends over backwards to be there for family and the one who always shows up for family. I have been there to help my mother and brother move
from one city to another. I have put my mother in first class when booking her flight tickets to visit me. We weren’t there at my dad’s parents’ dinner table for New Year, but we were at Disneyland for Christmas together. My mother and brother are notably absent from my cousin’s note. They exited a place that is toxic and now those who stayed are shaming those who left.
A predominant attitude among the Chinese is that children owe everything to their parents, and that parents’ know best. I have lived with and fought against this as long as my memory started. My (not uncommon) response has been hyper-independence and hyper-vigilance. But like debt on steroids, Third Culture kids get hit much harder, because the sacrifice involved in uprooting
one’s life from one side of the world to another side of the world is without a doubt, harder than sacrifices done without uprooting one's life. So, how much debt are we in with our parents? And what obligations do we have to take care of them? Does a portion of our paychecks go towards our parents? How much of us do that? How much of us do it because of obligation? What else is on this list of paybacks?
Uprooting is perhaps one of the hardest things one will go through in this life. I have done it 4 times across the East and West and 5 times across the Atlantic Ocean. What I do know is that cultural expectations are exerted on a particular people in a particular place, so the gift of uprooting is that it offers a physical and literal break from the cultural shackles that bind us. For those who don’t move, they are more likely to suffer in silence and won’t be able to recognize the things that are simply not okay. When it comes to shame, I have discovered that every culture and every place has it, but it is spelled out and vocalized differently, and to various degrees, audible at different decibels. As others have said, our perspective can be either our passport or our prison.
My own experiences and all that I have seen and heard from my Third Culture friends point to one solid conclusion, which is that traditional Chinese parenting and Western educated minds have a hard time mixing in harmony. For those of us who are straddling cultures, how do we blend these obligations? To what degree, if any, do we owe the extended family back in heritage land? What is the cultural debt we carry?
And when we are shamed and questioned, how much of that can we mark as return to sender?