Stop Living Through Your Children

A reality in many Asian families

My parents live through me — my accomplishments are theirs to brag to their friends and that brings pride to them. I have many accomplishments that bring a certain amount of salience to my Chinese-American family — I have gone to prestigious schools, I do good on tests, I’m independent and make a middle-class wage, and I’m going to law school. The fact that I’m a teacher doesn’t matter as much — what matters is how my accomplishments sound in the context of our culture.

I am 24 years old and obviously my own independent adult. But I am also not one to give a tremendous amount of backtalk to my parents. As much as my values of independence and individuality conflict with my family’s values of prioritizing the family, all I really say is “yes” and “sure” in a lot of these conversations when it’s the path of least resistance. It is, after all, how I was raised.

Recently, I got a 166 on my LSAT and have the score and grades to go to some top law schools if I want. I am simply trying to go to my local law school in my city, the University of Maryland, and hopefully acquire a full scholarship in doing so. When I told my father, he said what you’d kind of expect from an Asian dad: apply to all the top 14 schools and only go to the best. Go to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or Penn. Again, it won’t happen, but I said “yes” and “sure.”

But also, my father critiqued some personal decisions of mine and urged me to reconsider, asking me to think about the family above myself. He even went as far as to say I shouldn’t make personal choices that don’t put the family in mind, and if the family doesn’t approve, it’s inherently wrong for me to pursue a certain career or choice. It’s my duty to follow the family’s wishes so I can bring pride and not shame to the family. I am planning on getting married soon, and my parents expressed a lot of concern about me marrying young and before I finish law school.

I realize that at 24 years old, I needed to grow up, man up, and draw a line between the family’s preferences and my own. I don’t vibe with all these values of duty, filial piety, or whatever, and there’s always been the expectation towards absolute perfection because once my older brother cracked and didn’t meet my family’s…

Related posts:

As a machine learning engineer, AdaBoost is one hell of an algorithm to have in your arsenal. It is based on boosting ensemble technique and is widely used in the machine learning world. Before we…