I can’t identify the first time that I realized I was a disappointment to my parents, but when I think back, it seems like something that’s always been there. Sometimes I think it’s attributed to the fact that my parents fit the Asian stereotype of desiring a son and being born a daughter was the first disappointing act I committed. I eventually adopted being a disappointment as a joke, one that has now numbed the pain.
When the bar is set so low, I would assume that the only place to go after that is up. That assumption was wrong, because I grew up with older cousins, and my cousins always set the expectations of my parents. Being my own person, I never quite matched these expectations, and the result was that I never heard the end of it from my parents.
Now that I’m older, I’ve learned that my dad believes in tough love, so much so that when we were born, he told my mom not to give us any compliments because they would lead to us becoming lazy and spoiled. As a result, I’m in a perpetual state of stress, always working my hardest to try and gain the smallest compliment from any person or any teacher.
I’m constantly “on,” with a smile plastered on my face, not wanting to be a burden to anyone. Growing up like this, it’s hard not to develop a sense of unworthiness. If my parents couldn’t find anything to love about me, how would someone else find something to love about me?
Despite all of this, I do believe on some level that my parents love me. I just don’t think our love languages matched as I was growing up. Throughout my life, my parents would buy me things, and the second we left the store, they would say something along the lines of, “See how much I care about you? I’m always buying you all this stuff.” That’s something I would hear a lot of Vietnamese parents say to their children. It’s apparent that their love language is “gifts.”
My first love language is “words of affirmation” and “quality time” is second. I didn’t get much of these things from my parents growing up. The former was realized because of my dad’s tough love, and the latter because my parents worked seven days a week to make money, so they could give me things like a roof over my head or the books I asked for. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but the miscommunication led me to develop a fear of being unlovable that has hindered me from forming relationships to this day.
I remember there was a night in elementary school where I saved a section of math homework to do with my dad. It seemed like something from a TV show, where parents made time to help their kids with their homework. I pretended I was struggling so that my dad could help me, or maybe I pretended because I wanted a compliment for how smart I was.
My dad started to try and help me, but he wasn’t doing it the way I was taught. I couldn’t follow him, so I gave up on the ruse and explained to him how I was taught. This made him throw up his hands and say, “If you know how to do it, then why don’t you do it that way?”
I was hurt at the time, but I look back now and think that maybe my dad felt a little of the hurt that I’ve felt for not being affirmed my whole life. And it makes me feel bad thinking about it, because now I know that the highest level of schooling my parents have had is high school. But how are they supposed to remember what they learned in high school when it was a time of war?
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Asian Americans are three times less likely to seek help for mental health issues, according to data from National Latino and Asian American studies from the University of Michigan. Wei-Chin Hwang, PhD, clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College says on the matter, “In general, we don't talk about mental illness and there is a common belief that people should just get over it or be stronger.”
That’s what my parents chose… to be stronger. When they left their country during the war to escape to America, they had nothing on their backs and knew nothing about the society that they were coming into. Even as they were separated from their families, trying to reunite in a land where they knew nothing and no one, they made themselves learn enough to be able to provide for themselves.
From having nothing they grew to build a family and they always made sure to have food on the table and that there was a roof over our heads. They worked so that one day, my sisters and I could have it easier and be able to support them when they grew old.
My parents never wanted to revisit the time of war that they dealt with, or the traumas that they’ve experienced before America. They never wanted to talk about those things with me, not even when I brought home an assignment for AP U.S. History where my teacher wanted the class to ask our grandparents about where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot, or their experience during the Cold War.
The Cold War, which was never recognized as a real war because it was never approved by Congress. In the same way that the Cold War was never officially recognized, my feelings and desires felt unrecognized and unimportant when I logically thought about all of the sacrifices my parents made and what they desired and deserved.
One sacrifice is how my mom worked up until the final month of her pregnancy with each birth, and then was back at it after a week. Another is how my dad continues to work as a cosmetologist even though the arthritis in his hands hinder his work because he can’t imagine skipping out on the opportunity to make money and waste time learning something else.
Yet another is how the two of them typically work for seven straight days on a regular basis, even though they might want to stay home. All they wanted was for their daughter to go to school to become a doctor or some other well-paying job, earn a stable income and take care of them. This was an opportunity to make them proud of me and give back to them. Why couldn’t I do it?
If my parents had ever let me get a word in, I might have explained to them that I wanted to be a psychiatrist not because of me, but because of them as well. I would’ve told them that a psychiatrist is a doctor, which is what they always wanted from me. But I wanted to specialize in psychology because, when my little sister had surgery and my dad handed me the psychological evaluation to fill out, I wish that I had filled it out honestly.
I wish that I had written about the personality change. And maybe I should’ve recognized it then, that my parents and I would never truly talk about mental illness, that it went beyond not having the right words to express ourselves in the different languages we spoke.
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In my first psychology class, I learned about Phineas Gage, a man remembered for surviving an accident where an iron rod went through his left frontal lobe. While he survived, his friends and family noted differences in personality and behavior during his last twelve years of life. Before the accident, he was even-tempered, and after the accident he became a fitful man who relied on swearing to express how he felt.
Recently, I read about how the frontal lobe doesn’t fully develop until the age of twenty-five. The frontal lobe is significant when it comes to decision-making, emotional expression, problem solving and judgment. I’m not a professional, but I’ve hypothesized that the surgery to remove the tumors on Kristina’s frontal lobes have had long term effects.
There is a possibility that I am remembering her before the surgery through a nostalgic lens, but Kristina was the sweet sister that was always trailing behind me because she wanted me to play with her. She was always patient enough to wait for me if I was busy. I can’t recall a time when she could stay mad at me longer than five minutes.
Now, she has a short temper, and everything she wants has to happen right away. She doesn’t want to be around me unless she can get something from me. The only needs that matter to her now are her own, and that lack of empathy scares me. From my perspective, her frontal lobe experienced something traumatic before it had the chance to fully develop, and it’s probably something that will affect her for the rest of her life.
I never got over her having a seizure. I tried to be her best friend and biggest supporter afterwards, maybe to make up for all the times I was mean to her before her surgery. Whenever my college applications asked me why I wanted to study my chosen field, my answer was so that I could help people like my sister. Because even though I felt like I couldn’t make a difference in hers, I wanted to be able to help others.
For AAPI-specific mental health resources, please visit the Asian Mental Health Collective.
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