Why I sort of forgive my objectively horrid immigrant mother
It just dawned on me that my mom pursued software engineering over her dream of being a writing because her dad had told her it wasn’t much physical labour, and it was one of the few jobs back then, in the South of China where temperatures can reach up to 40C with 90% humidity, that had air conditioning for the computers.
I guess I can’t be too mad at her that she always mocked my fragile aspirations. Me, for all appearances a ridiculous kid who sometimes let myself be carried away by the North American idea that I could be anything I wanted. I remember on one fine day at the age of 18 I told her excitedly as I got home I wanted to be an architect because it combined my two favourite subjects: art (which I probably got from my mom) and science (which I probably got from my dad). I couldn’t even get through the door when she laughed in my face and said it was a ridiculous job to have. Being an architect.
You can imagine how much of a miracle it was when she did support me, in the very last day of my med school application deadline. I had barely started because after submitting 10 applications for very fancy schools in the US that would help me escape from that suffocating home with the pretext that I was furthering my education, I couldn’t answer the prompt “tell my about the journey that leads you to apply to medical school”. My journey did not lead there. I had the grade, I had the community engagement and even a research project, I was good enough at pretending to be the sort of person who was right for these kinds of things for a week or two at the time. I could hack it.
But all I could picture for my future there is the past that led to this point: outcompeting many precious kids who I did not understand or like. The kind of kids who carried themselves like they were yearning to be good and respected rather than free from other people’s expectations of who they should be. I resented them because I could never feel safe around them. More than just the way we did not get each other and they would far outnumber me in any venue where we compete for spots at being good and respected, even their very existence was dangerous to me. They were the very kind of people who proved to me, and most importantly my parents, that it was possible to be happy living with the crushing expectations the Asian-Canadian community puts on their children, while I wanted to die from it (or run far, far away from this miserable world where I knew almost no one who did what they wanted and everyone was bitter to everyone else as a result). The fact that I worked so hard that I slept about 5 hours a day on average is that the numbness and constant disorientation felt no worse than being aware of my surroundings and not feeling like I could change my situation. Each time I got a test back and the teacher mentioned I was top of the class, each time I won a prize assigned to a single person, I was inching towards my goal of making an escape, and simultaneously getting a bit more air at home.
When I was 10 to 13, I would wake up at the crack of dawn on weekends to keep up my Neopet-themed graphic designs which by the end ranked top in hits for the francophone community (which was non-trivial). Being an Internet Lord in my local community at 13 was what I wanted to do, but also I wanted to kill myself because my mom would regularly unplug the computer whenever she got home from work and bring me back to reality which meant living with her. Every night, we would have dinner which involved them talking and me groaning. She’d make little speeches which seemed optimized for hurting me for not being like how she was at my age, which was good at school and popular. My dad would add how I also wasn’t this and that.
Well, I couldn’t figure out how to be popular with the racism going on at my school, my rather elevated degree of aggression inherited from the regular beatings I was getting from my dad, and my general trust issues around people which regularly got me the label antisocial (I do hate being around most people to be fair), but I could be good at school. I knew I was smart and most importantly had fire in my soul if I could be better at my part-time hobby than professional adults also doing the same hobby full-time. I wasn’t very performant at school simply because I did not care, as it seemed like the evaluations were very silly, and did not really understand why my new peers at private school seemed to derive so much from these numbers we were assigned. Nevertheless, I gave up my unacceptable hobbies to do that* which pacified my mom so I was able to live for a couple more years (i.e. not kill myself) under Her Highness, although one night I’m pretty sure I came close to dying because my dad found me too annoying and decided to full on strangle me until he was happy with the control he seemed to have regained. I was a teenager and too big to be locked in a closet like he used to do when he wanted to play video games and I wanted to play with him. My mom gets mad when I bring it up because my dad apologized to “the family” for almost killing me the day after (after I told on him to my mom, of course) so the whole thing is, officially where She officiates, “resolved”.** When all you have to do is survive constant physical and emotional abuse for a couple more years, sleep and happiness aren’t worth much.
*Did I mention she was a software engineer? For god’s sake!
**I did file a police report years later and they got a divorce and now my dad is alone, from what I hear in a sort of penitence reflecting on the ways he has wronged his family. Getting the last word on this was on some sort of bucket-list I needed to do before actually dying in peace, so now it’s done.
Anyway, the real answer for why I got to where I was being socially unacceptable for med school, I was stuck on the essay they wanted from me.
“Mom”, I said, “When I picture going to McGill Medical School, I picture that I am a cow in a farm in line to get butchered.”
“Then don’t apply”, she said.
“Can I really?” It was internalised I needed her permission lest I incure her disapproval, which I had memorised as “possibly lethal mental health-wise” (although she would also send my dad to beat me up when I wasn’t pliant to her mental beatings).
“If that’s how you feel.” She said. It was that fucking simple to her, that day.
“Really?…Thanks mom.” Tears welled up my eyes. I was shaking. And I gave up that application, just like that.
She had to go so she left me with her credit card so I could pay the application fees for other program. First thing I did was call McGill and cancel my med school app. The lady there said I didn’t need to do that, I’ll just get auto-rejected but it was that important to me I never hear from them again. I also didn’t know where to apply to so I applied to about 10 med-tangential programs, afraid of everything. This was the unknown for me. Freedom! A first taste! Apparently I spent like 300$ on that card in two hours and she was surprised, and doubtless, she likes to repeat this story to her friends in my presence so I’d feel shame about it. Of course, I didn’t mean to waste her money. I just had no idea what to do with the freedom she just gave me.
Which is truly one of the most generous things she has done. The other being financing her kicking me out of the house (my dad has wanted me to leave for years and said so every time he decided to have a random, dreaded “heart-to-heart” with me where he poured his heart and mine got hurt, silently and secretly. His heart seemed to only contain resentment for having children and a wife.) and my mom revealed, in another one of her monologues designed to hurt me that with my cousin coming to live with us for college, she wanted me out but not in a way where I could claim she chose my cousin over me and have that on her morally-speaking so there we were overlapping for a semester) and renting me my first apartment near school, smack in the middle of midterms season during my second semester (what’s a nice thing from her if it’s not shitty in some way?). The situation at home had become truly too tense and I think she felt sorry for me I couldn’t go to an ivy league school or leave to otherwise better pastures. She, after all, met all of her best friends living with them in college so so should I!
And it was amazing! Within a semester out, I switched program and lived my to aspiration become a “cool genius” (against the expectations of my parents who reminded me my vagina stood in the way of my ever developing the necessary skills to math or physics, of course — and against the smallness I had felt before which was, mysteriously, a little bit lifted so that I could really dream for the first time) and never wanted to return to my parents’ house again. I made friends who, looking back, were pretty awful for me for the most part and dated people I mostly regret dating, as my defaults were not, let’s say, calibrated to “healthy”. I cried countless hours over being homesick over a trash home and all the trauma I had endured, especially comparing notes with my (mostly white, mostly rich) friends who not-so-secretly thought I was a shitty person for having shitty norms and hating my parents. And it was amazing because it was the first time I made all those mistakes, got high on them, got low on them and moved on later to not repeat them again. Because I was free from being trapped in an environment that was toxic for me, if only I could now use my newfound freedom to get out. And I think I did.
All this because my mom, who never got her own freedom, gave me mine.
She may be a pretty objectively horrid person, but she did do this for me. And writing this (and exposing her, which is truly her worst nightmare) I think I finally forgive her a little bit.
