Chinese Christians

Growing up Chinese has its own lessons. Every mother is a tiger mom. What you did in life was never going to be good enough; your best always fell just short of their expectations. Your every accomplishment was compared against the accomplishments of some unknown scion of one of her many friends who was the perfect son or daughter, who was a doctor/lawyer/billionaire/perfection.

In time, some of us were able to overcome this fiction and survive, but living with psychological scars that would mark us for life. You manage to ignore the criticism, but it is never easy.

Yesterday, my mom told me that one of our family friends had died this week. He was a religious man, someone who was obsequiously disapproving of my atheist belief; someone who is dismissive of my doctorate, saying that it is not quite as impressive as being a real doctor, a medical doctor. While I seethed and fumed, my mother would sing the praises of his two sons, who are both doctors and active member of their church. They went to Stanford, you only went to a state school, blah blah blah.

Over time, as we all got older, these sons got married and thrived in their practices. My mother would regale me with their salaries and the luxuries that their salaries were able to afford them. She didn’t see this as rubbing it in or being provocative or mean spirited, she saw it as a matter of course, the Chinese thing to do, to use other people’s kids to be an inspirational beacon to me, hoping that I can use their example to improve my own lot.

Then the stories started to change. These beloved sons slowly metamorphosed into uncaring and selfish sons. Their parents moved to where the older son lives, some place that was much more expensive than where they were living. Their retirement nest egg is not going as far as they envisioned, and their two sons, the ones with the upper six figure salaries refused to help their parents financially and practically. The oldest son, with his own child now spends his every waking moment with his boy, and rarely, if ever visited his parents. When the parents needed help going to doctors and needed medical advice, he left them to rot. It would have been easy for him to intervene on their behalf, to ease their difficulties in dealing with the medical establishment.

When ailment after ailment struck his parents, the sons seemingly abandoned them to their own devices. All of that fine Christian charity pounded into them having evaporated under the heat of selfish greed and hubris.

When the father died this week, the oldest son, who lived in the same town, refused to come to their house. The father’s body was taken away by the hospice ambulance, and the mother not being able to accompany the body as she had no way of coming back to her home. The body was cremated and no services will be held because the sons are uninterested in it. The second son is flying in next week, as he could not abandon his lucrative practice.

Fine Christian hypocrites.