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.
