I hope your winter holidays went okay, it was kind of a mixed bag for me to be honest. I was looking to hanging out with my parents but my mom’s shitty boss has basically told her at the end of every work day (meaning days that she worked, including weekends) that she has to come in on the next because she booked her for some patients then and there is a lot of money to be made when people realise that their un-roll-overable insurance is about to expire and so she’s been doing 10-12 hour shifts every single day since the 20th (it is the 1st) despite the fact that she’s asked for a week off for the hols. Her boss just keeps pressuring her into giving up more and more of her time and she doesn’t really have a choice here. She has told me that this is probably not going to continue into February, like I should be happy to hear that she’s only going to get exploited this heavily for another entire month at most. And hey, at least she managed to take today off finally since it was new years and she spent it with some of her friends playing cards and loudly arguing about poker strategy which is something that she really enjoys so you see it’s not all bad.
I’m really angry about this but for two separate reasons. The first is very straightforward; it’s just really frustrating and heartbreaking for me to see that her reality is so different from mine and because she’s working at a Chinese clinic and for a Chinese boss in the Chinese community none of the labour laws that we have will protect her. I guess I kind of naively thought that you get to escape this kind of shit if you’re making well above minimum wage. She just shrugs it off with some casual racism(?) like, “oh you know, my boss can’t help it, she’s from [specific Chinese province] and people from that province are all misers who get angry if they think they’re leaving money on the table, she will never forgive me for doing that to her” etc etc. Like what the fuck do I do here, I tell her that this seems terribly wrong and she just looks at me like I’m a little kid who doesn’t understand how the world works, and honestly that’s kind of fair because her world and mine are so different. She tells me that this year it’s especially bad because the other employee there is on maternity leave so next year it’ll be easier, but come on guys what’s obviously going to happen is that the boss is going to work both of them this hard next year. There’s going to be money left on the table if she doesn’t.
The second reason makes me sound like a child. I’m really upset that I didn’t get to spend any time with her. There are some surface reasons for that, she works weekends so I don’t see her much when I visit during school terms. And for the last four months I was a 5 hour drive away for an internship in another city so I only managed to visit two or three times, and she was of course working then too. It seems like I haven’t been able to see her this entire year, even though she’s right there. Sometimes we call but my already bad chinese is worse on the phone so i can’t even say anything really meaningful. I should call more anyways. But I was looking forward to this break, and being able to spend time with her.
At this point I think I kind of need to spend some time talking about the microtrauma (archive) of being raised by parents who do not partake in your native culture and who don’t speak your language both in a figurative and literal sense, by parents who are trying their best to escape a cycle of abuse for you but sometimes not perfect in their execution of that. And how those two things intersect – see, they would probably object to me calling my grandparents’ child-rearing tactics abusive, because they turned out fine. They’d say that I was looking at the world through the eyes of white colonizers. They might be right. We will never see eye to eye on this topic.
So if you didn’t know this about asian parents, they have a hard time telling you that they love you after you’re old enough for pre-k. Looking back I think there were some supports that I learned to live without growing up with them that I thought was completely normal, or even rationalized as “freeing” at the time, and it wasn’t until moving out and seeing healthy interactions between my non-asian friends and their parents (I was raised in a heavily Chinese suburb and all my friends were Chinese, which meant that for the most part my parents were the ones everyone else coveted because they didn’t hit me and they were relatively chill about Bs on report cards and I never had to spend hours practising an instrument on the daily) that I realised that maybe my parents weren’t at the pinnacle of, uh, parenting. But it’s been okay, through the complete fluke of me being a giant bookworm and aspiring polymath with good research skills and also good friends on my wavelength I’ve been able to get a well-rounded childhood. And now that I’m older and financially independent I’m starting to really enjoy talking with them on relatively equal ground, getting to know them as people, and the way that their experiences have shaped them.
Here’s other things that are happening too: many people in my family have died this year and it’s the first time that I’ve had to confront the fact that my loved ones are mortal. I’m thinking about my future and how it’s not so far away, which means thinking about their future too. Being away from them for long stretches means it’s very apparent that every time I visit their hair is greyer, their wrinkles deeper, their movements fractionally slower, that the time I have with them is limited.
And I don’t know if this is a cultural thing or just because my language skills are crap, but i can’t seem to convey to them the idea that I actually want to spend time with them. Their way of showing love is through the food that they would make me and they way they keep buying me things that I mention offhand to them and how they keep my room in order and don’t even ask me to do chores anymore because they just want to make life easy for me when I visit. I know they feel deeply ashamed that they don’t have a house paid down for me for when I graduate, which is a very ridiculous thing to me. I don’t want a house, I want more of the post-dinner long talks that I have with them. Learning about them as people, finally, finally.
I brought all this up with my parents as well as I was able to in my ex-mother tongue, but I don’t think it’s something that they’re even capable of processing. My mom kept reassuring me that it’s fine and she’s not too tired from the job so I don’t have to worry about her health. I told her that had I known her only days off when I was on vacation in mexico with my boyfriend and his family then I wouldn’t have went, I only went because I thought there would be days enough left to also hang out with you. She told me to not be dumb because she just wants me to be happy and obviously I was happier in Mexico away from them doddery old folk. I told her her that no, because I’ll be seeing my boyfriend more than her next term, I would have really valued spending time with my doddery old folk instead.
There was a long pause. Then she and my dad commended me on my familial piety. Then they said that they actually didn’t expect that from me in such a large amount because they knew that I was too westernized for that and have made their peace with it long ago(???). Man, so much for not hitting me, because I was SLAPPED.
So yeah, there’s three days left before I have to move back to Waterloo for school and I’m upset because I was really looking forward to hanging out with the rents some more, which isnt looking likely. Mom told me that she would be free after the 27th- make that the 28th- well definitely by the new year- well no actually it won’t but oops we already invited guests over today so I guess we’ll just interact the next time you come home
And I feel childish for whining about my parents not giving me more attention and in the exact specific form that I want because I’m too ungrateful to appreciate what they actually do but there you have it, my mood to start off 2019. At least it can only be up from here.
