contractually asian

immigrants & sacrifice - name a more iconic duo

I suppose everyone born has entered a contract with life that they did not choose, but it feels like Asian contracts have the most clauses.

Your life is, across the world and decades past, inextricably entangled with the throes of the cultural revolution, itself the aftershock from centuries of Western imperialism¹

You are born of the economic boom and the bubble that burst, of despair and hope smuggled between cold hard cash. You are born into a technological explosion and the ensuing cultural clusterfuck. You are born of oil and water, and you will spend too much of your life trying to make it become one.

Before you spoke your first word, you became the fulcrum of each and all of your parent’s sacrifices. The reason and the result, the cost and the reward, all in one.

Remember: Your parents gave up everything for a better life, so don’t get confused and start wishing for a happier one.

Kyoto, 2023

I was 10 when I cried on the way to Chinese school - a pure, uncontrolled bawling unaffected by the constant self-monitoring I’d soon learn - in hopes my sheer suffering would let me skip class. When we got there, my mom dragged me by the collar onto the street, slammed the doors and drove away. I went to class that day.

I was 13 when I forgot I wasn’t white like everyone around me. Imagine my shock when a pair of pit black eyes stared at me from the mirror, like waking up from a bad dream.

I was 18 the first time I hooked up with a white girl. I felt like I had won the underdog fight of the century, a panda who had conquered a leopard.

Kung Fu Panda is an allegorical documentary

That was the same year I shipped myself across the world, alone and aloof. It wasn’t till people told me I was brave that I even considered it wasn’t trivial, normal. The whisper of my parents “that’s nothing” leapt out from under my tongue, automatic. You start believing it. That because your pain, your struggle, your loneliness paled in comparison - and it did, it really did - it wasn’t real.

*

People never extract their personal context from understanding. It’s part of our beauty; it’s our greatest sin. But what you experienced as a kid can’t be seen in the context of an adult. Your sacrifices should be judged in proportion to your existence². You may look back and scoff at missed playdates, but the pain was real.

I didn’t know of the revolutions, of poverty as a life. All I knew was the freedom everyone but I carried. All I knew was the deep aching I felt when my friend’s parents made jokes at the dinner table.

Your parents have drilled an awareness of your privilege deep into you, but they forget they also had things you didn’t. Years of running around in the village with friends, a life that wasn’t optimised for a college application. Life was hard, but simple.

They don’t understand your struggle. They don’t understand why you’re not happy. They struggled to stay alive, but you’re struggling to live.

In the cracks between the two, a deep murky resentment would pool. Hate is not supposed to be murky, misunderstood. But how could a kid possibly see through it all?

*

I was a senior in high school when I first read about the cultural revolution. Waves of understanding flowed over me, hatred unwillingly ebbed away line by line. Too late, but can you blame the tree for missing the craftsmanship behind the axe?

“You can’t hate something you understand” is a blessing and curse intertwined. Frustration shackled by maturity. Burdens that spawn resentment, resentment that spawns this guilt sitting atop your shoulder.

Understanding does not erase the frustration, it does not stop it building up until it bubbles out in froths of rage. Words whip out of you as you watch red-hot welts form across their hearts. You ignore the part of you that understands them even as they scream back. They never had the luxury to develop emotional maturity, but why must you suffer for it? You forgive them and love them and scream back at them. And when the rage subsides, you are empty from all the shouting, left alone with the part of you that breathes guilt.

*

People talk about the boundless nature of love, but guilt shares that infinity. You will never feel like your sacrifices are enough. You will never wake up one day and say “welp, this is enough. Time to start living my life”

When your parents took all the risk so you don’t have to, they cursed you. Risk is the cotton to the fabric of reward. God, what’s the point of all that privilege if you don’t use it? What’s the point of being educated and aware if you waste your life in a zoom cubicle?

If someone gave me their most precious belongings and told me to burn them for heat, I would thank them from the bottom of my heart, ignore the fuck out their instructions, and cherish them instead. Yet when you’re told to burn away your time for what ends in safety in a salary, you slave away like it’s a holy commandment.

Your parents may have sacrificed everything, they may have given you everything, but they lived in a distinctly different world from this one. Your parents are wrong about life, one way or another. It’s your job to figure out how.

*

Guilt is endlessly illogical because logic breaks down in the infinities. I won’t try to absolve you of that responsibility. Instead, let me reframe it.

Your responsibility towards your parents isn’t doing exactly what they tell you to do. You can understand them, you can love them, you can feel the weight of their sacrifice, but you still need to do what’s right for you.

The only way to beat an infinity is with a bigger infinity: The responsibility of life dwarfs the responsibility towards your parents.

I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement.

You don’t have to be a doctor. You don’t have to subdue your dreams for your parents’ anxiety. You fulfil your responsibility simply by trying.

The foundational bricks of my life were laid by going against my parent’s advice. I got my job by sacrificing my schoolwork to work on projects, and I found love in people and places my parents would forbid.

It is only through the distance between us that I have the psychological safety and space to write to you, and it is through writing to you that I found myself. My path may be less safe, but I feel alive.

*

I’ve seen too many Asian kids whose lives are controlled by their parents thousands of miles away. Their relationship lives within the confines of the goals they’re given, and they fear nothing will be left without them.

But by living for yourself, your relationship is recontextualised away from sacrifice to love. What every white kid intuitively understands is that they don’t need to pay it back to their parents - they can pay it forward to their kid. Love is not a transaction. You do not have to pay it back.

I heard someone say "don't cross oceans for people who wouldn't cross a puddle for you." Which I thought was good advice. But then someone else spoke up and said

“No. Do it. Do cross oceans for people. Love all people.

No conditions attached. No wondering whether or not they are worthy.

Cross oceans, climb mountains.

Life and love isn't about what you gain, it's about what you give.”

And I changed my mind

*

Sometimes I look over at the contract the white kids got, and it’s just one line that’ll make me furious. I think about all the clauses of that contract I suffered through and my brain goes what the fuck.

But we have that line in our contract too, hidden in the back, squeezed in the margins. It tells you it supersedes all other clauses, and it says in absolute letters.

“It’s your life”

Stay curious and love well,

Jesse

1. you can replace the cultural revolution with X historical event, but it is shocking how well this applies to almost every country in Asia

2. https://jonsuh.com/blog/father-forgets/ is one of my favourite stories, and is a reminder that we should judge each by their own yardstick