Chapter 131

“You owe your parents for your upbringing”

This is a message that is ingrained into the Asian household. There’s obviously a generational and a cultural aspect to this but let’s look at it in another light. Let’s try to look at it from a mathematical side. I want to ask the question of “how much do I owe?”. 

Unfortunately, this is usually where the conversation ends. “You can’t ask that! That’s rude and disrespectful!”. It seems almost like blasphemy to ask your parents to quantify your upbringing despite their constant telling you of how costly it all was. Maybe putting a number to something like an upbringing of a child is bad because parents want to think that it’s priceless. Okay? But here’s the thing, this is a flawed system. Unquantifiable currency doesn’t exist in the real world for a reason. 

Here’s the thing with Asians, we’re good with math. Some of us, like myself, even like doing math. So when it comes down to the specifics of parental relationships, I treated it like an arithmetic transaction. Take all the money she’s ever given to me for surviving and living under her roof when I was young and add that to all the money she contributed to me when I was going to university and just sum it all up. That was it. This is how much I owe mom for existing. 

The number was large, as it turns out, and very hard to adjust for inflation. However, it wasn’t impossible to pay back. Sure, it would require a long time to pay her back and would require me to take out some loans but it wasn’t impossible. That being said, even if I did have the money to pay my mom back completely, I really don’t think she would’ve accepted it. 

This is not because she would worry that after this final debt repayment that I would cut off all connection with her. I think it’s going to be more contentious because in her hierarchy of values, the top of the top is just ego and face, and having your offspring pay you back all the money they owe you to cut themselves off from you looks really bad. 

Speaking of hierarchy of values, do you recall all those chapters long ago when I mentioned that my mom’s hierarchy of values was very much set in stone? Yeah. Nothing’s really changed now that I’m an adult. I’m still a B tier and honestly, I’m used to it. I’m something she cares about but will often be deprioritized by A tier or S tier values. I’m an adult now and the wisdom gained from existence is that sometimes, people just can’t change. No point in resenting. 

Accepting this fact allows for a better way of paying my debt. I could just help her do more favors! Yes yes, I know. Here is where the math ends. I knew I couldn’t math this entire thing out. Families really don’t like mortgages or taxes (unfortunately). It was always going to be a bargaining game in the end. So let’s see how we can bargain my life debt away. 

To do this, I want to pay her back in the most optimal way, which for us means to pay her back by appeasing the higher tiers of her value system. So in other words, doing favors that she can brag about. Beyond that simple fact, I should also pace myself because when there are no numbers involved, this means that this debt essentially has no end. 

In practice, whenever my mom needed something done, I would look at my schedule and book her in when it was most convenient for me. This way, she gets to brag that her son helped her around the house, a very positive thing in the community, and I get to say that I’ve paid a bit of my dues owed. Added bonus…If I space out these interactions a bit, they’re more tolerable and also gives a chance for my mom to rethink if what she is asking is reasonable or makes sense. 

We did this with moving things around the garden, then moving things back in the garden. Lifting heavy things around the house and cleaning things like the gutter and such. This works kind of fine and honestly, it feels like I talked a lot of math to just bring it all back to a normal family dynamic.

Yeah…That’s true. Seems like overthinking all of which is to say nothing at all doesn’t it? Soooo why think like that at all? Well…It all has to do with what brought about this entire conversation in the first place. 

What triggered all of this thinking of math? Well…It was because the political activist side of my mom’s personality was starting to show…In the last chapter I talked about how my mom’s been getting more and more political. A few months after we kicked the tenant out of our place, this was starting to get out of hand. 

In our messages online, if you just looked at what she was sending me, you’d think she was trying to radicalize me. It was an unyielding amount of right wing posts against everything left sent every hour of every day. I tried my best to ignore these posts but eventually, it was all of these posts and nothing else. My mom only wanted to talk politics with me and I wanted anything but. It was starting to get to a point where I thought about just ignoring all of my mom’s messages in general. However, remember my plan? This is not a step in the right direction when you’re trying to fix your relationship with your parents. 

I tried to work around this. I figured I would try and have just very frequent but very objective conversations with her. The frequency would allow us to stay very much in touch and the objective nature of our talks meant that there was very little misinterpretation or triggering going on. For the most part, we talked a lot about mortgages and how to maintain our current finances. 

This worked for a little while until, out of the blue, she messaged me and chose a topic that really pissed me off. She sent me link after link of anti-vaccination propaganda. 

It started with anti-vaccination for COVID and then delved into anti-vaccination in general. It was also around this time that I found out my mom had not vaccinated for COVID. I tried to convince her that all the links she was sending me were ridiculous but she claimed that she had a moral right to let me know about all of this and try to convert me. I then watched in horror as our conversation went from mostly comments on the mortgage and fiances turn into anti-science propaganda. She, at one point, even told me how sorry she was that she let the Chinese communist party vaccinate me when I was a kid against TB. Then there it was. The fire in the bridge I was trying to build. 

I tried to hold my tongue as much as I could but this was the last straw. This time I stepped in. I think my mom saw this moment as a victory because I had finally decided to converse with her about politics but honestly, there was no winning here. I was angry with her and she was desperately trying to negate all the arguments I was making. She had won. She succeeded in pulling a political opinion out of me and was enjoying the arguing that was coming up. 

She saw it as an interaction between two intellectual equals but for me, I saw her as an attention seeking hippocrate. I told her how disrespectful it was for her to talk down to her son, who she told to go into healthcare, about science when she didn’t have a background in science. 

Did she think after 8 years of school in the STEM field that my opinion was worth less than her WeChat group’s random posts? She chose to believe that over her son? She thought her WeChat group was more credible? 

Symbolically, I think our relationship hit a point of no return when she, one day, sent me a whole bunch of photos of her at the Freedom Convoy rally against the COVID mandates. Even after trying my best to convince my mom that it was in her interest to get jabbed, my mom not only ignored and went against the idea of getting jabbed, she was politically rallying against getting jabbed. 

I’m not sure how much she cared about my loss of respect for her. I think she cared more about whether or not she was going to get her bank account frozen by Trudeau. Nothing was reaching through to her and somewhere down the line, I realized that there was no arguing with someone this deep. I hoped that I could just wait out this phase of my mom’s political activism. 

Until she gets over all of this, there is only one thing to really do. It was to accept my losses and pull away. Having conversations with my mom were leading into more and more contemptuous relations. I thought long and hard whether it was better to have an offspring mother relationship where we yelled at each other all the time (like my mom had with grandma), or to not have a relationship at all. I decided to just let our conversations die down. 

Maybe that’s unfair but I think it’s unfair to put your mental health at risk and to constantly argue with a parent even if this is what the parents want. I think in some way, being argumentative is my mom’s love language. But it isn’t mine. And also, sacrificing my wellbeing so she could have a sparring partner seems unfair. 

Our conversations slowed. I replied less and less and left more and more messages ignored. Her value system had me in the second tier and her ego at the highest tier meant there was no work around. Her ego, corrupted with a political righteousness, now prevented her from seeing things differently or from any other point of view. There was honestly very little I could do at this point. 

I think the fact that my mom and I were both financially independent and worked against us here. The separation was way too easy. We had the luxury of simply not talking as means to not rile each other up because we were not dependent on each other at all. 

Thinking back, this was not strength but a vulnerability. 

And one that I would regret a lot in the next few months.