Chapter 27

So in the last chapter we talked about money a little bit. As some of you may have come to expect, this concept of money will come back a lot. I am Asian afterall and this story of mine is from the perspective of an Asian. We love money. A lot. So much so that we had a stereotype of being cheap in the past. In fact, if you read between the lines a little bit, the overall theme of my childhood has the premise of always stemming from a point of poverty and a tint of desperation. A recurring theme was my mom’s guilt about some shortcomings due to finances which triggers a domino effect. What follows eventually ends with me sometimes meeting the rise and call but always at a cost towards my relationship with my mom. 

Here’s the thing though, Asians as a collective consciously or unconsciously know about the inception of our discourse and struggles in life. We are so aware of this that we sometimes think the only cause for hardships from life is due to poverty. I think this stems from the fact that a lot of Asians are very poor or come from very poor backgrounds. If I had to speculate, I’d say that as Asians immigrated outside of Asia, we got reinforced with the idea because a lot of troubles in the capitalist American countries, from familial ones to the political ones, can indeed be fixed by throwing money at it. 

In my experience, this is another reason why Asians love money. At least the Asians I know. We know that if we don’t have it, we are missing something. We also know that the worst of the worst gets brought out of us usually when we are poor. Hence, finances are number 1 on the priority list. Not only does it allow us to fix whatever we want, we can also be saved from our worst selves. As I stated, I do believe that poverty, as I see it, is the common ancestor for all the toxic traits Asian have. Finances are important.

You can tell what the true values of an Asian family are by what they choose to spend their money on. Afterall, money is our most valuable resource. To use it, we must also have something of equal value to gain. In my home’s case, my mom’s financial situation came through in high school and would exemplify what she really wanted in our lives. As expected, she decided to pay for my tutoring classes. And as you’d expect, I would be unsure if this was actually for my benefit or if it was just to make herself feel good.

As I previously stated, I did well in High School despite all my other plotlines dealing with lifeguarding, breakdancing and music because I had tutors. It wasn’t necessarily easy but it was definitely functional. During the school year, I had a private tutor for math and physics for an hour a week and I had “Marilake” (a very common Saturday tutorial school in our local district) for classes in math, french and science. In the summertime, I attended a cram school called “Success Tutorial School”. Most of these tutorial schools did all the subjects for the following year’s curriculum in advance. So I would have already some idea as to what to expect for the coming year a few weeks to a few months in advance, saving valuable time during the school year. The cost of this? I would have no free time on the weekends between all my hobbies and even the small hour gaps during the summer were filled and scheduled always for something or other. 

I truly believe I couldn’t have performed that well in high school if not for these extra curricular tutors. Furthermore, I think the Asian community always sending their kids to tutorials is the reason why Tiger cubs may have garnered the reputation of doing well in academia. Sometimes these tutorial school programs DO work. That is not to say they all work but since I was taking so many, I was bound to get at least some returns on this. 

Now, to address the elephant in the room, I suspect some readers will at some point point the finger at me and say how ungrateful I was. You’ll likely state unfair I was to my mom for all her efforts and how she truly prioritized me because the minute she got money, it went directly to me and tutoring. I’ve also been told that in my own narrative, as much as I spin the scenarios, in reality I was just being a whiny little b*tch because “HEY! YOU GOT THE RESULTS OF SUCCESS DIDN’T YOU?”. 

I won’t deny it. It is true. I did succeed in highschool because of the money mom spent on some of the tutoring programs she did. I had gone through the tutoring programs and that helped me get through to the other side fully prepared for the world. Was I being a bit ungrateful? Maybe. I am not unconscious nor excusing this. What I do want to bring up with this is the theme of the flawed narrator because I am human too and boy do I have a lot of biases. You ever hear about how memories can change in perspective as you learn more about the past in the future? Maybe you really enjoyed a sandwich in the past but was then told that the deliciousness came from an ingredient you morally despised. It makes the experience a bit sour afterwards doesn’t it? The point is this. My performance in highschool has never been what this entire story has been about. In truth, the context of how negatively I am reminiscing on my life probably has more impact than the events that actually transpired. My negative point of view is the thing we are examining. Not the actual thing.

Some would say that if I knew that these events were positives in my life, why throw this overcast shadow of negativity regarding my relations with my mom over all of it? Well. The answer to that is. It’s more genuine this way. If I adjusted my narrative style to fit what the public sees as more acceptable, it wouldn’t be honest would it? It would also shift the narrative and we wouldn’t be talking about the truth of my experience. Speaking of honesty. To be honest, I really don’t care what others think. I have had it with all the talks on letting my past go and showing more forgiveness for my parents and their past sins. I know that it’s unhealthy but sometimes, you can’t deny me of my right to vent. Freedom of speech says I have the right to do a thing and complain about it as it helps me in life. It’s stupid and it’s a waste of energy but that’s pretty much most of being human so maybe leave me alone on that would you?

Moreso, it’s not like I let my ungratefulness blind me to reality and remove myself from it. I learned to fend for myself early on, remember? I would like to say that in most circumstances, I know how to keep myself in check. I’m only ungrateful in the context of complaining. However, just to ease off the haters a little bit. Let me just state this clearly. 

I’m not saying that the Tiger Cub lifestyle is bad. Being a Tiger Cub is not a bad gig! 

It’s tiring and stressful but it’s just like anything else in life, it’s got some good and some bad. To be honest, if this entire story was just about being a Tiger Cub exclusively then it would probably be a happy one. It would be a harrowing story where I would overcome a majority of all the hardships given to me. The story would play out like an urban fairytale of how I would come to rise and go beyond to tasks assigned and achieve a future that, in highschool, was only a dream of mine. I wish this was it. I honestly do. But unfortunately, being a Tiger Cub isn’t the BIG BAD of the story. Being a Tiger Cub is only the context. The story truly lies underneath it all. It’s about how all my previous memories, even the good ones, were changed in tone due to some catastrophe that has corrupted the narrator sometime in the future. This story is about the future. Now about the past. 

If you’re wondering why I chose to add in all these extra chapters at all. It’s because I do believe in the fact that if you speak your mind about your anger and frustrations, justified or not, means you can deal with them in a more efficient way. Hence why I am mentioning all the things that went on in my life because they are chalked full of frustrations. Some of which can’t be appreciated unless you look at the roots. 

It also serves the opposite purpose. You can only vent so much before you are hit a bit with reality. I found this to be the most worthwhile reason for writing. Writing my life story and venting some of my frustrations have helped me with moving past some of my more intense anger episodes. It allows me to focus on the bigger picture and lets me know how there are few parts that my mom got right. In reality, my mom’s money issues, when I was in high school, dissolving did lead to her money going to the right places at times and helping me in the right ways. There are definitely positives. Despite all the horrible toxic overtones I told, the story so far has still been the positive side of my life. If not for the big future event that ruins everything, the stories I’ve said so far may have had a lighter comedic tone instead of the darkness it is stained with. 

And with my biases explained, let’s bring back the original tone of everything. Where were we? 

I tried to keep a tab on all the help my mom gave me so I wouldn’t let the anger against her later on in my life run rampant. So yes, I do keep a tab of the good things that go on and try to be grateful for them. Unfortunately, I picked up this habit of keeping a tab from my mom. 

You see, as good a decision as it was to send me off to tutoring with her new freedom from finances, my mom also kept a tab. I was made sure to to have known exactly how much money I was costing her every month on tutors and music. On various occasions, she would tell me this number and use it against me whenever I underperformed. She was asking for more now. I was no longer failing. But she still wanted something to yell at me for or belittle me with. I think it was a habit at this point and she didn’t know how to stop. I also think she didn’t really know how to communicate with me outside of yelling at me. 

I recall that when I got my highschool report card back and she saw all the 80% and 90% I was now pulling, she still only said how I was still falling short despite all the help she has spent on everything. Furthermore, she told me that I could be doing even better considering how much tutoring I’ve had. After I succeeded, now she was criticizing how I got there and how I could have been more efficient about it. You’d think that after going from poor to slightly better off that mom would become generous but I think money only made her pettiness and previous habits more exemplified. Well, whatever, another stereotype for Asians and another means for yelling from mom. What else is new?

The biggest change in highschool wasn’t my mom’s finances. That had changed but she still treated everything practically the same. If I had to say what the biggest change during this time was, I’d say that it was the fact that I was now fully independent. In the previous chapter, I’ve mentioned that I was working as a lifeguard and was financially independent for all the hobbies I did, including the cello. Why did I do that when mom was supporting me? Well, because the thing I chose to spend my money on was decreasing dependence on mom. That’s right. If Asians show their true colors with money. This was my choice. I stopped relying on mom for money for anything.

I also stopped relying on mom and stopped depending on mom for other responsibilities too. In fact, for school. I stopped showing my mom my report cards. You see, in highschool, if you did well in a subject and showed up to class, there was usually no need for parent teacher interviews nor any disciplinary action. Since I was now excelling at all my subjects. Mom was out. She had purely become an ATM for my tutoring classes only. Everything else I was covering myself. 

My mom had lost her main way of communicating with me. She started to slowly realize that she couldn’t just yell at me anymore. She could have very healthily admitted that I was now on a league of my own and capable of making my own goals and results. She could relinquish her control on me and tell me that I can handle myself and that I don’t know, maybe she was proud of all the achievements I did despite starting off as an English non-speaker? But no, she didn’t do that. Instead, she tried one last time to find something to lecture me on.

She told me that I had to do even better now that I was doing well because I had the responsibility to carry on the family’s legacy.

This was laughable. I’ve met her expectations in school and now that she could find nothing to complain about, she still tried to gain authority over me by saying that her initial expectations were not enough and that I must now go beyond for my family’s legacy sake. She said that I had to excel to make our family look good. 

Tough love usually stops when I achieve something. Since my mom was being greedy, this narrative quickly shifted from being about me and my achievements to our family legacy which, to be blunt, was really her legacy. She appeared to be trying to bask in my glow. My achievements were now to be considered hers. She wanted a payout for the money spent on tutoring. 

Sounds familiar? It should. This was just like when I won the Silver Medal for RCM for CC. He didn’t really give a shit about how I did and how I was doing. I was just a punching bag to him. And yet, when I did achieve something unexpectedly, he gladly stepped up to take credit for it. The only difference from him and mom at this point was that mom paid for me for a tutoring service and CC took money from our family for the cello teaching services.

Am I being too harsh? Well, consider it from my point of view. When it came down to being grateful for the person who helped CC win a silver medal, CC still never stood up for me once afterwards. CC treated me like crap before I won the medal for him and still like crap afterwards. He took the credit for all I did and in exchange never gave me anything else. He really let me down. 

Like with mom, I’m not sure if CC thought our only way of communicating was through yelling or verbal abuse. Maybe he also didn’t know how else to deal with our communications outside of criticism. Regardless, the way it came off to me was that even after I achieved something for him, he still didn’t appreciate me at all. I know he was capable of it because he treated X so nicely. Maybe he just didn’t want to or couldn’t do that with me. If you go one step further, I may have a deeply rooted complex with this type of thinking with my true father too. As a kid from a single mother household, it’s usually after the fact do you really realize that there was always this need to get approval from people, especially from adult males. I never got it from CC and would never even get it from mom either. Eventually I started to question why I was even trying so hard to get approval from either mom or CC. Nonetheless, I felt burned by CC. I did what he told me, I earned some success from cello, yet he still wouldn’t change his point of view of me nor respect me more. Now with mom, the same thing. I got the grades, and yet she still wanted more. The weight of her expectations would never falter. The only way to move on is to ignore what she had to say. So that’s what I did. 

One of the most unfair things about being a Tiger Cub is that when the kids perform badly, the parents would tell them that they dishonored the entire family and ruined them. However, when it comes to the parents doing badly? They always omit it or tell you the same excuses as the kids. 

“Oh, it was a different time.”

“Oh, we didn’t have the tools available.”

“After I got to Canada I couldn’t do A, B or C because I didn’t speak English very well.”

Okay, but did I have any help for English from you when I first came to Canada? Why do Asian parents get excused for not doing that well in Canada when their kids don’t? Why can’t we look at our parents and say 

“Hey Mom, it’s been 10 years since you landed in Canada, why does your English still suck?”

Or how about “Hey Auntie, I know you and your companions all complain about how you used to be PhD’s in China and have now had to start all over but why didn’t you try to bridge into a similar field in Canada?”

When it comes down to it. The biggest unfair trial of the Tiger Cub is this.

“Why do you get to complain when I don’t?”

Why are all the failures of our parents coming into a new country seen as admirable? Why are the failures of our parents the fuel for our success and not just a tale of how they’ve failed? Why must we be the successes that our parents aren’t? Especially when it was they who chose to come to a new land? 

No one bats an eye at these accusations. More times than not, whenever I voice these concerns, people call me spoiled for even questioning the older generation. The biggest rebuttal to this is usually: 

“They brought you here to this country and this is how you repay them? How ungrateful!”

I get this, I do. But who told them to come to the new country? It wasn’t our decision. Kids around 4 years of age aren’t really qualified to judge immigration policies of the world. So why must we inherit the problems of our parent’s decisions? 

Now if you followed me this far, stay a bit longer. Because if you find someone who actually is willing to listen to the argument of why do Asian kids have to excel in America because their parents chose to move there, or even if you ask any immigrant this question, you may find that the answer is “opportunity”. Why is the answer an opportunity? Because for one reason or another, our home country was not up to par. In this regard, what I tend to say that the reason for immigration is for more opportunity is because of circumstances out of our parent’s control. You know? Things like war, famine or natural disaster. Our parents alone can’t be responsible for all of that nor the need to leave the country immediately. I think it’s unreasonable for them to be responsible for those things also. But here’s my issue. 

Why am I responsible for rebuilding our lives in the new country? 

The immigrant children never caused the reason the family had to flee from their old country just like how the parents aren’t responsible for that problem. So why do the children have to pay the price of rebuilding? 

My conclusion? Life isn’t fair. Deal with it. Suck it up and stop looking for people to blame. I’ve been down that road and it leads to nowhere. You may be thinking that I’m only talking about children here but no. I’m talking to the parents as well. You can’t take out your frustration on what the world took from you by making your children rebuild it. You can’t gain back what you had in the previous world by forcing your children to redo that in the new one. 

In the end, I think my biggest beef with the Asian parents is that they forget they are failures themselves. If you move to a new country and lose your old job. That’s expected. It’s the cost of immigration. Why don’t you acknowledge this failure instead of beating a narrative out of it saying how this failure is the reason why your children need to do better in life? Why don’t you tell your children to do better in life because, I don’t know, that’s just a better way of life? Why do Asian parents feel the need to make their children feel bad? Is it because they think this breeds more success? Are Asian parents unable to find other ways to make their children succeed? 

There’s a fine line here and unfortunately, or fortunately, results matter. Without the guilt tripping I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. So the system is shit but it does work. Okay, what do we do with this information? I don’t know. Forcing success onto your children is a decent way of parenting because success is the foundation for a lot of health and wealth in the future. But is it the best way? Who knows? 

I’ll tell you one thing. If there is one thing about this entire rhetorical scenario that I do have an answer of some sort for it is this. How about Asian parents stop being egotistical about their children and using them like badges of honor? Your children may have succeeded but you have not. You children may accredit you for helping them but at the end of the day, it was they who did the work. I think Asian parents do succeed with their children, they try to drown out their own failures with the successes of their children but in reality. The successes of the children are not at the ownership of the parents. 

For me, this hits extra hard. Because for me, I can go one step further. Why did my mom even have me in the first place? Was it because she wanted to provide me with a good life or bring something wonderful into the world? No. She had me force my dad into doing something he didn’t want to do. Oh, and it didn’t even work. Dad left and she was now a single mom. So if she didn’t even want to have me in the first place, why am I still paying for her sins? Why is she still taking credit for my successes? If her intention for me was never to give me a good life, why am I even trying so hard to gain her approval? 

In the fineprint, I know and some would say that I am privileged for thinking this way because yeah, there’s worse things you could do in life than that. But the idea was essentially that immigrant children had a strong sense of responsibility to do well because otherwise, we were discrediting our entire household. But how could I do that when the generation above me screwed things up so much that pretty much any success was already better than they were? If I was already doing well simply meeting expectations, why is my mom so greedy for more of my success? 

Yes, that’s the right word to use too. Greed. Not tough love. Greed. My parents. What a mess. What did I do to deserve these two? My dad stealing money from me when I was young wasn’t enough, my mom wanted to steal my childhood with her expectations and intentions too. Why?

Okay okay. I know that last bit was a reach and incredibly unfair. Yes, yes I know. Somewhere on the tangent I probably lost the reader. 

“Boo hoo, your mom wants you to do even better in school. What a tragedy!”

I’ll admit it. That part was just because I was ranting so much and couldn’t stop until I reached too far. I’m pretty sure I don’t even believe the last few sentences I typed myself. Anyhow, it’s all out of my system now. Think I mentioned all of the things I wanted to. I know its horrible when there’s no answer but sometimes, that’s all there is. I’m not trying to garner sympathy or anything. The Tiger Cub is a functional lifestyle. It does work. There are flaws but it does yield results. I am by no means trying to say there’s something wrong with it and it must be stopped.

All I’m simply trying to do is tell you is that there’s more to it.

P.S. As I got to proof reading this article, I realized that most people probably gravitated to a small blurb I mentioned about my dad stealing money from me. Don’t worry. That is definitely coming up.