"Your parents are so proud of you," my patient said.
It can seem that way on the surface. It might even be that way in a certain context. Yet, it always makes me prickly when people tell me this.
A lot of South Asians who are not doctors have derision galore for those of us who have chosen this profession. I know, because I shared some of that derision for a long time.
There's this folklore on shows like Master of None and other South Asian shows that South Asian parents are selfless and sacrificing and that they would do anything for their children's success. And there is undeniable truth in that. There's also something under the surface that not that many people wish to acknowledge.
As far as pop culture goes, the depiction of South Asians that hit me in the gut the hardest was Nair's Mississippi Masala. Because this I recognized- gujarati aunties gossiping to each other, shaming each other, and aunties and uncles obsessing about realizing the American dream, strictly in the capitalist interpretation. This I recognized- the bemoaning of colonial tendencies and mistreatment by Caucasians, but yet the anti-blackness. This I recognized- the daughter who vacillated between trying to placate her parents and finding it impossible to fit into the outlines that her parents had drawn for her.
A lot of damage happens in the South Asian community on the basis of societal expectations, which Hasan Minhaj beautifully captured in Homecoming King with his log kya kahenge bit. What's funny is parents have obscured this log kya kahenge tendency, and children often feed into it too, thus also not calling a spade a spade. I'm really on Twitter mostly as a spectator, and sometimes to scream into the void, but it's often tempting to call out the countless folks of my generation and those of the generation that followed me, who wring their hands about disappointing their parents, who say they felt pressured to be doctors, lawyers, engineers.
I kind of ruined things for my parents early on. I was a sensitive kid, from a young age, and it was so obvious that the only way my mother would ever be satisfied with me is if I did every single thing as she prescribed it. My mother, I should note, and we will never talk about it as a family, and certainly will never talk it as a community, and certainly she would deny it until she breathed her last breath, but my mother suffered/suffers from mental illness. So there is a very good chance that even if I did every single thing she wanted, she would have found a way to find me lacking of her approval and love.
But my mother gave me a great gift in a way. My mother and father, like many South Asians of their generation, are very social people. They came to America and craved other South Asians with desperation- some of our closest family friendships started in desperate grocery store encounters. I don't honestly know if the same social norms from India carried over here. I just know that every weekend, we went to a different auntie and uncle's house, and all the kids got shoved into a room together to amuse ourselves while the women all congregated in the kitchen and the men all sat around the living rooms talking smack.
I learned a lot about the world from those gatherings. A lot of those things, I've spent a lot of time unlearning. The man is always right, a woman who works full time doesn't care about her kids, a woman's education is not as important as a man, a woman's education should help her secure a good husband, a woman's opinion cannot be considered valid about anything outside of food and Bollywood.
And the one that people don't talk about that often. The society in which I was raised held up a belief that children existed to serve as an extension of their parents' identity, to contribute to the status of their parents. A child's accomplishment is their parents' accomplishment.
They're proud of you, they say.
Or maybe they're just proud.
When does your life become your own, I suppose?
It's arrogant to say that anyone does anything in this world all by themselves. My brother and my cousins and my family friends make this claim and it's obnoxious. Their parents have financially buffered them, allowed them to be successful. But that's the thing. You let them pay for your education, subsidize your rent, help you with expenses, help you with that down payment, provide you with free childcare- you better believe they get a say in what you do with your life.
My parents helped me too. I'm aware of that. I worked by choice, as an act of rebellion. My mom was a little more blatant than most South Asian parents, and that's the gift she gave me. She held money over my head like a bookie. If I didn't do x, no allowance, no new clothes, no movies with my friends, no going to summer school. So I started working initially for pocket money, f*** you money, I guess you could call it.
But that wasn't enough. My mom would remind me, that classic South Asian refrain, this is not a hotel. I was living under my parents' roof, but I didn't have South Asian friends in my hometown. I had other friends in high school, friends who got kicked out of their houses, friends who worked to make rent, friends who contributed to rent. So I still knew I had it easier than a lot of people. And I also knew I was a coward, because I wanted to get to college, and I knew I wasn't going to make it there without remaining under my parent's care in high school.
In retrospect, it was amazing that I had that much insight at 15.
In retrospect, it was also amazing that I was such an utter idiot at 15.
Because my solution was impressively self-destructive. My parents' only bragging right when it came to me was intelligence. I wasn't cute or otherwise talented, I wasn't docile and obedient, I couldn't cook (then, ha!), I didn't care about wearing pretty outfits, and even though my mom made me take Bharat Natyam classes, I was mediocre at best. But I was a bookworm and a nerd, and school was not challenging in EBF, so I did well. And my parents loved to bring this up. They loved to bring up to their friends that I was taking advanced placement classes, that I was in the gifted program. Whatever they could scrounge up.
And I think adolescents in particular struggle with their identity as it is. And I felt outside of my body much of the time. I felt like I existed as a vessel of my parents' expectation. I felt like my accomplishments only mattered insofar as what my parents could make of them, what they could say about them. Maybe my parents wanted the best for me, but it didn't feel that way. And I couldn't separate what I wanted from what they wanted for me.
So I failed my favorite subject.
I went to my English class. Like the true nerd that I was, I did the assignments too. I just didn't turn them in. Over and over again, until the teacher had no choice.
My parents were livid and also baffled. I was nearly baffled myself.
But there's something good about burning your entire identity to the ground. You remain. You get to figure yourself out, figure yourself out without the constraints of expectation and pleasing others. And I did, and it was my first taste of failure as freedom. My mother, in a panic, forced me to apply for a summer study program, and she unwittingly turned my entire life around. Six weeks at 16, not living with my parents, with one professor who was a socialist and another who encouraged me to figure out what I was doing and why I was doing it. And also, I lived on a campus for six weeks with kids who actually wanted to study too, kids who were not posturing, kids who showed me that everything didn't have to be so binary- that you could study hard and still have fun. Less antics and intelligence than Real Genius, but the camaraderie was similar.
I returned to high school with a completely different attitude. My grades were back to spotless, because I wanted to get out. I wanted to get to college. I wanted to take a big bite out of life and taste all of it. And nothing was going to stop me. Not even getting rejected from various top notch schools.
It was the second to last showdown between my mother and I. She wanted me to go to the state university, and I wanted to go to the one in the city. The state university was in the middle of nowhere, and I would have a been a speck of dark dirt in a clean white page there. I knew I would have become clinically depressed if I went there, I knew it with such certainty that I fought and fought, and my father interceded for the first and only time in a battle between my mom and I, and he endorsed me going to the city university.
My mother said it looks bad, to spend money like this on a daughter.
So I got scholarships.
Anyway, all of that was a long time ago. And I had complicated feelings about becoming a doctor later in my life, mostly because I wanted to be 250% sure I wanted it, and it wasn't somehow a way to earn validation from my parents. Luckily, by the time I decided and had saved enough to go to medical school, it was at an age where it seemed more misguided, whimsical and foolhardy rather than something to brag about.
But like I said, that was a long time ago, and I had long ago given up on trying to please my parents. My father called me once and asked, what type of doctor are you, because all my friends ask me. My mother sniffed once and said, when V uncle got pancreatic cancer, the doctor didn't do hardly anything, the nurses were really the only ones who took care of him. And anyway, being a doctor isn't even something that impressive anymore among their friends- their friends' children are bitcoin magnates and tech mavens and not to mention anesthesiologists. As an academician, I once again thwarted my parents' bragging rights, when I informed them that I get paid half what most community oncologists get paid.
You'd think. You would think at this age, that they would let it go. I let it go a long time ago. I knew I had disappointed them, that I'd done nothing the way they'd wanted me to. I thought we had settled into an equilibrium. Not a peaceful one necessarily, but one with balance.
Then my parents shattered Le Chatelier's principle because I did one thing. One thing.
Recently, I bought a house. Tangentially, allow me to note, every time I write, I bought a house, I get a flashback of that stupid movie with the little moppet yelling we bought a zoo! It seems as unhinged and as stupid a decision as that. It's nothing I ever yearned to do. It was never The Goal, not even vaguely. I had let go of wanting the norm of the picket fence and the kids and the cars. None of that.
Really, I bought a house because the lease expired at an inconvenient time at the place I was living, and I realized this could be a recurring nightmare in my life, uprooting myself from place to place on someone else's whims. And my work makes that a real problem, because at the moment it demands my time in a way that does not allow for this. Also, unfortunately, rents have gone up in my neck of the woods such that it no longer makes sense to pay rent instead of a mortgage.
So begrudgingly, and with a wholly nauseated belly the entire time, I settled on buying a house. It wasn't a momentous occasion except that I did take a moment to acknowledge that not a single other person in my family had done this, bought a house on their own, and certainly not any single woman in my family. So I understood that some of my misgivings stemmed from being the first. And some of my misgivings stemmed from the permanence of home ownership (though nothing is really permanent, it just feels more permanent). And of course, a large portion of my misgivings stemmed from California being the most overpriced place in the world, and the market being exorbitantly expensive such that I've already made my peace with losing money on this whole thing.
Anyway, buying a house had an unexpected consequence. I really thought my parents were past this. But they're not. They still are very social. I forgot that my brother has been bearing the brunt of their bragging. He has ticked all their boxes, though he certainly did it on his terms. But he has the wife, the kids, the house, the job. My parents have photos to parade around, and even though they have an icy relationship with my brother, they're happy with it, because it makes a good story. And my mother and father like their stories.
So, when I bought a house, my parents suddenly felt they had a story. My parents, who have not inquired much if at all about my job or my life, were suddenly asking all kinds of questions. How many bedrooms was the house, where was the house, how much square footage was the house. And could I FaceTime with them when I closed on the house so that they could see the inside (nb I have never once FaceTimed anyone in my life)? Suddenly I was 16 again, and my self-possession flared up. I wanted to scream, this is not yours, this is mine! But nothing is really mine and nothing is theirs either. We are interconnected but also quite separate. Even if they did not help me financially in any way, they raised me, they fed me, they clothed me in those formative years. There are things I carry with me from my parents, but there are also ways in which we are strangers. And I am old, and they are older still.
Some fights, I feel like I've been having my entire life. And those fights, they're just not worth fighting anymore. I'm not going to change my parents' minds about how they view the world. They're in their 70s, and they've never shown the slightest inclination towards changing their behavior in the past. But nor do I plan to appease them completely, because that's something I can't do and still look in the mirror every morning.
When the third request to FaceTime came in, along with an urgent message asking me to post to a family WhatsApp group pictures of the house, I knew I had to address it. So I took a deep breath and told them that no, I would not be FaceTiming. And no, I would not be making any wild announcement to the family. But it wasn't a secret either, and I didn't care what they did with the information. It was not it's not yours, it's mine! It was more, I'm not participating in this, but I can't stop you so I'm not going to try. Which is only slightly different, I know. I'm sure my parents were not satisfied with this response. But it was what I could live with as a response, and sometimes, that's the best any of us can do with family.
All this to say to my patient, yes, I suppose they're proud of me. In the end, I suppose they probably are. And I guess it's not up to me to decide what they should be proud about. What I value as an accomplishment is not what they value as an accomplishment. It clearly bothers me because it spurred on this post. And yet, that I could write it down and name it, it's also a way to let it go. And I guess I don't have much in common with those South Asian folks who lovingly talk about their family's expectations. I can't think of it with that kind of romance. But it has allowed me to live honestly. And that's something, I suppose.
#1000wordsofsummer is hard when you're on a 14-day hospital stretch. But I'm still going to give it a shot. But I apologize- this is all gratuitous nonsense. I'm just trying to get some words out so that I can maybe get back into the practice of writing.
Oh and also, anyone who is going through a move and is behind on the Kondo movement knows the truth/sarcasm of 'til every room in my house is filled with sh** I can't live without in Arcade Fire's Everything Now, a fantastic live version of which exists here.
It can seem that way on the surface. It might even be that way in a certain context. Yet, it always makes me prickly when people tell me this.
A lot of South Asians who are not doctors have derision galore for those of us who have chosen this profession. I know, because I shared some of that derision for a long time.
There's this folklore on shows like Master of None and other South Asian shows that South Asian parents are selfless and sacrificing and that they would do anything for their children's success. And there is undeniable truth in that. There's also something under the surface that not that many people wish to acknowledge.
As far as pop culture goes, the depiction of South Asians that hit me in the gut the hardest was Nair's Mississippi Masala. Because this I recognized- gujarati aunties gossiping to each other, shaming each other, and aunties and uncles obsessing about realizing the American dream, strictly in the capitalist interpretation. This I recognized- the bemoaning of colonial tendencies and mistreatment by Caucasians, but yet the anti-blackness. This I recognized- the daughter who vacillated between trying to placate her parents and finding it impossible to fit into the outlines that her parents had drawn for her.
A lot of damage happens in the South Asian community on the basis of societal expectations, which Hasan Minhaj beautifully captured in Homecoming King with his log kya kahenge bit. What's funny is parents have obscured this log kya kahenge tendency, and children often feed into it too, thus also not calling a spade a spade. I'm really on Twitter mostly as a spectator, and sometimes to scream into the void, but it's often tempting to call out the countless folks of my generation and those of the generation that followed me, who wring their hands about disappointing their parents, who say they felt pressured to be doctors, lawyers, engineers.
I kind of ruined things for my parents early on. I was a sensitive kid, from a young age, and it was so obvious that the only way my mother would ever be satisfied with me is if I did every single thing as she prescribed it. My mother, I should note, and we will never talk about it as a family, and certainly will never talk it as a community, and certainly she would deny it until she breathed her last breath, but my mother suffered/suffers from mental illness. So there is a very good chance that even if I did every single thing she wanted, she would have found a way to find me lacking of her approval and love.
But my mother gave me a great gift in a way. My mother and father, like many South Asians of their generation, are very social people. They came to America and craved other South Asians with desperation- some of our closest family friendships started in desperate grocery store encounters. I don't honestly know if the same social norms from India carried over here. I just know that every weekend, we went to a different auntie and uncle's house, and all the kids got shoved into a room together to amuse ourselves while the women all congregated in the kitchen and the men all sat around the living rooms talking smack.
I learned a lot about the world from those gatherings. A lot of those things, I've spent a lot of time unlearning. The man is always right, a woman who works full time doesn't care about her kids, a woman's education is not as important as a man, a woman's education should help her secure a good husband, a woman's opinion cannot be considered valid about anything outside of food and Bollywood.
And the one that people don't talk about that often. The society in which I was raised held up a belief that children existed to serve as an extension of their parents' identity, to contribute to the status of their parents. A child's accomplishment is their parents' accomplishment.
They're proud of you, they say.
Or maybe they're just proud.
When does your life become your own, I suppose?
It's arrogant to say that anyone does anything in this world all by themselves. My brother and my cousins and my family friends make this claim and it's obnoxious. Their parents have financially buffered them, allowed them to be successful. But that's the thing. You let them pay for your education, subsidize your rent, help you with expenses, help you with that down payment, provide you with free childcare- you better believe they get a say in what you do with your life.
My parents helped me too. I'm aware of that. I worked by choice, as an act of rebellion. My mom was a little more blatant than most South Asian parents, and that's the gift she gave me. She held money over my head like a bookie. If I didn't do x, no allowance, no new clothes, no movies with my friends, no going to summer school. So I started working initially for pocket money, f*** you money, I guess you could call it.
But that wasn't enough. My mom would remind me, that classic South Asian refrain, this is not a hotel. I was living under my parents' roof, but I didn't have South Asian friends in my hometown. I had other friends in high school, friends who got kicked out of their houses, friends who worked to make rent, friends who contributed to rent. So I still knew I had it easier than a lot of people. And I also knew I was a coward, because I wanted to get to college, and I knew I wasn't going to make it there without remaining under my parent's care in high school.
In retrospect, it was amazing that I had that much insight at 15.
In retrospect, it was also amazing that I was such an utter idiot at 15.
Because my solution was impressively self-destructive. My parents' only bragging right when it came to me was intelligence. I wasn't cute or otherwise talented, I wasn't docile and obedient, I couldn't cook (then, ha!), I didn't care about wearing pretty outfits, and even though my mom made me take Bharat Natyam classes, I was mediocre at best. But I was a bookworm and a nerd, and school was not challenging in EBF, so I did well. And my parents loved to bring this up. They loved to bring up to their friends that I was taking advanced placement classes, that I was in the gifted program. Whatever they could scrounge up.
And I think adolescents in particular struggle with their identity as it is. And I felt outside of my body much of the time. I felt like I existed as a vessel of my parents' expectation. I felt like my accomplishments only mattered insofar as what my parents could make of them, what they could say about them. Maybe my parents wanted the best for me, but it didn't feel that way. And I couldn't separate what I wanted from what they wanted for me.
So I failed my favorite subject.
I went to my English class. Like the true nerd that I was, I did the assignments too. I just didn't turn them in. Over and over again, until the teacher had no choice.
My parents were livid and also baffled. I was nearly baffled myself.
But there's something good about burning your entire identity to the ground. You remain. You get to figure yourself out, figure yourself out without the constraints of expectation and pleasing others. And I did, and it was my first taste of failure as freedom. My mother, in a panic, forced me to apply for a summer study program, and she unwittingly turned my entire life around. Six weeks at 16, not living with my parents, with one professor who was a socialist and another who encouraged me to figure out what I was doing and why I was doing it. And also, I lived on a campus for six weeks with kids who actually wanted to study too, kids who were not posturing, kids who showed me that everything didn't have to be so binary- that you could study hard and still have fun. Less antics and intelligence than Real Genius, but the camaraderie was similar.
I returned to high school with a completely different attitude. My grades were back to spotless, because I wanted to get out. I wanted to get to college. I wanted to take a big bite out of life and taste all of it. And nothing was going to stop me. Not even getting rejected from various top notch schools.
It was the second to last showdown between my mother and I. She wanted me to go to the state university, and I wanted to go to the one in the city. The state university was in the middle of nowhere, and I would have a been a speck of dark dirt in a clean white page there. I knew I would have become clinically depressed if I went there, I knew it with such certainty that I fought and fought, and my father interceded for the first and only time in a battle between my mom and I, and he endorsed me going to the city university.
My mother said it looks bad, to spend money like this on a daughter.
So I got scholarships.
Anyway, all of that was a long time ago. And I had complicated feelings about becoming a doctor later in my life, mostly because I wanted to be 250% sure I wanted it, and it wasn't somehow a way to earn validation from my parents. Luckily, by the time I decided and had saved enough to go to medical school, it was at an age where it seemed more misguided, whimsical and foolhardy rather than something to brag about.
But like I said, that was a long time ago, and I had long ago given up on trying to please my parents. My father called me once and asked, what type of doctor are you, because all my friends ask me. My mother sniffed once and said, when V uncle got pancreatic cancer, the doctor didn't do hardly anything, the nurses were really the only ones who took care of him. And anyway, being a doctor isn't even something that impressive anymore among their friends- their friends' children are bitcoin magnates and tech mavens and not to mention anesthesiologists. As an academician, I once again thwarted my parents' bragging rights, when I informed them that I get paid half what most community oncologists get paid.
You'd think. You would think at this age, that they would let it go. I let it go a long time ago. I knew I had disappointed them, that I'd done nothing the way they'd wanted me to. I thought we had settled into an equilibrium. Not a peaceful one necessarily, but one with balance.
Then my parents shattered Le Chatelier's principle because I did one thing. One thing.
Recently, I bought a house. Tangentially, allow me to note, every time I write, I bought a house, I get a flashback of that stupid movie with the little moppet yelling we bought a zoo! It seems as unhinged and as stupid a decision as that. It's nothing I ever yearned to do. It was never The Goal, not even vaguely. I had let go of wanting the norm of the picket fence and the kids and the cars. None of that.
Really, I bought a house because the lease expired at an inconvenient time at the place I was living, and I realized this could be a recurring nightmare in my life, uprooting myself from place to place on someone else's whims. And my work makes that a real problem, because at the moment it demands my time in a way that does not allow for this. Also, unfortunately, rents have gone up in my neck of the woods such that it no longer makes sense to pay rent instead of a mortgage.
So begrudgingly, and with a wholly nauseated belly the entire time, I settled on buying a house. It wasn't a momentous occasion except that I did take a moment to acknowledge that not a single other person in my family had done this, bought a house on their own, and certainly not any single woman in my family. So I understood that some of my misgivings stemmed from being the first. And some of my misgivings stemmed from the permanence of home ownership (though nothing is really permanent, it just feels more permanent). And of course, a large portion of my misgivings stemmed from California being the most overpriced place in the world, and the market being exorbitantly expensive such that I've already made my peace with losing money on this whole thing.
Anyway, buying a house had an unexpected consequence. I really thought my parents were past this. But they're not. They still are very social. I forgot that my brother has been bearing the brunt of their bragging. He has ticked all their boxes, though he certainly did it on his terms. But he has the wife, the kids, the house, the job. My parents have photos to parade around, and even though they have an icy relationship with my brother, they're happy with it, because it makes a good story. And my mother and father like their stories.
So, when I bought a house, my parents suddenly felt they had a story. My parents, who have not inquired much if at all about my job or my life, were suddenly asking all kinds of questions. How many bedrooms was the house, where was the house, how much square footage was the house. And could I FaceTime with them when I closed on the house so that they could see the inside (nb I have never once FaceTimed anyone in my life)? Suddenly I was 16 again, and my self-possession flared up. I wanted to scream, this is not yours, this is mine! But nothing is really mine and nothing is theirs either. We are interconnected but also quite separate. Even if they did not help me financially in any way, they raised me, they fed me, they clothed me in those formative years. There are things I carry with me from my parents, but there are also ways in which we are strangers. And I am old, and they are older still.
Some fights, I feel like I've been having my entire life. And those fights, they're just not worth fighting anymore. I'm not going to change my parents' minds about how they view the world. They're in their 70s, and they've never shown the slightest inclination towards changing their behavior in the past. But nor do I plan to appease them completely, because that's something I can't do and still look in the mirror every morning.
When the third request to FaceTime came in, along with an urgent message asking me to post to a family WhatsApp group pictures of the house, I knew I had to address it. So I took a deep breath and told them that no, I would not be FaceTiming. And no, I would not be making any wild announcement to the family. But it wasn't a secret either, and I didn't care what they did with the information. It was not it's not yours, it's mine! It was more, I'm not participating in this, but I can't stop you so I'm not going to try. Which is only slightly different, I know. I'm sure my parents were not satisfied with this response. But it was what I could live with as a response, and sometimes, that's the best any of us can do with family.
All this to say to my patient, yes, I suppose they're proud of me. In the end, I suppose they probably are. And I guess it's not up to me to decide what they should be proud about. What I value as an accomplishment is not what they value as an accomplishment. It clearly bothers me because it spurred on this post. And yet, that I could write it down and name it, it's also a way to let it go. And I guess I don't have much in common with those South Asian folks who lovingly talk about their family's expectations. I can't think of it with that kind of romance. But it has allowed me to live honestly. And that's something, I suppose.
#1000wordsofsummer is hard when you're on a 14-day hospital stretch. But I'm still going to give it a shot. But I apologize- this is all gratuitous nonsense. I'm just trying to get some words out so that I can maybe get back into the practice of writing.
Oh and also, anyone who is going through a move and is behind on the Kondo movement knows the truth/sarcasm of 'til every room in my house is filled with sh** I can't live without in Arcade Fire's Everything Now, a fantastic live version of which exists here.
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