Hello. I am your typical Asian-American 21-year-old college student. For those of you who know me, you may be confused by the title because around my friends, I don’t think that I come off as an angry person. Bubbly, energetic, easygoing a little naive and loud, maybe, but not angry. However, I think that maybe I am, but only towards two people who I should love: my parents.
Every time I go home or talk to my parents on the phone, my mom says something like “you should go to the gym more” “have you thought about getting a personal trainer?” “why do you spend all of your money on food?” or “don’t eat so much”. These things are honestly very typical of an Asian-American mom, and I hear my friends joke about how their relatives comment on their weight whenever they visit the motherland. However, for some reason, I get extremely angry and I feel very hurt when I hear these things from my own mother.
“Mom, stop saying these things to me. I have learned to hate my body because of you. You hurt me every time you say these things, and I never go home because this is all I hear.” Ouch. I said that to my own mother. It must suck getting told by your adult daughter that your parenting sucks. And the odd thing is that I never wanted to emotionally hurt someone more than my own mother.
My parents aren’t bad people. They’re pretty typical Asian-American parents, but for some reason I snap at the smallest things they do. One winter I told them that I didn’t feel loved as their daughter because instead of telling me how proud they were of my accomplishments or positive things, they always told me to lose weight or do this or that to improve my life. I know that they are just looking out for me, for that is the Asian belief - love in a family is expressed through duty to the family. But I was sick of it! I wanted the hugs, the “love you” on the phone, the acts of kindness that other parents did that my parents never did. And not having those things made me feel like the relationship wasn’t working for me.
However, there have to be Asian-American first-generation immigrant kids who are sensitive and have similar parents and just deal with all of this. Am I just being too sensitive? My parents have done things that I really didn’t agree with, but they’re not that big of a deal in the big picture. I just can’t get myself to love them even when I really, really, really really hate them. Maybe I just never learned. And that is why I think that secretly, I am cold-hearted.