My family is very warm and accepting, while remaining culturally Cantonese (and Canadian, and American) in a lot of ways. But my parents are also open-minded people, and even though they make mistakes, I think they are generally willing to listen to me even when I disagree with them, which I think has partially to do with their upbringing and spending a large part of their early years growing up without their parents' direct oversight.
I think something that is easy to forget is that immigration is an inherently traumatic experience. It's especially easy to buy into the model minority myth, and the implicit assumption that when abuse happens in Asian families, it is because of "culture." But I don't think that's it at all. Asian folks leave their home countries for many reasons - political change, war, economic downturn. Each situation is different. But for the most part, the common backdrop in many of our collective pan-Asian experiences is the intergenerational trauma of western imperialism, and it's hard to understate the deep psychological, economic, political, and social harm caused by generations of genocide, war, famine, and theft. Obviously, experiencing trauma isn't an excuse to treat your family like shit. But I think it is also more complicated than "Asian families are inherently less loving than white families," and I think a lot of that results from internalized racism and the trauma of constantly viewing ourselves from a white lens.
What is important is that white culture and Asian cultures do EXPRESS things differently. Neither is more predisposed to healthy or unhealthy family dynamics. But they may look DIFFERENT in how those versions appear. From my own experience with white friends and their families, I think white families that "appear" friendly and warm from the outside may have a lot of shit going on under the surface that an outsider might not see (religious trauma, domestic violence, infidelity, homophobia). White families also have a COMPLETELY different sense of money than a lot of Asian families, and while sometimes that can be a positive (independence), I also have seen it cut the other way (coldness and cutting children off). If you always view Asian families from a white individualist perspective, they will seem "bad," but a lot of it is just because of the lens of white individualism. There are a lot of toxic Asian families too, but we should think about what SPECIFICALLY is wrong about each one on a case-by-case basis, instead of being lazy and making sweeping racialized generalizations about ourselves that we have a "toxic culture" that is frankly untrue (and also compresses the wild diversity and variety among Asian cultures across East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia that are all very different from each other). White culture has plenty of patriarchy, homophobia, ageism, disrespect, domination, and abuse in it. Even if the "flavor" of abuse is different than many Asian cultures, it's still widely pervasive in white families.
I think what a lot of overseas 2nd+ gen Asians don't realize is that they are conflating "white families" with a Hollywood concept of what a happy white family looks like, and I don't think that this picture of a domestic white family actually has much basis in reality. No family or culture is perfect, and the nature of this group and this page predisposes us towards only hearing from the "bad" side. But I hope that we in this community can also celebrate the ways that Asian parents DO show love, and the ways that WE show love to ourselves and to the people we care about that are just as meaningful and valid.
