There’s a moment in every Asian child’s life—usually somewhere between age six and the first time you’re told you “disrespected the family” by having a B+—when you realize your life is less of a coming-of-age story and more of a Cold War spy thriller, except you’re both the sleeper agent and the bomb.
My personal moment happened in a grocery store. I was five, and I waved at a stranger. That was the crime. My mom yanked my arm back like I was disarming a nuke wrong and muttered something about “don’t embarrass us.” And that’s where the programming began. Don’t embarrass us. Not “don’t embarrass yourself.” Not “we love you.” Just don’t make them look bad.
This is the secret operating system of Asian parenting. Not culture. Not Confucius. Optics. A curated performance of family life where obedience is love, achievement is personality, and the only emotion allowed is shame. My parents didn’t raise me to be a person. They raised me to be a bullet point.
Every kid gets one dominant household emotion. Some kids grow up in joy. Some grow up in chaos. Mine was tension. You could chew it. You could slice it and put it on a sandwich. Home wasn’t a place—it was a hostage negotiation where your captors also packed your lunch.
My parents told me love meant sacrifice. They sacrificed. I was supposed to sacrifice. Emotions? Distractions. Friends? Enemies in disguise. Hobbies? Diversions from the path. The “path” was always vaguely defined as DoctorLawyerEngineerCEO, which was as much a job description as it was a religious experience.
The problem with this system—and there are several, but let’s start small—is that it never allows for the fact that kids aren’t code. They’re not blank hard drives you can install “Success.exe” onto. But Asian parents try anyway. And when the software glitches, it’s not the program’s fault. It’s you. You’re lazy. You’re entitled. You’re ungrateful. You left a sock on the floor? That’s not a sock. That’s evidence. That’s proof that you’ll die alone.
My mother once turned a shirt on my bedroom floor into a two-hour soliloquy about how I was a waste of space and money. By minute 47, we were somehow talking about how my therapist was a scam artist and how my brother was better than me. My dad once got mad at me for asking what a Roth IRA was because “You should know that already.”
And here’s the thing. I’m successful. I am, by all accounts, the walking embodiment of the Asian Dream™. Degree? Check. High-paying job? Check. Polite small talk with aunties at Lunar New Year? God-tier. But my mom still thinks I overspend on coffee and my dad still looks at me like I killed his fantasy draft every time I mention I might not want to have kids.
And this—this is the part that nobody gets. The part that makes people go, “But your parents love you.” Yes. They do. And yes, it’s also true that I’ve had panic attacks while hearing the garage door open because it meant they were home and I was about to be critiqued like I was on Top Chef. Love doesn’t cancel trauma. You can love your captors. That’s what Stockholm syndrome is.
Eventually, I left home. Went to college. Got a job. Sat in meetings with people named Chad who knew how to do small talk and not internally weep. I watched people interact with their parents like humans and not like commandants. I met white families who asked about my day without diagnosing my GPA. It felt like visiting a foreign country with no border patrol.
And it made me angry. Not just at my parents, but at the entire ecosystem that made this normal. The idea that survival = success. That if you’re not in debt, in jail, or in a ditch, then your parents did “a great job.” That the bare minimum—food, shelter, school—is not just enough, but deserving of eternal loyalty.
Here’s the punchline: My parents still think I turned out “fine.” They still brag to their friends about me. They still think all the yelling and the threats and the “you’re not even worth BTS” speeches were worth it. And in a way, they’re right.
I’m “fine.”
Just don’t look too closely.
Don’t look at the unopened diploma. Don’t look at the smile that twitches when someone asks about childhood. Don’t look at the fact that every text from my parents makes my stomach turn like I just ate expired sushi.
This is what it’s like to be raised by overbearing Asian parents: You become exactly what they wanted—and you hate yourself for it. You are everything they dreamed of—and you feel nothing inside. You survived the brainwashing. But now you’re a defector in your own story, and the country you escaped from still calls it love.