Note: My blog posts are based on my personal and interpersonal experience, not based on therapy participants’ stories. Obviously participants may express similar or the same sentiments, but I do not post in social media (incl blogs) about thoughts and theories originating from participants’ stories.
Obviously there are some Asian parents that only care about money. But the Asian parents I know push us not into specific income brackets but into specific credentials: doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants (and, in some regions, Ph.D.s). I don’t even think if they know these occupations earn high income because fixed-income Asian parents frequently offer their doctor lawyer engineer children money.
In several parts of Asia, the system of oppression was not capitalism but caste systems. In fact, the purpose of these caste systems was often to thwart capitalism’s upward mobility, a la “a self-made entrepreneur.”
(NOTE: A lot of ethnic groups in North America carry the historical contexts of their people: e.g. my friend, a 5th gen English Canadian, believes that her interest in regional accents comes from the regional accents as a class indicator in England. We can simultaneously acknowledge the Asians’ historical context of Asia and also fight the “perpetual foreigner myth.”)
A lot of people know that caste systems are horrific, but few know just how much. Let me give you an example – if you are sensitive to gore, skip the rest of this paragraph. Say, in Japan, the caste system of humans (there are non-human classes above and below this) was made up of shi-nou-kou-shou (samurai, farmers, trades, merchants). This meant that samurai, at the top of the caste, could do anything to the people below. Many frequently tested their swords on just random farmers or took the farmers’ children with impunity.
Many caste systems lasted hundreds of years, and the whole lineage of people over generations were locked into a caste with zero mobility. Wealth could not buy safety; in fact, flaunting money puts you in danger. The only way to gain a little extra safety was to be useful to be the people in upper castes: the doctors, lawyers, accountants, and engineers.
Obviously there are Asian parents who only care about money. But some push their children into specific occupations to protect them from being completely dispensable. In fact, when you ask Asian parents, they often name this. They don’t care about money; they just want children to be okay.
Though it is important to note that Asian children are not to blame for the communication breakdown. Many Asian children (those who are children today and those who were children generations ago) have been deprived of fluency in the language and culture of their parents due to the survival assimilation. There are so many stories of Asian parents choosing to keep their communication with their children to minimum so that their children learn English quicker and avoid xenophobia, a form of a caste in an imperialist “nation.”
The Asian children, with the loss of fluency in the language and culture of their parents, surrounded by racist peers, may believe their parents are all about money when they insist they pursue these specific careers. Obviously some Asian children would be correct, as some Asian parents are in fact all about money. But for those who are wrong, where in our society is there an opportunity for them to find out? I hope this blog is one of those places.
