How to Get Out of Slavery: A Message to Children of Immigrants and/or Controlling Parents

There is this terrible misinterpretation that is pervasive among children of migrant parents: In order to show your love and gratitude to your parents, you must do what they say.

聽媽媽的話 or “Listen to your mother”, these phrases are drilled into us as children. What happens then is that people take this advice literally, whatever their mother or father tells them to do, they do it. This is not so dangerous when they’re telling you to put on a jacket but it is when it comes to education or career choices:

“Go study this”.

“Go be that”.

And the kids do it. But what is surprisingly absent in these life changing decisions is the child’s own voice. (Please note, when I say “child” I’m not referring to a five year old, I’m talking about a young adult who is beginning to make decisions for him/herself that will affect the rest of their life).

What happens then is that there are legions of people in fields of study and professions that they don’t really care about. They’ve been the good son and daughter and they’ve done what their parents told them to do at the price of their life.

So what is the misinterpretation? Where does this misinterpretation occur?

Let’s look at the phrase again: In order to show your love and gratitude to your parents, you must do what they say.

This is a concept that is derived from my observation of the Asian migrant community in America but I believe it translates to many migrant communities around the world. There is this pressure (spoken or unspoken) by children to acknowledge the hardships and sacrifices that their parents went through to come to a new country and give them a better life. The problem is that this acknowledgment constantly comes in the form of slavery.

However, this does not have to be the case.

Good parents want one thing for their children: They want them to be happy. This in turn will make the parents happy.

The misinterpretation is that the children believe that doing what their parents tell them to do will make the parents happy when in fact, if their parents are reasonable people, the child’s own happiness will make the parents happy. It may not in the short term, but after some time, the parents will recognize that their child is doing what he/she wants and will accept that.

Where the misinterpretation occurs is that parents think they know what their children want and the children believe that. The reality is this: only YOU know what you want.^

Migrants move to a new country generally for one reason: stability.

They’re escaping economic/political instability in their own country to explore the prospect of a more stable life abroad.

To them stability = happiness.

Let’s assume that this equation is true, taking happiness as a constant and stability as a variable. Most migrant parents define stability in a few choice professions: medicine, law, engineering, and accounting. They don’t understand that the idea of a stable job has broadened to incorporate all different kinds of sectors and professions. * With self knowledge and knowledge of what’s out there, you will realize what you want to do and define “stability” in your own terms.

The bottom line is this: parents are human beings too. The advice they give should be taken with the same grains of salt you season other peoples’ advice with. If it’s good advice, it’s good, if it’s bad advice, it’s bad. You must not focus on the person giving the advice but the actual advice itself and how it relates to you.

One of the major obstructions to making such a differentiation is a mental one: as the child you feel inherently guilty for doing anything that might go against what your parents envisioned for you. DON’T FEEL GUILTY.

This is your life and you and only you are responsible for your own happiness. When you realize that, you will be free.

^To know what you want is a lifelong journey. By knowing yourself and what is important to you, you will be in command of your own life. Thus, it’s a journey well worth taking. Your life experience will inform you what is important to you, listen to that.

*I have nothing against medicine, law, engineering, or accounting, they are all very honorable professions. The problem I believe is that there is an overemphasis, especially in the Asian migrant community, to pursue these professions without regards to the fact if the child fits that profession. I believe that there is a natural statistical spread of what people should be i.e. in a group of a 100 randomly selected people I do believe there is a number of them that are meant to be doctors, a number of them are meant to be musicians and a smaller number that are meant to be both. I don’t know what those numbers are but I feel there is a greater shift, more so than that of the general public, in the Asian migrant community towards the medicine, law, engineering, and accounting professions that deviates from a natural norm. What that natural norm is quantitatively I don’t know, but qualitatively I know it’s there.