Theory 1: This is a social skill that you have to learn, you only bother learning stuff you think will be useful.
There are certain skills in life that you need to learn and until you've made the effort and either had some lessons from an expert or taken the trouble to figure it out for yourself, it is a skill that you're never going to acquire. Hence my theory is that Donna had parents and/or older siblings who taught her the fine art of conversation by showing interest in the other party and asking questions, that is why she has that skill; but on the other hand, my parents never ever had anyone in their life who showed them how to do this, never mind taken the trouble to explain to them how this works and explain why this is so important. Furthermore, you need to be in an environment where people do place a certain amount of importance on having that skill before you would be motivated to obtain that skill. For young people these days, there is a lot of talk about the importance of coding and whether or not the kids want to pursue a career in IT, most parents wouldn't hesitate to enrol their kids in a course to learn basic coding just in case it might prove to be useful in the future. However, in my parents' culture, respect is given rather than earned: for example, within a parent-child relationship, children are obliged to respect their parents and listen to their parents whether or not the parents have done anything to earn the respect of their children or command their attention. Thus within that context, my parents would feel that any effort to try to engage their children socially is a just total waste of time, since they are already supposed to have our undivided attention and utmost respect. But if you feel that something has little or no marginal benefit, then you wouldn't bother spending time or money on it. Let's use the example of water in the UK: some people prefer drinking bottled water that is either mineral water or filtered water and they would avoid consuming tap water - they would use tap water for washing, showering and cleaning but not for drinking or cooking. I don't see the point in that as it is quite expensive to do so and the tap water in the UK is properly treated, so it is perfectly safe to drink. You're not going to fall sick if you drink a cup of tap water - I have been drinking tap water in the UK for years and have been perfectly fine. This is why I don't bother with bottled water in the UK, unlike say, if I was in a country like Nigeria or Bolivia where tap water isn't safe to drink - then I would definitely only consume bottled water as I don't want to risk falling sick. So going back to this social skill which involves the art of asking questions, even if my parents have witnessed others using this skill, they probably felt that it just was not something they needed or would bring them much additional benefits and so did not bother trying to learn it.
However, as time passes and our society evolves, our norms and expectations will change with time. Back in the 1980s when I was a child in Singapore, people had lower standards and expectations when it came to our social skills and so people like my parents were perfectly fine, so if everyone had poor social skills back then, then their lack of finer social skills wasn't a problem at all. Let's compare this to air-conditioning back in the 1980s when it was considered a luxury; for example, public buses were mostly without air-conditioning so most people just accepted that it was going to be a hot and sweaty ride on the bus. It was in 1984 when the first air-con bus was introduced in Singapore and by the 2011, the last non-air con bus in Singapore was taken out of service as air-conditioning became the norm of public buses. Besides, my parents were poor working class folks who were far more concerned about their basic needs like having enough food - allow me to refer you to the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Working class people tend to focus very much on basic physiological needs like getting enough food, sleep or clothing whilst they don't have the time, money or inclination to focus on higher order needs such as using finer manners or social skills to develop better relationships with people in your life. So if everyone around you is barely clinging to survival, trying to get enough food to fill their bellies or secure shelter for the night so they don't have to sleep in the streets, then yeah, nobody would care about developing better social skills as that would not be considered crucial within this context. Whilst my parents (especially my mother) did experience genuine poverty in her lifetime, thankfully things have changed for the better. My mother lost her father and sister as a direct consequence of her family's poverty: they both fell very sick and the family simply didn't have money for the necessary medical treatment that could have easily kept them alive. Hence that created this 'survival' mindset for my mother, whereby her mind was focused what she considered most vital whilst dismissing anything else that wasn't essential. Once someone is set in their ways, it can be hard to change and adapt to new circumstances even as the world around them continues to evolve. Please allow me to be clear: I'm merely trying understand and explain why my parents behave like that - I certainly don't condone the way they behave nor do I believe it is justifiable. The world will change and we ought to adapt to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in; if that means developing new and different social skills to cope with these big changes, then so be it - we ought to do whatever it takes to adapt and thrive.
Theory 2: This is a social class issue - working class people just don't do this.
Donna comes from a rich family, both her parents are doctors and her older siblings are equally highly educated, so her upbringing is very different from mine since I came from a very working class family in Singapore. Her lifestyle now is enviable: she attends glamorous parties, she has exotic holidays, she hangs out with minor celebrities and most people would be jealous of what Donna gets up. So if you were to ask her simple questions like, "what did you do last weekend?" or "what plans do you have for this summer?" You can be sure that you will get a very fascinating answer. But the same cannot be said about working class folks like my parents who spend long hours working just to put food on the table and have little free time or spare money to do fun stuff. My parents had no hobbies and if my father had any spare time with nothing to do, he would either busy himself with household chores or just watch TV rather than plan anything more elaborate like a visit to the local museum or art gallery to see a special exhibition. In fact, I have tried using Donna's technique with my father before and that yielded the most mundane results. I have tried asking my father how his day was and he didn't know how to react as most people would take zero interest in his everyday routines like grocery shopping - so I got these "stories with no punchlines" from him, he once recounted this shopping trip to the supermarket and told me the long list of food items he bought (along with details like how much he paid for those items). Another time, he recounted how my nephew opened a bottle of water from the fridge, drank it halfway and then put the rest of the bottle back in the fridge. I would try hard to hide my reaction as I wanted to scream, "your life is so freaking boring, get out there and do something interesting whilst you're still fit and able to do so!" Now contrast that to Donna, when she casually name drops the celebrity she ran into at the party she attended last weekend in Paris. Whilst I want to hear more about what Donna did in Paris, I found those conversations with my father painful to say the least, as I find myself listening to a story that only reminded me just how vapid his life is. If my father's life is really that uninteresting, his friends and family would be unlikely to ask him questions about what he has done, since they can already predict what his answers would be like. If I found my father's description of his grocery shopping trip so boring, I doubt his friends or even my mother would be particularly interested in the details of his shopping trip either, especially in the age of social media.
Now when we scroll through Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), Youtube or any other social media platform of your choice, we expect to be entertained, educated, amused or stimulated one way or another. So as I scroll through my Youtube feed, I see videos that I would watch for those reasons: there are educational videos that teach me foreign languages or discuss a topic like global warming, there are instructional videos which offer me recipes for dishes that I would love to try, there are stand up comedians waiting to make me laugh with their jokes, then there are entertainment clips from my favourite music videos to the best gymnastics routines from the 2024 Paris Olympics and even clips from my favourite films. I could go on but I need to feel like I would be entertained and/or learn something new/useful if I watch a video on Youtube. That's exactly how I feel each time I ask Donna a question, because I know that her answers would probably tick all of those boxes. So a casual question about what she did last weekend would yield a crazy story about how she went to a birthday party with her best friend only to run into Orlando Bloom there. But if working class people like my father know that such a question with their peers would only yield the most mundane and unexciting responses, then they probably would be far less inclined to ask such questions to each other and turn instead to social media to try to find some content that will stimulate, entertain and amuse them. All that entertainment is now available on your mobile phone to provide hours of fun and the algorithm on these apps would create a stream of content perfectly suited to your taste; so with that on hand, why would you bother speaking to people like your friends and family if you know they are simply not going to provide any kind of interaction to rival the entertainment you can get on your phone? When I used to speak to my family regularly (I don't anymore), my father would literally walk out of a conversation with me mid-sentence because I can see that he has simply lost interest in whatever I was saying and then he would go turn on the TV instead. I suppose he is just so used to being entertained this way that he found any kind of social interaction with a real human being less interesting or fruitful; I believe that is because of the kind of working class peers he has in his community. If asking a questions about each other would simply lead to an unpleasant conversation like, "that woman at the local shop has raised her prices again, the toilet paper there now costs ten cents more than last month, I can't believe she did that." Yeah, that's what happens when you don't hang out with friends like Donna - no wonder my parents are not in the habit of asking questions about others if that's the kind of answers they will usually get.
Theory 3: The irrational Asian fear of 'losing face'.
It's a fact that I'm a lot more educated than my parents, that is mostly because I have had much better opportunities to access further education than my parents ever did when they were younger, but also because I am just a lot more intelligent. I would have thought that most parents would be happy that their child turned out to be clever and well-educated but then they are also incredibly Asian in that they feel that they would 'lose face' in the dynamic of the parent-child relationship if they acknowledged that the other party was superior in this aspect. I put this theory to the test a while ago when I deliberately talked about a painfully complex concept from corporate finance that I knew my mother would have absolutely no way of understanding. Instead of saying, "I have no idea what the heck you just said," she simply nodded during the whole conversation and when I asked her if she understood what I had just explained, she said, "yes, I understand." I knew she was lying of course, because if she had confessed to not understanding what I had just explained, she risked looking stupid in front of her child. I could have put her on the spot and tested her, exposing her lie but I wasn't spoiling for a fight with her - no, I didn't want to start an argument, I just wanted to test my theory. I believe this is why my parents avoid asking me questions like, "how is your work coming along? So what are you doing with your new company?" This irrational fear of being exposed as "stupid" (and thus losing face) is just too much and this frustrates me - they know I am more educated, I know they are less educated, there is certainly no ambiguity whatsoever when it comes to this topic, yet they really don't want to be put in the position where they have to confront it out of some irrational fear of being embarrassed by it. In traditional Chinese culture, you must offer your elders respect because they are supposed to be wiser because of their age; but I am struggling to find what extra wisdom, foresight or acumen they have to offer, especially when it comes to a topic like my career in corporate finance. Don't get me wrong, I realize that a lot of working class kids will follow in their parents' footsteps and end up just as working class - in having achieved social mobility, I am an exception and I am most grateful for that. Yet at the same time, I am very frustrated by the way my parents expect me to pretend that they are just as if not more intelligent than me when they always spout complete rubbish that only uneducated working class folks would say. Don't even get me started, we would be here for a long time if I gave you some examples of some of the ridiculously stupid crap that my parents have said to prove just how uneducated they are. Hence their strategy to avoid losing face is to avoid questions, as "preserving face" is their priority.
How does my sister deal with this? She told me that she recognizes that my father is a lonely old man and just likes to talk, he is oblivious to whether or not the other party is listening or actually agrees with him or not. So she just lets him talk, in the knowledge that 100% of what he says is complete rubbish, that's just a very lonely old man with very few friends trying to seek some kind of social contact, so to let him talk is the kind thing to do, it is an act of kindness and charity. She told me that she would just listen and say nothing, she might just nod or give other visual cues to let my father know that she is listening but she wouldn't go as far as to respond because that would mean correcting him and she is not looking for any kind of argument or conflict that might risk my father feeling as if he had "lost face" as she understands how this concept means so much to him. She told me that our father was not looking for any kind of validation that he is some kind of genius, but rather, he is simply a lonely old man who needs to find someone to talk to, a listening ear and so that is all she is providing for him - the fact that he is talking rubbish most of the time is a moot point. This does remind me of a memory I had from about 15 or 16 years ago when my nephew was still quite young, around 5 years old or so. We were playing this silly game with him and apart from my nephew and I, both my sisters and my mother were there. Given that he was the only young child amongst a group of adults, we would deliberately make sure he won the games as it would give him such a thrill to win against all the adults. I remember wondering at that point if he realized that we were all deliberately engineering the game to make sure he always emerged the winner every single time, if he would think that we were being somewhat condescending. How would he feel if he knew what was actually going on? By the same token, I wonder if my father realizes what my sister is doing by listening to him that way, without questioning or challenging him when he talks rubbish. It is one thing to pull wool over a 5 year old kid's eyes, it is another to do the same thing with a man in his 80s. Wouldn't that come across as quite condescending? I think there's a difference in accepting the fact that there are just some things in life we cannot change, such as the kind of parents that we have. But on the other hand, even if I accept the way my parents are, I don't want to celebrate it or condone it by "playing along" the way my sister does and giving in to them out of a sense of filial duty. Mind you, my sister's methods hasn't created a situation where he started to take interest in her life at all, but she is just him giving him a listening ear.
Theory 4: My parents never really wanted children in the first place.
It might seem like quite an extreme suggestion, but hear me out as I think that this may be true. Chinese culture prescribes certain roles for people within society - by a certain age, you are supposed to get married and have children. Failure to do so would be frowned upon and met with disapproval, the person who remains single and/or childless is seen as selfish and only caring about their own needs whilst ignoring their duties towards their family, community and society. This pressure to get married and start a family is still very strong today, but can you imagine what it was like back in the 1960s when my parents got married? My parents actually have very little in common and I can see why they got married in the first place. When my father's eldest brother got married, that marriage thrilled his parents who were desperate to get their first grandson. Feeling like he was ignored whilst his eldest brother was getting all the attention from his parents, my father made it his mission to get married as soon as possible. So he decided to ask my mother (she was a neighbour who lived in the same area then), my mother had come from a very poor family and life was pretty miserable for her then as they were living in abject poverty. Having lost her father a few years prior to that, she saw how a wedding could bring everyone together for some much needed joy. There was one problem though: my parents didn't get married for love, in fact, they had very little in common apart from having lived in the same neighbourhood. But back then, the concept of falling in love and marrying someone you are madly in love with was at best a decadent, foreign Western concept, most Asian people simply married out of a sense of duty, to perform your designated role in your community as a spouse and parent. Thus nobody actually bat an eyelid when my parents announced that they were getting married back then, but if they got together today, most people would tell them, "you have nothing in common with this person you're about to marry, you don't know each other well enough." The only reason why they stayed married for so long and are still married today is because their expectations were very low - their objective was never to experience what true love and happiness in a marriage. Rather, it was simply to prove to their society and community that they had fulfilled their duty in becoming both a spouse and parent. They probably looked at their peers and noticed that none of them were really that happy in their marriages either and thus not being in love with your spouse was the norm for them.
Allow me to elaborate on this point: back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was still a gender imbalance in Singapore - this was due to the fact that more men than women were killed in WW2. Take the infamous Sook Ching massacre for example which took place after the fall of Singapore in 1942: in just two weeks, the Japanese massacred between 40,000 to 50,000 mostly ethnic Chinese locals whom they considered a threat, but men overwhelmingly outnumbered women in this massacre. The fact that my father was one of those lucky male Chinese locals who managed lived through the Japanese occupation of Malaya unscathed, when so many males of his age were in danger of being slaughtered by the Japanese. This created a situation whereby the local women of my mother's age quite aware of the fact that due to this gender imbalance, not all women of that cohort would be able to find a husband and they were under pressure to simply lower their standards or risk being left on the shelf. Thus many Chinese women who got married in the 1950s and 1960s were not in love with their husbands at all, there was probably this sense of "you will have to do, at least you are not disgusting as that alcoholic gambler my sister had to marry." Contrast that today when a woman can choose to be single and focus on her career if she cannot find a man she loves enough to marry, back in those days, society was so sexist and misogynistic that women were under so much pressure to conform and get married. It was like that day when I was very busy at work and had no time for lunch before my next meeting, a colleague offered me a cereal bar so I didn't go hungry - I took one look at the cereal bar and whilst it didn't look appetizing at all, I shrugged my shoulders and thought, better than nothing, it'll have to do and at least I won't be hungry. So I ate it and rushed off to the next meeting, but that is what you would do during a busy work day - you shouldn't have that same attitude when it comes to getting married yet that's what so many women did during that period. The reason why I think it is important to understand historical context of that period is that I don't want you to think that I am somehow mocking my parents for getting married despite not being in love; yes it was the norm back then to get married to someone you didn't love by lowering your standards, but no that doesn't mean that this aspect of Asian culture back then didn't cause major problems. It frustrates me that so many Asian people feel like they just can't bring themselves to criticize their own culture despite the fact that there are clearly flaws and problems in their culture. This is why I see my parents as victims of their own culture, they were under so much pressure to get married that they simply lowered their standards to get the job done as quickly as possible whilst dismissing the concept of true love as some kind of decadent, selfish Western concept that had no place in their society. But what happens when you marry out of duty rather than love and can we discuss those impacts?
If you're not even in love with your spouse, how can you even begin to love the children you produce in this kind of marriage then? You can go through the motions and have children with that same sense of duty that compelled you to get married in the first place, but to emotionally develop a bond with that child in order to love that child is probably going to be a lot harder if that child is a product of a married that is devoid of love. If you feel little compulsion to get to know someone, you would simply do the bare minimum and the relationship remains quite impersonal. Allow me to use an analogy to make my point: on my last visit to Bangkok, there was a member of staff on the front desk of the hotel who was polite and spoke English very well. However, she wasn't really interested in becoming my friend, rather she was simply doing her job - that's called corporate hospitality. That lady at the hotel never asked me any personal questions, she didn't try to get to know me better. Now let's contrast this to my interaction with Donna when I told her that I was going to Bangkok, She took the time to find out how much time I had there, what my interests were and where I was staying, so she could pick a handful of tourist attractions for me to visit when I had the time. Obviously, there was a huge difference between the way Donna and this hotel receptionist reacted to my needs - Donna really cared whilst I could feel that the hotel receptionist faced so many tourists everyday that she can't really be asked to get to know any of them. I got the same feeling with my mother - like the receptionist at the hotel, my mother did her job but remained distant and impersonal, never taking any interest in anything that I got up to. You might wonder, geez if you're not even interested in your own children and getting to know them better, why did you bother becoming a mother in the first place? The answer to that question is that her own mother didn't take any interest at all in her and this was simply a cultural norm that afflicts so many Asian families. When marry someone you don't know well or love out of a sense of duty, then the arrangement feels like a job. When you have children despite the fact that you have no parental instinct and you all just end up together as a family unit because you're bound together by this cultural notion of what family means then your family members can feel more like colleagues or even clients, in the absence of any notion of love. By that token, I feel sorry for my mother as I see her as a victim of Asian culture; but then again, when has she ever cared about what I think or feel?
Theory 5: It is a way to avoid conflict.
There is one thing I do share in common with my parents - we would rather avoid conflict than risk having a nasty argument. Even a seemingly normal question like, "how's work going, everything okay?" may risk opening a Pandora's box. After all, my father is extremely racist and hates white people yet I have spent practically all of my working life in Europe working almost exclusively with white people. I wouldn't want to just brush that question aside with a standard answer like, "everything is fine, thanks for asking." Even if things are going well, I think I deserve some credit for finding success in a very competitive industry as a working class immigrant - the odds were totally stacked against me yet I somehow managed to find success. I think that's a story that would and should interest most people, but even starting to talk about it would mean challenging my father's very racist assumptions that all white people inherently hate all Chinese people. I realize I can't change my father, but don't expect me to play along and pretend that everything is normal. You can see why this is a Pandora's box that nobody wants to touch, thus by avoiding questions like that, my parents avoid Pandora's box by steering clear of any topic that may challenge their views of the world. They simply don't want to hear any evidence (such as their son happily working in Europe) that may force them to reconsider their long held beliefs. I don't want to be too harsh on them actually as it is just human nature to want to be in our own echo chamber where we only encounter others who agree with our own points of views. Let me explain what I do when I encounter such situations at work: I am left wing when it comes to American politics, I really dislike Trump and whilst I am not a fan of Biden, I believe that he is the better of the two options. But there are times when I have encountered people at work when they have said that they would prefer Trump to be president - I have two options at that point: I can either challenge them and risk getting into an argument (potentially souring that relationship) or I can keep quiet, change the topic and just not voice my opinion on the matter. I often opt for the latter as it is the easiest way to avoid any kind of conflict with people I work with as my priority would be to maintain that working relationship, rather than impress my political opinions upon them. At some level, I think my parents are aware that I have a very different view of the world but any discussion about these differences might lead to conflict as we profoundly disagree on quite a number of topics, so that's why avoiding questions is their way to avoid any disagreements and conflicts but in the long run, the absence of any meaningful conversations has created a situation where they don't know me at all. This is an very high price to pay to avoid any kind of arguments.
However, I don't think the avoidance of conflicts should be an excuse not to get to know someone better especially if that someone is as important as a family member. Allow me to give you an example of when I did not shy away from conflict: some years ago, I was in a hotel room in Lyon on holiday when there was a lot of noise coming from next door. There was no way I was going to get any sleep with that much noise, so I got dressed and went to confront the people next door - there were a group of young ladies about 18 years old on holiday, they seem to have just returned from a party as they were in fancy dress and were in high spirits, probably somewhat drunk. Note that I was rude or aggressive with them but I was very firm in explaining to them that they were so loud they were disturbing others. I then went down to the hotel reception to explain to the night manager what was going on and thankfully, there was this older no-nonsense French woman who on duty - she immediately went with me to that group of young ladies and gave them a very stern warning, she had the tone of a strict head teacher dealing with a bunch of naughty students and that finally got through to the young ladies who settled down for the night. So whilst I risked conflict in dealing with that situation, I knew that simply doing nothing will not lead to a better outcome - I wasn't prepared to sit up in bed all night to be kept awake by the noise and I knew I had both the social skills and the language skills to resolve that situation. We would risk a conflict if we knew the favourable outcome was worth fighting for. So if I may refer you back to the example I used previously about encountering someone at work who is pro-Trump, I didn't want to risk conflict by starting a conversation about American politics with that person - after all, I didn't consider that person a friend, he was merely someone I happened to work with and thus his views on American politics really didn't matter to me, especially if I knew it was unlikely that I would ever want to befriend that person outside the context of work. Contrast that to a situation if someone closer to me like my nephew were to express such an opinion - I would want to hold him to account and challenge him to explain himself (even at the risk of conflict arising as a result) because I actually do care about my nephew and whilst I respect his right to form his own opinions, I would want to make sure that those opinions are based on facts and truth rather than fake news or misinformation. Thus that's why I am disappointed that my parents have chosen to shy away from conflict this way, because it shows they really are not emotionally invested enough in this relationship to bother risking a conflict. I can ignore a guy at work who likes and supports Trump, but I don't like being treated that same way by my own parents.
So there you go, that's it from me on this topic and if you have made it this far to the end of the article, congratulations - you know me better than my own parents. But over to you, which theory do you think is most likely to be true? Just how well do your parents know you? Is this just an Asian or Chinese phenomena or does this same problem also exist in other cultures as well? Have I been too harsh on my parents? Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.
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