Coming out to your Chinese parents (or not)

Hi guys, this is a draft for my latest podcast which you can choose to listen to by clicking here, or you can read on as always. Recently, I watched a piece on social media about a gay guy in Singapore called Eric Feng who chose not to come out to his Chinese parents - I don't want to criticize him since that's his personal choice of course but I want to discuss the topic and share with you my perspective. So let's start with this piece that I saw: this is an openly gay 45 year old Singaporean guy talking about how he is totally out to the world by having a presence on social media to talk about LGBTQ issues, he is showing his face and not hiding in the closet. A reason why he didn't want to burden them by coming out is because he claims, 'they wouldn't know what to do with that information'. His father has expressed a worry and chose the words 'who will take care of you when you are old', referring to the fact that in Chinese culture, children are supposed to take care of their parents when they are elderly and gay people tend not to have children. Eric could have used that opportunity to point out the obvious and come out to his father then, but he chose not to. The key reason why Eric feels that he doesn't want to come out to his parents is that he doesn't need any kind of emotional support or acceptance from them in his coming out journey - he is perfectly content with his identity as a gay man and often, for a lot of other gay men, coming out to their means receiving that sense of acceptance from their parents which can be a huge source of emotional support for a young gay person struggling to accept themselves. Furthermore, Eric already has a very supportive, gay-friendly sister whom he is out to already and she is a great source of strength and emotional support. I guess Eric doesn't expect his aged Chinese parents to behave like those in the West who are gay-friendly and know how to say the right things to a son coming out of the closet, so he didn't go down that route. So that's kind of it in Eric's rather short video and allow me to offer my own response to that and spoiler alert - no, I didn't agree with Eric. 

I want to make it clear - this is in no way any kind of criticism of Eric, his story intrigued me as I'm only 5 years older than him and we're both from Singapore. So it is fair to say, we actually do share a lot in common actually. Now let's focus on the differences - he has shown loads of pictures and videos of his parents on his social media feed obviously without their consent, since he is not out to them and these are videos about being gay, but regardless, that's between him and his parents. I have chosen to keep my parents out of my social media content because I know they are not happy at all when it comes to letting the public know that they have a gay son. In film and TV production, we always ask participants to sign a release form to indicate that they consent to being a part of the production, to show their faces otherwise we either have to mask their faces in the show or not use that footage at all. I'm somewhat uncomfortable with what Eric has done with his parents but like I said, that's between him and them. In showing their faces so openly like that on his social media posts, surely someone is going to go up to them and say, "eh I saw your gay son use your photos in his videos talking about being gay". And yet at the same time, he said he doesn't want to come out to his parents - I just can't quite get my head around that. But perhaps this is where we have the shades of grey, where life isn't this simple dichotomy of black and white, left or right, up or down. It seems his mother has a pretty good idea that he is gay, she just doesn't want to have the conversations about it. He pointed out that his parents, like most of our parents of that generation, are simply not that well educated and thus wouldn't have the same information, knowledge and understanding about LGBT issues. Yet somehow, in their own way, they are comfortable enough with the situation. Likewise with my parents, I'm totally out to them - I never got any kind of acceptance yet at the same time, I never got any rejection either. I suppose both Eric and I are in the same situation, there's a sliding scale between 0 to 10, with 0 being homophobic parents kicking their children out of the front door and disowning them; and 10 being this kind of ideal situation where they are totally gay-friendly and say, "I knew you were gay since you were 3 years old, I knew you were gay before you knew what it meant to be gay, you're my child, of course I know I created a gay child and I have always loved my gay child." Thus Eric's parents are probably somewhere like on a 7 or 8 on that scale, whilst I feel like mine are at about 5 (on a good day). 

But there's one thing that Eric said that really resonated with me. He talked about his parents spending years always worried about people looking down on them and that is something my parents went through as well. I always tell this story to illustrate just how poor my parents were when they got married. My mother was a young mother with a baby - my eldest sister and so my mother wanted to cook a nourishing meal for her baby and herself. She went to the butcher and wanted to buy some pork, but when she saw the price of meat that day, she realized she couldn't afford it. Nonetheless, she tried her luck and asked for the butcher to give her just a very small slice of pork. When the butcher cut a tiny slice of pork and weighed it, my mother realized that she still couldn't afford it and so she asked the butcher if he could cut it any smaller so she could afford it. The butcher laughed at my mother, if I cut this piece of meat any smaller I would have slicing into my own fingers. Get out of here, if you don't have any money to buy meat, why do you come here? Come back when you have money to pay for it. All the customers in the shop reacted by laughing at my mother and that was when my mother left the shop in tears, consumed by so much shame as she had been laughed out of the butcher's shop. You know what the irony is? The butcher wasn't exactly rich, neither were the other customers in the queue - yet they chose to heap judgement on someone slightly poorer than them and mock my mother. Really rich people would probably react with a lot more compassion in such a situation. You might assume rather incorrectly that poor people might have more compassion for other poor people, but from experience I can tell you that a poor person has two choices in that situation which my mother encountered at the butcher': they can either express empathy and kindness or they can use it to feel superior to this person, like "hey I may be poor, I know I am not rich but I'm not as pathetic as that woman I ran into that the butcher who was told to leave because she couldn't afford anything - she was practically begging the butcher for free meat, she has some nerve to even show her face in there." This was just one example of how my mother was routinely humiliated by her peers and her community for being poor and this wasn't a one off - this happened regularly, almost daily for her. Thus such bad experiences have scarred my mother for life and she so is always paranoid.

Let me compare and contrast my coming out to my husband's coming out - when I came out to my parents around 1996 at the age of 20, they didn't have a clue what it meant. Their only concern was if they would lose face, ah yes, that old Asian concept of losing face, losing the respect of others. They didn't once think what it meant for me being a young gay person, it was like my welfare wasn't at all of concern to them at all. No, it was all about them - it was all about how they would be humiliated if other people found out, how they would be judged for having been not good enough parents and how they have given others yet another reason to look down on them. So at the time, I could have been very angry and disappointed at their complete lack of interest in my welfare but I think what Eric is suggesting is to look at it from their point of view: if they had been traumatized by a lifetime of humiliation, then they are not likely to know how to deal with this kind of situation. This is no excuse of course for the type of reaction I got, but perhaps I can compare this to my husband's coming out years ago to his family. Their first concern was that of sexual health - a lot of gay people got AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was a major issue for the gay community. HIV/AIDS has since become a manageable long term illness with modern medicine, but back then, it was a death sentence that could seriously impact the quality of your adult life. So at least his family's first reaction was, okay are you protecting yourself from HIV and do you know what to do to have safer sex, so as to minimize your risk of infection? Once that was out of the way, then there was all that about "who is going to take care of you when you are old?" Even if that conversation was awkward and difficult, at least they were concerned about him - that conversation was about his welfare. With my parents, they had absolutely zero interest in my welfare, it was all about blaming me for being such a bad son for once again making them lose face, for subjecting them to even more humiliation and disgrace. But once that conversation was over, they hardly ever brought up the topic again. They dealt with it the same way my father dealt with his cancer diagnosis - they don't have the social skills nor the vocabulary to have an intelligent conversation about such a complex, sensitive topic and thus they simply don't talk about it at all, if they do talk, it would just be about very mundane things like what they want to eat for dinner. 

I think it is ironic that my parents are so obsessed with this whole concept about losing face and people looking down on them because there are plenty of things that they can be proud of. Despite being very working class, I am working in the upper echelons of the financial services industry in Europe and if I may be blunt, making a lot of money. Yet they are not interested in all that - I remember this moment from a few years ago when I was visiting my aunt with my mother, so my aunt quite innocently asked my mother (and not me, for some reason) what I was doing in London. I thought it was my mother's opportunity to boast how well I was doing, given that this was one opportunity for her to gain that much wanted respect from her own sister. But the answer that she had given was so wide of the mark, she had described me as if I was some kind of uneducated labourer doing a totally unskilled job. At that moment I realized that my mother was so stupid that she didn't understand the difference between a skilled job and an unskilled job - that highly educated, highly skilled, highly intelligent people did very different kinds of jobs which paid a lot more, that these jobs weren't accessible to people who were not as highly educated, skilled or intelligent. Believe you me, I have tried to explain the difference to my parents but as they are uneducated and very working class, the concept of highly skilled individuals earning a lot more money doing more specialist professional roles is just somehow beyond their comprehension. Furthermore my mother was so totally disinterested in me that she really could not give a fuck whether or not I was a brain surgeon or a beggar on the streets of London. I can tell you that both statements are true: that my mother is woefully ignorant about skilled jobs as she is totally uneducated and she has also totally lost interest in me decades ago. Thus within this context, if that is just the nature of my relationship with my parents, then I can't be held responsible for them feeling this paranoia about people looking down on them.- it's like if they are thirsty, then I have put water in front of them for them to drink, to quench that thirst, to take care of that need. But as the saying goes, you can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink. If they choose to continue to be consumed by this paranoia of people looking down on them for being poor instead of taking pride in their children's achievements, then no, I didn't create this problem and this is not a problem I can fix. 

So allow me to analyze it as a businessman being very rational: I am shown business opportunities on a regular basis and I would have to evaluate if it the opportunity I am shown is worth pursuing or not. If a deal is fraught with risk and difficulty, I would usually just pass on it, especially if I know my time can be a lot better spent on easier projects. Thus if coming out to my parents would be presented to me as a project in this context, my evaluation would be, "you have everything to lose and nothing to gain, your parents are only going to fuck this up by reacting poorly to your coming out, you know they would say a lot of very stupid things that are completely inappropriate and everyone would be worse off as a result of you coming out. Alternatively, you could maintain the status quo by avoiding the topic, in the same way Taiwan's independence isn't recognized by China but China isn't invading Taiwan yet - it is a kind of stalemate status quo that has maintained the peace and this might be the best case scenario." Maybe this is why Eric didn't want to come out to his parents all this time as he could probably predict that his parents simply wouldn't know how to say the right things - it would simply be incredibly awkward and there would be nothing to be gained by any of the parties involved. When you realize that there's little potential gain from doing something, you have little incentive to do it.  Putting aside any kind of moral judgment on whether or not we ought to be honest with our parents about our sexuality, Eric's choices may have simply been guided by a simple cost-benefit analysis of the situation based on what his own standards and expectations.

Eric also talked about his father being completely clueless. I think there is an element of that in my family as well and I shall focus this discussion on my own family since I clearly don't know Eric and his father, so I don't want to judge them. Eric guessed that it was a combination of his father being way too busy working, providing for his family so he never noticed that his son was gay; as well as him being of a different generation where they really didn't have an understanding of gay culture. Well, based on my own parents, I can offer another dimension to this: my parents got married out of a sense of duty rather than love per se. For them, it was a lot more important to fulfil their duty to their families and society to get married and have children - the concept of marriage and parenthood was never ever about love, it was viewed in the context of responsibility and duty. There is a big difference between doing an activity out of duty and out of love. For example, I brush my teeth every night and take good care of my teeth not because I actually enjoy the process, but I do so out of a sense of duty. I need to take care of my teeth properly or I will pay a high price if I start losing my teeth. I believe that love and marriage ought to be treated more like visiting our favourite roller coaster - it must be an experience that we embrace simply because it brings us great joy, rather than something like the way we routinely brush our teeth. But for my parents' generation, they had a completely different set of values and times have changed of course, our culture has evolved a lot. Back in the day, it was far more important for them to get married than to find genuine love, so in that context, if spouses didn't really love each other, then they are not that likely to love their children or even take much interest in their own children. When I complained to my sister about this situation, she simply rolled her eyes and said that all her friends face exactly the same situation and that this is just the norm in Singapore. I pointed out to her that two wrongs don't make a right - even if this is a common problem in Singapore, it still remains a problematic situation for those involved. I get the feeling that her reaction is pretty normal in Singapore, as long as she isn't the only one facing the problem, she accepts it all as normal as there's nothing she can do to change things.

So whilst I don't want to assume anything about Eric's father, but I am saying in the case of my father, it isn't all that unusual for Asian parents of that generation to be totally disinterested in their own children, especially once they become adults. If your children are a result of a loving marriage, then you are far more likely to have a meaningful relationship with your children over the years. But if you got married out of a sense of duty and find yourself trapped in a loveless, vapid relationship with a spouse who feels the same way about you, then whilst you might accept that this is your fate in life, it would be hard for you to have the same kind of motivation to get to know your children. In fact, it isn't uncommon for some Asian parents to guilt trip their children for the sacrifices they have made to bring them up, but they often dance around the issue of the lack of love, affection and joy. The blunt, uncensored version of this narrative would be, "you realize I had to marry someone clearly don't love, someone I can barely tolerate on a good day and the sex was just unspeakably awful, it was the worst experience of my life - I went through all that, just to have children to fulfil this duty of becoming a parent. You are the product of all those sacrifices that I had to go through, all the suffering I had to endure in that process to fulfil my duty." Sex should be a fun, pleasurable physical experience that you partake in with someone you are physically attracted to, but if you are forced to have sex with someone you don't like, whom you might even find repulsive, then how is that any different from what a prostitute does for a living as a prostitute has sex with customers for money, it is purely an economic transaction. It is unpleasant, hard labour performed in exchange for money, done by those who have no other choice, no other way to earn a living. So in the case of couples like my parents, the best case scenario would be for the sex to have been boring, uninteresting and my mother would simply daydream about something else until my father was done. But in the worst case scenario, one or both parties may end up feeling violated and disgusted by the whole experience. If that is the kind of context for the notion of 'sacrifices' that our parents have made for us, then what do they expect in return? And would they expect their gay children to stay in the closet then?

Bur let's take Eric at face value - let's imagine that his father really is clueless and has no real concept of what it means to have a gay son. Well, allow me to use an analogy to share with you how I feel about this situation. So I was in Greece on holiday many years ago, this wasn't in a big city but in the rural north and we were trying to get a bus from one town to our next destination - I checked on the internet and it seems like there was a bus service between the two locations, it just wasn't frequent as this was a small countryside town in Greece. However we waited a long time at the bus stop and the bus just didn't come and we didn't know what to do. Was it running late? Was it ever going to come? Quite by chance, we saw a young man come along and I asked him for help - as this was Greece, finding bus time tables could be tricky as websites are often only in Greek, I was relying on Google translate and these websites may not be updated regularly. Sure you could try to use AI to try to plan your trip but if AI can only use the information that is already out there on the internet, if that info is wrong or out of date, then you are fed incorrect information as I found out. The helpful local pointed out to me that the info I had found on the net was out of date and there wouldn't be another bus that day in that direction, the only way for us to realistically get to our destination would be to get a bus in the wrong direction to the nearest big town for a connecting bus (and so making the journey much longer), or to get a taxi to go directly to our destination. So if Eric's father is still clueless and believes that his son is straight and might just be waiting for the right woman to come along, shouldn't someone play the part of the very helpful Greek local whom I met and offer Eric's father some useful, accurate information about what the current situation actually is? After all, how did you think I felt waiting at that bus stop in Greece for a bus that didn't exist, that was never going to come that day? I felt so very grateful to that helpful Greek local who helped me get to my next destination - after all, he was under no obligation at all to render any help, but he did so anyway. Likewise, if Eric's father is somehow naively waiting for his son to just meet the right woman to get married because he hasn't realized his son is gay, wouldn't it be the kind thing for Eric (or his sister or mother) to offer this clueless old man some useful information the same way this helpful Greek local did with me with the bus?

So like all complex issues, there are two sides to every story and whilst Eric is free to share his experience and opinions on the matter, I worry that Eric's video is going to push some people deeper and deeper into the closet because it signals that it can be okay to stay in the closet. I don't even think that is Eric's intention, given that he is out to everyone on the internet. Hence this is why I am hoping to do my part in balancing out the argument here, by putting one piece on the internet that disagree with Eric's stance. Like I said at the very beginning, just because I don't agree with Eric and I've explained why I feel the way I do, it doesn't mean I am making this any kind of personal attack - it is not persona at all. He has used the internet to express his opinion on the matter and I'm simply doing the same. So guys, what do you think? Am I being way too harsh on Eric? Why do you think his father is so clueless about the whole situation then?  Do you think that the analogy with the bus time table in rural Greece is a fair comparison to this situation with Eric's clueless father? Would you be tempted to tell Eric's father the truth about his gay son? Thank you very much for reading.