Asian emotional damage: how do Chinese parents get it so wrong?

Hi guys, I have been putting off telling my family about my health issues as previously outlined in a recent post and I would have to break it to them sooner or later. Thank you so much to all my readers who joined in the discussion about our health issues and I'm grateful for your support. So I am going to do this experiment, I am going to outline here what some of their responses might be and then I am going to share with you what I think ought to be the right kind of response if a close friend or family member tells you about their problems with their health. It's frustrating of course as I come from a very autistic family and they have shockingly poor social skills - this is exactly the kind of situation that they don't know how to handle and so let me run through seven possible responses that I might encounter and then I'll eventually tell you in a future post if any of these seven responses actually happened. I was thinking about this when I watched comedian Steven He's meme about 'emotional damage' - yeah, so it is not just me then. This meme took off as so many of us recognized what he was talking about. If you have Asian parents, then let's talk and spread the empathy. 

Response 1: Scolding, "why you so stupid?"

This is a very typical Chinese response, a very unhelpful one at that. Blaming me for my health issues doesn't help as it only causes me more stress - sure, in hindsight, I would have taken better care of myself and have made far better choices when it came to my snacking patterns. I have brought this upon myself by not being careful enough and whilst I am willing to punish myself by subjecting myself to a strict diet to lose a lot of weight quickly, scolding me at this stage rather than offering me emotional support isn't the right response. That would be their default response though as an Asian parent, something went wrong so I must scold my child about it and so my child will realize what he did was wrong then change his ways. The fact is, I have already been through all that - I know exactly what is wrong with my body, how to fix it and I have already lost a lot of weight. Scolding me at this stage only causes me stress and annoyance, it doesn't help at all. Furthermore, I could easily turn around and point out to my parents that not only do they suffer from the same ailments, but in their case, it is a lot more serious than mine. So there's an element of pot calling the kettle black but do they realize the irony of them trying to 'scold' me in this case? Probably not, due to their poor social skills - no, rather the way they choose to behave and react is conditioned by their culture and therein lies the problem. I need emotional support right now to deal with this situation, I certainly don't have the time or the patience to deal with any kind of 'scolding' and if they even dare to do that, I'll probably get into a really nasty argument with them and no, I don't want to pick a fight with them. It's not what I want or need right now, so I have been just avoiding even speaking with them now.  

Response 2: Extremely simple solutions, "drink turmeric juice and it'll all be cured at once! So easy!"

This may sound shocking but this is a very common theme with uneducated older folks. My father in particular will read something in an article about the health benefits of something like "turmeric has a lot of anti-inflammatory properties". Whilst the article may be factually correct, my father is too uneducated to understand the article properly, he would read it and come away with a completely incorrect impression and claim, "turmeric can cure everything from cancer to diabetes to dementia. So just take some turmeric and it'll all be cured instantly." I shake my head in disbelief the number of times this has happened as my father is after all a retired Chinese teacher and one of the key elements of any Chinese exam is the 理解问答 whereby the student has to read a short passage and then answer questions based on the passage to test how well the student has understood the passage. It is not the hardest part of the exam, it tests the student's reading comprehension abilities and quite often, the student simply copies the correct answer directly from the passage as part of the answer. Therefore in this case, if my father were to take the same exam and if we used the article on the properties of turmeric as the passage for 理解问答, then he would fail that exam miserably despite the fact that getting students to do this kind of exam was the job he did all his life. Thus you can see why it causes me so much frustration - there is a lot of wishful thinking on his part, hence he completely misinterprets these health articles. Simple, uneducated people often go out of their way to simplify complex problems as they are unable to comprehend difficult situations and therefore they really want to believe that there is a very simple solution to those complex problems. I can put up with my father talking bullshit, but I worry one day he will have a heart attack then drink turmeric or ginger juice instead of going to the hospital. 

Response 3: Flat denial, "tell the doctor that s/he is wrong." 

This actually happened the last time I told my parents I had a degenerative condition with my eyes that is irreversible and that the eye specialist said to me, "I'm sorry but this can happen when we get older, you are getting into your mid-40s and this tends to happen to people who are slightly older in their 50s and 60s, but in your case it has already begun. It is associated with your age and there's nothing we can do about it." So when I told that to my father, he merely reacted by going into flat denial  - so my father claimed that the doctor was wrong because she didn't realize how young I was and then he ignored everything else the doctor had said despite the fact that the eye specialist had come to those conclusions after having done a very careful examination of my eyes, whilst my father wasn't even there, he had no idea what the eye specialist had done to arrive at those conclusions; I call this "ignoring an inconvenient truth", the version of events was too much for him to deal with, so he just sweeps it aside and chooses to ignore it by convincing himself that it can't possibly be true. Learning that your child is losing his sight or developing serious health conditions can be a stressful and difficult situation for any parent, but some people simply panic and go into denial mode. The problem with my father is that when my father enters denial mode, realizes that he feels safe and secure by pretending that the problem doesn't exist and then never ever bother to confront the inconvenient, messy, difficult problem. It is a short term coping strategy by uneducated, stupid people who simply don't have the social skills to deal with such stressful situations but encountering that kind of response is very unhelpful to say the least, when I am the one with the medical conditions.

Response 4: Trying to prescribe a ridiculous cure and spouting utter bullshit.

Oh this is the part that frustrates me a lot. there is the possibility that they do take my situation seriously and recognize the gravity of the situation. What they then try to do is play the part of the doctor and tell me what to do next - the problem is that my parents are completely uneducated. So whatever they try to suggest is completely wrong (I refer you up to point 2 above) and at this point, I want to point out that I never try to play the part of the doctor as I am not a doctor. I always seek professional medical advice and listen to what the doctor has to say. Why the hell would I go to my uneducated parents for any kind of medical advice when I have already obtained the medical advice I need from my doctors? After all, that's what you must always do - listen to your doctor, not your parents when it comes to medical advice, unless your parents are qualified medical professionals. But in my case, no my parents are not doctors, but they are completely uneducated sand unfortunately, they also suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect and they are somehow, completely unaware of just how little knowledge they have. I have unfortunately seen them do this many times with my older sister - we were once talking about Bruxism, a condition that we both suffer from. Without even understanding what Bruxism was, my mother tried to give my sister medical advice that was completely wrong - at that stage I wanted to find out if my mother simply misheard us (she is very old and her hearing is not very good) or if her hearing wasn't the issue here and she was simply talking nonsense as usual. So I said to my mother very slowly and clearly, "do you know what is Bruxism? What can you tell me about Bruxism?" My mother stared at me blankly and so it was clear that she didn't even know which medical condition we were talking about yet somehow that didn't stop her from trying to give medical advice. 

Response 5: So when are you dying? You'll die very soon, right? You die tomorrow or today? 

This is another response that is possible as they get confused by what I am telling them - remember, my parents are totally uneducated and stupid (this isn't just an insult but simply a reality I have to cope with as part of my relationship with them), so they can get confused very easily and struggle to process even the most basic information. Thus jumping to the wrong conclusion is something that they can do all the time and it is something they have done before. So in the case of my eye condition, they went from complete denial to checking if I was going to completely lose my sight within weeks - I had to say, no, I am not going blind yet, I will still have vision in both eyes for a long time to come. So for them, there are only two outcomes: either my eyes are 100% perfect or I completely go blind by the end of today. They are incapable of processing the concept that I am gradually losing my sight and the condition will deteriorate over time, but that could take many years. So even if I do get diabetes for example, I am not going to die from diabetes tomorrow - it's certainly not a death sentence even though most of us would much rather not have to deal with a condition like that! But the problem is simply my parents' inability to understand the shades of grey between "I'm completely healthy" and "I'm dying tomorrow". So this is the part that really confuses me, neither of my parents are healthy - they both have a very long list of complex medical conditions that they live with but they are still alive. If anything, they are living proof that even very unhealthy people can still stay alive, living somewhere in the shades of grey between black and white when it comes to their health conditions - yet somehow, they are unable to mentally process this when it comes to my medical conditions despite the similarity to their own situation. It is exhausting as I feel like I am trying to explain physics to a cat. 

Response 6: "Don't be so drastic, in fact don't do anything at all!"

This is a weird one that's not obvious but I had encountered it before from my mother. If I were to tell her that I am going on a diet, she would respond by telling me not to do it or not to do go on a crash diet as the weight loss would be a shock to the body and I would die. Of course, none of this is based on science at all, rather it's based on a totally ridiculous assumption that I would be so stupid that I would just stop eating altogether and literally starve myself to death. Actually I know how to manage my weight loss with the help of medical professionals but I think she reacts like that because she probably ought to go on a diet herself as she too could do with losing a lot of weight, but she justifies refusing to do so by constructing a narrative that diets are dangerous and could potentially do more harm than good - thus she would cite the example of how some people can end up suffering from eating disorders if they go overboard with their dieting and thus she thinks it is safer to be fat (and cope with all the nasty consequences of obesity) than to open the Pandora's box of dieting. She takes the same attitude with exercising, so she would cite stories like, "back in 1986, when my friend Mrs Tang went jogging in the park, she tripped and fell when she was trying to avoid a dog running her way! Aiyoh, she broke her ankle then she had to go to the hospital and was in so much pain! So exercise is very bad for your health and dangerous, you should avoid all forms of exercise to stay healthy and safe." So it is this kind of stories which make me roll my eyes and wonder how her brain works - that's why I believe she might even tell me that it is better to be fat and get diabetes than to go on a diet to lose weight. After all, if you look at the way she still consumes a lot of sugar and avoids exercise; so that is how she is justifying her own actions in order to avoid taking responsibility for her own health. 

Response 7: Complete indifference 

This is base on a story that my sister told me, some time ago my parents inflicted serious emotional damage on her when my sister won an award given out by the government to civil servants for their outstanding contribution in public service. She mentioned it to them in passing but they didn't react - my sister then dismissed it as "they are just way too stupid to understand what it means, so let it go." Then someone else in my mother's church got nominated for that same award but didn't win - however, as it was explained to my mother as if it was a bloody big deal, my mother then had the audacity to tell my sister about it whilst somehow ignoring the fact that my sister had already won this award but of course my mother had completely forgotten that fact. Yeah, talk about awkward - it was clear that my mother either wasn't listening or had failed to process that information the first time when she had been told that my sister had won that very same award. Thus I could tell my parents that I have some really serious medical condition and could be met with complete indifference if they simply haven't been listening or even if they did, they haven't been able to understand that information. So what do they do when they do not understand? One response is to ignore the parts of the conversation that they do not understand and focus on the parts that they do - hence there is the possibility that it is not because they don't care about my health or the consequences my condition, but it is simply because they have not been able to process the information in the first place. Now you can either place the responsibility on the person delivering the information as a poor communicator, but you also have to acknowledge the fact that my parents are so uneducated and stupid that they often struggle to understand even the most basic pieces of information given to them in a conversation. 

I did talk about this with my sister and she told me that this kind of attitude from older Asian parents is so prevalent in our culture that most of her friends have parents with equally poor parenting skills. So how would I react if a friend were to come to me to talk about their health problems? I would first of all be a good listener and make sure I offer a lot of empathy. I would make sure that I do not try to give any kind of medical advice, but I would make sure that my friend has already obtained all the necessary help from medical professionals. The fact is the vast majority of my friends are probably sensible and intelligent enough to know exactly what to do when given a diagnosis like that and I realize they are just coming to me for emotional support. There's also a very simple way to check if your response is adequate or appropriate - simply ask your friend, "is there anything I can do to help? Please let me know if there's anything else you need from me, I want to be there for you." Thus if there's something in particular that your friend wants or needs, then that's an open invitation for them to ask you for it. It does frustrate me that my parents have such poor social skills that they sometimes try too hard to try to say something to fill and awkward silence but they often end up saying something really stupid instead. An example is when I was showing my mother my garden and I grow some fruit, when my mother noticed that they weren't ripe yet, she warned me, "don't pick the fruits that are not ripe." I just made this face like, did you think I was actually going to do that? Did you think that warning was necessary? Did you think that I didn't know when to harvest the fruits? She later did admit that she knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment she uttered those words but she merely said the first thing that popped into her mind at that time - she was just trying to be helpful and engaging but had misfired. The absence of malice does not change the fact that what she said was dumb and annoying. 

I shall end on that example in the garden about the unripe fruits because I often need to remind myself that my parents say the dumbest, most inappropriate crap because they are stupid, socially inept and autistic, rather than because they are malicious and hateful, that they have an agenda to inflict as much emotional damage as possible on their children. So there you go, what do you think? Do you have Asian parents and how do you get along with them? Is this entirely my fault in allowing myself to be disappointed by having high expectations of my parents' social skills? Or do you feel my pain in having to deal with autistic Asian parents like that? Or is there a compromise - to meet somewhere in the middle in order to still have some kind of relationship with them then? Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.