I often got that exact same attitude from my parents as a child - like the Austrian lady at the hotel, they did what was required of them as parents, as if it was a job. I had a roof over my head, I had three meals a day, I had shoes on my feet etc. But whenever I tried to do something like tell my parents what I had done at school, I would be shooed away as if I was a pest disturbing them with something stupid or trivial. In my defence, this didn't just happen when I brought them some vapid story of something that was boring or simply didn't matter - it was just their standard response whether it was something good or bad. I learnt from a young age not to disturb my parents by telling them anything, given that this was just their standard response to anything I brought to their attention. They just weren't interested at all. When you are a child dealing with this kind of response, you don't question why your parents are like that; you deal with it by making the best of a really terrible situation. It was really only as an adult that I came to realize why my mother behaved like that and I am trying to make sense of what I had gone through as an adult and somehow, that lady in Vienna helped me understand what was going on. My mother never loved my father, she definitely didn't love any of her children and that's because she certainly didn't love herself - she received absolutely no love from her own parents and thus the concept of love is utterly foreign to her. That is a painful thing to admit and it must be wretched going through life like that. However, for people of her generation it was seen as their duty to their family, society and community to get married and have children. It was more important for them to fulfil this duty and they felt they really didn't have the right to seek happiness through marriage, thus there were so many couples from my parents' generation who got married out of a sense of duty and were definitely not in love; if they were lucky, they were able to get along as a couple but many ended up quite miserable in their marriages as they simply didn't love each other. That would describe the kind of relationship that my parents had: on a good day, they were able to put up with each other, but most of the time, my mother really resented having to marry my father and had found many ways to punish him over the years. I find that bewildering as nobody chose to force her to marry my father, but he had to bear the brunt of her anger over the years. Whilst she was a victim of her culture, he was the scapegoat, the punching bag, at the receiving end of her bitterness and anger. But then again, I find it hard to feel sorry for him as he chose to marry my mother for all the wrong reasons, though neither of them would admit that there was anything wrong with the situation, as they had just accept their current situation to be totally normal.
Thus if you compared the way my mother treated my father to the way she treated me, there were a lot of similarities: being a wife and mother to her was a job, a duty she simply had to fulfil - she felt that she had no other option but to go down this path and do what was expected of her whether she wanted to or not. So she did what was expected of her but like the lady in the hotel in Vienna, she really didn't care if she managed to cultivate that relationship into something meaningful. Don't get me wrong, like the lady at the hotel, she did the bear minimum and when I tried to make an effort to engage her beyond that, it was always met with a toxic mix of hostility and coldness. My mother somehow still gets away with it because I have two very Asian, older sisters who have inherited this sense of duty to take care of their parents regardless of the state of their relationship. My mother shows absolutely zero interest in my two sisters as well, but my sisters don't seem to think that is a problem or even an issue. My sisters had simply inherited my parents' sense of duty when it came to family relations, the way it functions in the near complete absence of any real love. In life, there are loads of things we simply have to do all the time and we do them because we have to, not because we enjoy it. For example, I brush my teeth twice a day and I also floss my teeth at least once a day. Do I enjoy the process? No, not really, but I have gotten into the habit of taking good care of my teeth because that's just the sensible thing to do, you don't want your teeth to rot away as you get older. Hence I always brush my teeth out of a sense of duty, it is a joyless task that I perform twice a day whether I like it or not. Let's contrast this to something I do enjoy a lot: I spend a lot of my free time at my gymnastics club training as I still enjoy the sport a lot and I often post videos from my training sessions to Instagram. I do know of someone whom I will refer to as May (not her real name), May is rather fat and she knows she needs to exercise regularly to try to lose weight. The only exercise May knows how to do is to walk, so she goes for long walks in her local park and she admits to me that it is a joyless experience. She is always hoping for it to rain, so she will have an excuse not to have to go for that walk and when she accepts that she has to go, she can't wait for it to be over. "I get hot, uncomfortable, my legs start hurting after 15, 20 minutes and I just want it all to be over as soon as possible. When I get home, I just have that sense of relief that the ordeal is finally over, I can stop and rest now, phew." So May and I have very different attitudes when it comes to exercising, I enjoy it so much as it brings me a lot of joy but for May, she enjoys it as much as her brushing teeth - this is just something she has to do out of duty, whether she likes it or not.
But let's stay with May for a while because I'm afraid things are not looking good for her at work - I know she isn't having a good time at work as she doesn't get along with her younger colleagues and her boss isn't an easy person to get along with. It is no secret that May is very unhappy there, but she keeps telling herself, I can't just quit now, I need to find a new job, a better job before I leave. She has been saying that for years and somehow, she is still working in that same place after all this time because she simply can't find anything better. May is a typical example of an older person who lacks the confidence to switch gears and try something different; she seeks comfort in having a familiar routine, even if it is in a rather toxic work environment. Besides, May really needs the money, so whilst she doesn't like the job, she needs a certain amount of money appearing in her bank account before the end of every month to service her debts and to afford the things in life that bring her joy. Thus work becomes one of those things that May doesn't enjoy at all, but does out of duty - she gets up in the morning, sighs and wishes she doesn't have to go into the office but gets dressed and does it anyway out of duty. By that token, she feels exactly the same way about her job as she does about her exercise routine. Don't get me wrong, I do feel sorry for May and very few of us can claim to be completely happy about our work situation, it is a sliding scale between being completely content and totally miserable - I'm afraid May is a lot closer to the miserable end of that scale. Hence for May, both work and exercise falls into the same category as brushing her teeth - these are things she knows she simply has to do whether she likes it or not. So is there anything that May enjoys a lot? Well, a one such activity is going to the cinema, May loves losing herself in another world when watching a movie. So we can put that into the category of activities that bring May joy whilst work and exercise falls into the category of activities that May doesn't enjoy but she knows she has to do regardless. Thus I believe that we need to get the balance right: if you spend the bulk of your time doing joyless activities you feel you have to do out of duty, then you will be a miserable person. But if your days are filled with activities that bring you so much joy, then you will be a very happy person. What I am describing here isn't rocket science but there are a lot of people out there like May and indeed, my parents, who have made certain choices along the way to end up in a situation whereby their lives are filled mostly (or even only) with activities that they simply have to do out of duty, leaving very little room for anything that truly brings them any joy. That is the unfortunate reality for a lot of people out there who have jobs that are filled with tasks that they neither like nor enjoy.
Some people do jobs they enjoy, others hate their jobs - when I was scrolling on Instagram, I saw this meme of a worker in a factory somewhere in China who was working on a production line and she had a very simple job to put the covers on the various products that came out on the conveyor belt. Sure this was a process that could be automated but given that it was probably a very low value item and labour in that part of China was so cheap, so they still employed a person to put the covers on the products and whilst that woman was very efficient at her job, I noted that she looked dead in her eyes - she had gone into auto-pilot mode and I doubt she was enjoying the process. It was probably just something she had to do to earn some money, put food on the table and support her family. Thus it is unfortunate that this Chinese factory worker has found herself in this unenviable position, but there are many others who experience the very same predicament. So ask yourself this: if you looked at all the activities you had to do in the last 24 hours excluding sleeping, how many of those activities can be classified as things you chose to do for pleasure and how many of those are activities like brushing your teeth - that you simply have to do even if you don't derive any joy from it? You might argue that it is unfair to divide these activities into only two categories: let's use an airline meal to break it down. When you are presented a meal on your flight, you probably can divide the food on the tray into three categories: items that you will take great joy in eating, items that you will eat just because it is there and you don't want to be left hungry but you are not that fond of it and finally those items which you find so gross you wouldn't even touch. Thus the bread roll probably going to fall in the middle category, such is the grey that falls between the white and the black on this scale. It is the kind of thing you would gladly eat when you are very hungry and just for a moment, you might even enjoy it even if it isn't your favourite food. When we're on a flight, we just get what we're given and if you're in economy class, you just accept that the food is not going to be good and you'll have a much nicer meal when you get to your destination. But imagine if you do have the choice to pick the menu for your own meal, you would never just fill your tray with bread rolls and settle for that - no, you will want to fill your plate with what you like to eat to create a more enjoyable dining experience for yourself. The two key components of an adult's life would be your job and your spouse - my mother had picked a spouse she didn't love and a job she didn't like yet she is oblivious to the reasons why she is unhappy with the outcome. I think that's mostly down to a sense of denial, her refusal to take any responsibility for the poor decisions that she has taken. She is probably trying to justify her choices by claiming that things are actually not too bad, that these are the equivalent of the boring bread rolls you get with your airline meal which are not particularly great, but are perfectly normal and acceptable.
Allow me to share with you yet another story from that trip to Vienna to make another point: our flight into Vienna was delayed so by the time we got our luggage and cleared customs, it was late and the only restaurant that was still open in the airport was Burger King - it was very crowded so we thought, let's chance it. Our hotel is in central Vienna, surely it would be possible to find something that is still open in the city centre. We went directly to the Hauptbahnhof, the central railway station where there was still some activity as the last trains haven't departed yet. Normally, you can expect to find a large number of food options in a major railway station like that. However, the only place open there was an Indian restaurant. it was not what I had expected. Quite frankly, I was expecting to find something local or even something Middle Eastern given the large number of migrants from places like Turkey, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries in Austria. But nonetheless, it was the only place available for a late dinner so we had Indian food. There is a saying, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. So when the only place available for dinner is an Indian restaurant, you enjoy Indian food. So what has this story from Vienna got to do with my mother then? My mother ended up having more children than she had originally planned for, my parents were poor working class folks and so money was tight. They wanted to have a son to carry on the family name and then stopped the moment they had a son. However, as the first two children turned out to be daughters, they only stopped after I came along. Whilst this may not have been what my mother had in mind, it was what she ended up with anyway - just like how I ended up having an Indian dinner that night in Vienna. So she was going to bring up this son she decided to have whether she liked it or not, why not try to get to know him better? He might turn up to be a nice person or he may turn out to be a total loser - but if you don't even bother to find out, how would you know then? Here's the thing that disappoints me, if my mother had gotten to know me and then decided that she didn't like me, then fair enough. But given that she had no maternal instinct at all, she treated motherhood like a job, just like that hotel receptionist in Vienna. When one becomes a parent, one has to accept the possibility that your child will grow up to be totally different from yourself and want to do things that you're totally unfamiliar with. Do you simply give up on that child and not bother to get to know that child at all, or do you simply accept that this was all fated and you are going to get to learn about something you never thought you were going to be interested in but it is somehow going to be a part of your life now? I'm afraid my parents chose the former, not the latter. As a child at the receiving end of that, you can imagine my disappointment, but I have had many years to get used to it.
So staying with my inflight meal analogy - this is what my parents have done. Imagine they are on a flight and they are served a meal, the contents of the meal look unfamiliar as it is from a foreign cuisine that they have never ever tried. Now the food may be absolutely delicious, there's nothing to suggest that there is anything wrong with it as the other passengers are quite happily enjoying their meal. But my parents have simply decided to skip the meal altogether and leave the food untouched as they were hoping for some kind of Chinese food they were familiar with and were left disappointed when they were served something else altogether. So if they complain that they are hungry during the flight, whose fault is it, given that they were given a very nice meal but had chosen not to touch the food? I was never going to be the straight, Singaporean son who was going to get married and give them grandchildren - I am gay and actually a rather intelligent guy who has accomplished a lot of very interesting things in my life; I actually have loads of good friends who will be able to tell you that I am a great person to get to know. If they had tasted the food and decided that they didn't like the way it tasted before refusing it eat it, then fair enough but I swear my parents have no idea what the hell I do for a living these days and so that's why I am so frustrated - I feel rejected as a child simply because I didn't turn out the way they had hoped for but more to the point, I didn't want to turn out like my eldest sister. I have an eldest sister who is eight years older than me and given that she was the first child, my parents were a lot stricter with her than they were with me - heck, if they had tried half the things they did to her with me, I would've run away from home as a teenager. But fast forward to today, she is a perfect Asian daughter who has tried to please my parents in every single way, including becoming the daughter set in their image, created to give my parents something very familiar, just like themselves. But oops, there's a fundamental flaw in following this approach. Since my parents were pretty miserable people whose lives were filled with so many activities they did out of duty rather than for joy, my eldest sister followed that recipe and guess what? She ended up as miserable as my parents - when someone makes a dumb mistake, doing exactly what they did would create a very predictable outcome, this isn't rocket science. This reminds me of a funny clip that has gone viral: this fat woman was trying to walk down some stairs which were wet and covered in moss, it was very slippery and sure enough, she has a bad fall. Her husband who has just seen his wife fall over runs over to help her and sure enough, he slips on that very same wet and slippery step where his wife has just fallen and also falls over in exactly the same way, hurting himself as well. So anyone looking on would think, what did you think was going to happen Mr Helpful Husband?
This is when I wonder why my sister did the equivalent of Mr Helpful Husband falling down those wet steps - I really don't think my parents derive any joy from seeing my sister end up like them in this way. In any case, my sister isn't stupid at all, she did well enough in her education to get through university at NUS but the problem seems to stem from her culture - she has this Asian desire to honour and respect her parents, even if that means sacrificing her own happiness or defying all logic. You should follow in your parents' footsteps in that path leads to happiness, but if you are simply going to fall down the stairs the way Mr Helpful Husband by making the exact same mistake, then common sense ought to prevail and that path should be avoided. There was something that happened last year which made me shake my head in disbelief as it was the textbook definition of a self fulfilling prophesy. My eldest sister still lives at home with my parents and one morning, she had an emergency and desperately needed help - so she texted and tried calling all her colleagues at work whilst my parents tried to help. The only two people apart from my parents who responded to my sister's cry for help were my second sister (I have two sisters) and an elderly neighbour, who heard the commotion in my parents' house and decided to check on them. Her colleagues had all seen her texts and chose to ignore her call, they probably thought that someone else would help or that it had nothing to do with work so they were not obliged to respond or help in anyway. Finally, it was the kind neighbour who found the solution and saved the day. So my parents used this incident as an example of how you cannot rely on friends and colleagues, that the only people you can rely on are your family (ignoring the fact that the very person who saved the day was a neighbour, not a member of the family). However, the reasons why this was the outcome was because my parents had been so extremely strict with my eldest sister when she was a child - they didn't allow her to make friends as they viewed friends as a distraction from what was important: my sister was not allowed to go out to birthday parties or go see a movie with her classmates. Instead, she was expected to stay at home and study hard, when my sister had done all her studying, she would read books, since that pattern of behaviour pleased my parents, that's exactly what she became: the quiet person who was so shy and would rather spend her weekends at home reading books than being social with her friends. So whilst she was smart and good at her job, she never really had strong friendships at work with her colleagues and that led to the situation of her cry for help being totally ignored by her colleagues that morning. My parents were quick to blame her colleagues for being unhelpful and callous, but I am not sure whom to blame as I did not end up like my sister. Do I blame her for blindly doing what she was told to please my parents or might I blame my parents for their bad parenting? Or are both parties equally culpable?
So allow me to contrast this with what happened the last time I had a major problem at work - I called a good friend at work and he responded very quickly, told me exactly what I needed to do to solve the problem and in less than 12 hours, I had resolved everything with his help. I wouldn't have even tried to speak to my parents or sisters about this situation as they don't even understand the first thing about the kind of work I do, so even if they took the time to listen to me explain what went so desperately wrong, they wouldn't even begin to know how to help me - so in situations like that, I don't even bother trying to tell them anything. I know I would find a way to solve my problems a lot more quickly by talking to my friends at work whom I can rely on. I am not like my sister because I had rebelled against the kind of Asian upbringing my parents tried to impose on me and I sought the approval of others in my life, rather than my parents and that process forced me to learn how to develop good social relationships with those around me from an early age. To be fair, I don't think my parents had set out to sabotage my sister or myself. But if we go back to the story of Mr Helpful Husband who fell down those steps whilst trying to help his wife, who do we blame for his fall? So we blame the wife who leading him down that path or do we blame him for failing to exercise any judgment when he chose to run after her? So in this case, it is easy to pin the blame solely on the husband: when the wife fell, it was an accident, she simply had not realized just how slippery those steps were and that is the kind of mistake that anyone could make if they are unlucky. But the husband had more information than the wife, he had already seen just how dangerous those slippery steps could be, yet he disregard that information and ran after her without thinking it through. So in the case of my family, I think my eldest sister has a lot more in common with Mr Helpful Husband than the wife who fell down the stairs. I do wonder if my sister has failed to notice that neither of my parents are (have ever been) particularly happy and thus did it ever occur to her that it would be in her best interest not to end up miserable like them? I know some of you may argue that if that was the way she was brought up and the direction she was steered towards, then the outcome would have been inevitable; but I am living proof that you can actually say, "no I'm not making the same mistake as you did - I just saw you fall down the stairs and hurt yourself, so that's why I am not going to do what you have just done." Can we blame Asian culture for the way my sister has effectively chosen to sacrifice her own happiness in order to comply with my parents' wishes or do we blame her for having made some really poor decisions as an adult in failing to put her own interests and happiness first?
Let me ask a different question about the Mr Helpful Husband story: if we asked the wife who fell down the stairs, "did you want your husband to hurt himself in the exact same manner by falling down those stairs just like you?" Her answer would be, "no of course not, he saw the way I fell and I would have expected him to have been more careful to avoid that accident." You would've heard of the saying "misery loves company" but I don't think that is always true. The wife had absolutely nothing to gain if her helpful husband fell down those stairs and hurt himself badly. I'm sure she would have preferred it if he wasn't injured like her as she needed someone to take care of her after that fall! She was probably thinking, "great, now we're both injured, who is going to do all the cooking? Who is going to take care of me now that I can't walk for a few weeks?" Thus it is safe to assume that I don't think my parents ever wanted my sister to end up making the same mistakes as they did, it was never their intention, but due to their poor parenting methods, they just didn't know any better as they were uneducated and quite ignorant - that's how we ended up in this situation. But wait a minute, my sister isn't uneducated nor is she ignorant, yet she allowed herself to go down the wrong path against her better judgment. So whilst I see my sister as a victim of her culture, is she a blameless victim given that it is possible to avoid falling down those stairs that you just saw someone ahead of you fall down? Allow me to now talk about my situation with my parents - when I came out to my parents, they had expected me to have retreated into the closet. put my duty to my family, society and community and get married to a woman I didn't love and have children, despite the fact that I am gay. Now if I had done that, I would have been unhappy, but guess what? Would my parents have been happy having ruined my life that way? No, actually and the reason is not what you might think! Many of you might be conditioned to say, "oh it's because they are reasonable people who want to see you happy at the end of the day." Hell no, that's not the reason at all because they are anything but reasonable and rational. The real reason when I look at the case study of my sister is that my parents will be miserable for the simple reason that they have already messed up their own lives so badly by making way too many terrible choices regarding the duty vs joy decisions that being truly happy is no longer an option for them. If you've married a person you don't love out of duty and picked a career you dislike out of duty and worst of all, you accept that this is your version of normality and you don't deserve any better, then happiness is at best a very abstract, foreign concept - one that they had mistaken as a form of selfish hedonism from Western culture.
So if I had done what I was expected (let's call that option A), I could be totally miserable just like my parents - that's the route that my sister had gone down. But if I had rebelled (option B), at least I could be happy living my best life whilst my parents are disappointed that they didn't get what they want and I realize that there is simply no option C where both my parents and I would be happy or even an option D, where I can do some kind of grand sacrifice and end up miserable but make my parents really happy in the process. My parents were going to be miserable regardless because of the poor choices they had made before I was even born and nothing I could do could change that. I recognize that they are victims of their culture but the way for them to find happiness isn't for me to become as miserable as them, no - the solution might be something more radical like a divorce so they might actually understand what it is like to find someone they truly love or at least have the time and space on loving themselves instead of being trapped in such a toxic relationship out of a sense of duty. Or at the very least, they can at least they admit that they hated teaching and were never any good at teaching anyway, that there had always been something else they wanted to do instead and finally embrace it, even if it will be at best a hobby at their age now. I met this guy at my gym and let's call him Tom (not his real name) - he is 36 years old and he too came from a working class family and had dreamt about working as a vet since he was young but veterinary school was just too expensive, so he settled on a more modest career of a graphic designer since his family couldn't afford to send him to vet school. His parents had put a lot tof pressure on him to get married as well, especially after he turned 30. He had been dating this woman (whom we shall call Tina, not her real name) and she enjoyed Tom's company but never felt ready to settle down. So one day, Tom and Tina just came to a realization that the only reason they were ever talking about marriage and starting a family was simply to please their parents as neither of them ever really felt like that was what they wanted to do and that was a wake up call for the both of them - they decided that Tom would quit his job to go to vet school and they would put any talk of marriage or children on hold until Tom is fully qualified as a vet as that takes priority. Tom's parents were mortified at his decision, "this is such a bad idea - would Tina wait for you? How long would this take? Would she be too old to have babies by then?" It was then that Tom found out that Tina truly understood and cared for him whilst his parents really had no idea what made him happy, nor did they really care. Tom's parents had made him put aside a lot of money to buy a house and start a family, Tom has now spent that pot of money on vet school and his parents are so angry with him they have refused to speak to him for over a year.
I meet people like Tom all the time as I live in the UK, but I doubt my sister would ever cross paths with someone like Tom in Singapore to convince her that it is perfectly okay to prioritize your own happiness. So when I learnt of Tom's story, I told him, "good for you, you're following your dreams and you are doing what will make you happy. You have my full support and your parents are wrong." After all, Tom just wants to become a vet - that's a well paid and very respectable profession; I rolled my eyes as it was not like he was going to enter the adult entertainment industry (and quite frankly, even if he really wants to do that, then so be it - it is his life and he can do whatever he wants.) Yet the price he has to pay for that career change is to put off marriage and children. He even told me that if he doesn't have children as a result of this decision, that wouldn't bother him as much as it bothered his parents. I had to tell him, "pardon me for pointing out the obvious Tom, but whether or not you wish to have children, how many children you want to have and when you plan to have them is entirely your decision to make, it is not your parents' decision, because you will be the one having to bring up those children, not your parents! Sure they have an opinion on the issue but that doesn't mean they get the final say on the matter." I wonder if Tom would easily find others in Singapore who would support his decision or if he would be condemned for letting his parents down by putting his own career goals ahead of their desire to have grandchildren. Look, I actually think that the reaction Tom would get in Singapore is going to be pretty positive, it's going to be more like, "oh wow, I wish I had your guts to do something like that," rather than "how could you let your parents down like that, you're heartless." Society has evolved a long way since I last lived in Singapore so attitudes must have changed, but by how much? But that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? If you look at the way you spend your average week, how much of your time is dedicated to tasks you have to do out of a sense of duty (such as brushing your teeth) and how many activities were there which you did purely for joy and pleasure? What is your attitude towards seeking joy in life - do you view it as your primary objective or do you view it as a hedonistic selfish pursuit? What is the right balance between duty and pleasure for you in your life and how would you feel if you found yourself in Tom's position, whereby the people in your life may not agree with your choices? How do you think Tom ought to resolve his difficult situation with his parents or do you think he should just stop talking to them altogether (which is my situation)? Is there a limit to how much duty we can sacrifice in the pursuit of pleasure and where would you draw the line on this issue and do you think I have been way too harsh on my sister? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.
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