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The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

nytimes.com

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Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#181

Post by tinktank »

kamaal wrote: post #101
spyckie2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Asian parents says, don't get a literature degree, become a doctor, they have a good reason to say it. It's not necessarily this bad in terms of standard of living (the above description would be subsistence levels, maybe less than 200$ a year), but the median household income in China is about $12-15k US a year compared to $56k in the US. And it's not that in China everything is cheaper so 12-15k goes a long wa…

The term you are looking for is called Abundance . A few days back I was discussing this with my friend who immigrated to the US and settled there. I'm an Indian. We were discussing how his wife and kids, who are Americans just do not understand his perspective of things from a living standards stand point. The thing is sometimes its impossible to erase the effect poverty has on you. When you go through tough times,…

Well said and very true.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#182

Post by seanmcdirmid »

danielsmay1 wrote: post #162
ptaipale wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The joke's been around for a long time, I was not very old when first time hearing sarcastically "eat your plate empty, because if you don't, some kid in Biafra will starve".

You are the only person besides my mother (born in the late 1950s in the Southern USA) that I've seen/heard mention Biafra. Her knowledge of Biafra was due to her being told a similar thing as a child, "eat everything on your plate because there are Biafrans starving."

Biafra only existed between 1967 and 1970, so it wasn’t from her childhood in the 50s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafra

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#183

Post by HillaryBriss »

cbhl wrote: post #33

One of the least useful pieces of start-up advice I received in college was, "if your startup fails, don't worry, you can go live in your parents' basement." Well, fine, if your parents owned their home, the worst you have to deal with is the shame of failing. If I did a start-up and it failed, it's probable that my parents wouldn't even have a basement for me to return home to.

This also applies to taking a low or non paying internship at a big company: free labor, subsidized by the dream-seeking intern's parents.

In LA, very often the dream is a job in the entertainment industry.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#184

Post by tinktank »

sturgill wrote: post #136
kamaal wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term you are looking for is called Abundance . A few days back I was discussing this with my friend who immigrated to the US and settled there. I'm an Indian. We were discussing how his wife and kids, who are Americans just do not understand his perspective of things from a living standards stand point. The thing is sometimes its impossible to erase the effect poverty has on you. When you go through tough times,…

Both my wife and I grew up quite poor (for US standards). We didn’t quite fit in at university and had a hard time relating to our peers who grew up with money (my wife’s parents encouraged her to not go to school but just stay and marry local). We’re doing well for ourselves, but still don’t really fit in among our peers. We’ve coined a phrase for it: “your poverty is showing.” It doesn’t matter how much I make: at…

> It doesn’t matter how much I make: at the core I’m still a poor kid in a rich world.

Does this tend to bring destructive tendencies? I earn well over median income and have investments etc. I still live cheap enough to be self-sufficient on less than $12K a year (inclusive of rent). I am so scared of what's going to happen when it all ends that it keeps me up at night.

Edited -> $12K/year not month!

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#185

Post by m_fayer »

nabla9 wrote: post #118
spyckie2 wrote: post #47

The harsh reality of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese is that while many of us went to the top universities and grew up with a modern, 1st world mindset, we can't escape the fact that our financial and family background is from the developing world, and we live in both worlds at once - our mindset is modern, but the issues and problems of the developing world are still very much things we have to deal with. I first enco…

What you both describe is large cultural division between survival values and self-expression values between two generations. In quickly developing countries some people already live modern life but their parents come from very traditional valued society. What in the west is cultural division between grandparents and grandchildren can be division between parents and children. Political scientist Ronald Inglehart (kno…

"Survival values" is just right, and key. I've lived this divide (1st gen Russian), and as a teenager could not comprehend why my parents constantly pressured me to study physics and maths, which did not come naturally to me, and why they did not see any value in my achievements in the humanities, or even recognise them as work at all.

As a young adult I understood that from their perspective, physics and maths was the most sure-fire way for Soviet Jews to gain a modicum of stability and security in a country whose industrial and military sectors were prestigious and financed above all else. But I still resented them for not truly internalising that they were raising their child in a different culture and a different economic reality.

As an adult, I eventually came to see how a life that started in Stalinist Russia had robbed my parents of the cultural and emotional intelligence that would have allowed them to empathise with a child growing up in such radically different circumstances. And how instead of those intelligences, there was an unsleeping instinct for survival and a permanent anxiety, knots that are just starting to show signs of loosening in what are probably the last years of their lives.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#186

Post by ConfusedDog »

I am experiencing similar problems with my parents in China right now... it is super stressful. Being a nerd throughout my life, I disdained people using each other for achieving anything - I didn't think it's real friendship. In a way, I was right, and in other ways, I couldn't be more wrong... I was just too stubborn and selfish to accept their social rules. Now I don't even know how to help my parents to do simple things like getting them a good doctor...

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#187

Post by msie »

spyckie2 wrote: post #47

The harsh reality of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese is that while many of us went to the top universities and grew up with a modern, 1st world mindset, we can't escape the fact that our financial and family background is from the developing world, and we live in both worlds at once - our mindset is modern, but the issues and problems of the developing world are still very much things we have to deal with. I first enco…

I remember 2 houses distinctly - a rich Asian immigrant's house, and a rich Caucasian's house. The Caucasian's was filled with relics of community - pictures of their involvement on sports teams, pictures of grandparents leading town hall meetings - it felt like they were rooted into the city and were an integral part of the community there. In contrast, the Asian immigrant's house was filled with relics of achievement - the doctorate was posted on the wall, lots of trophies and awards for their kids. The imagery offers a lot of insight into family and community development lagging behind income development in immigrant families.

Nicely written but I somewhat cringe because it's just an anecdote feeding a narrative about immigrants and we always have to be aware of it.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#188

Post by thatcat »

giggles_giggles wrote: post #166
bodas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with poverty every day, they have poor friends and poor family members, so the idea that poor people are unintelligent or not hard-working, never occurs. When countries become rich (it's not just America), people lose their connection with poverty and start to blam…

Is saying that many of the homeless in America are mentally ill blaming them? It's our health system that can't handle them, for a plethora of reasons. It's not the homeless peoples' fault for having schizophrenia or PTSD or whatever mental illness, which many of them do.

Poverty isn't caused by mental illness though it may be correlated with it. How many were mentally ill before becoming homeless? At what rate would wealthy people develop mental illness if you force them into the same situation?

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#189

Post by HillaryBriss »

spyckie2 wrote: post #47

The harsh reality of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese is that while many of us went to the top universities and grew up with a modern, 1st world mindset, we can't escape the fact that our financial and family background is from the developing world, and we live in both worlds at once - our mindset is modern, but the issues and problems of the developing world are still very much things we have to deal with. I first enco…

> The harsh reality of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese is that while many of us went to the top universities and grew up with a modern, 1st world mindset, we can't escape the fact that our financial and family background is from the developing world

The harsh reality of a large number of people (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation and beyond) living in Los Angeles is that they did not go to any universities, don't have any family or friends in Bel Air / Santa Monica, eke out an existence in a series of apartments (sometimes with their extended family, or in a car, or in some sort of civic transition shelter or on the street), and have a close relative with a chronic drug abuse problem or a chronic disease.

Re: The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter

#190

Post by growlist »

spyckie2 wrote: post #95
sametmax wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your testimony reminds me of a kid I met in Mali. The guy was our guide, and he spoke 6 languages, including 4 local dialects, french and english. He had a cellphone and knew how to drive a 4x4. He drove us to the desert, in a place at the north of Bamako known as the Dogon's country. There, he asked us if we were ok to take a detour by his parents village, and we agreed. His parents were living with no electricity,…

When Asian parents says, don't get a literature degree, become a doctor, they have a good reason to say it. It's not necessarily this bad in terms of standard of living (the above description would be subsistence levels, maybe less than 200$ a year), but the median household income in China is about $12-15k US a year compared to $56k in the US. And it's not that in China everything is cheaper so 12-15k goes a long wa…

> Even with a 10% GDP increase per year, it would take China another 15 years to get to US level standard of living

..as of now. Who's to say the US' standard of living won't fall in years to come? Certainly wealth inequality seems to be growing, if anything.

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