I Win At Passive Aggression

Image Source

You know you have a Chinese Mama when:
*you could win the gold medal if Being Passive-Aggressive were an Olympic sport

"Once upon a time, there was a little girl who disobeyed her mother.  One day, she died."

"Did you see the news last night?  No?  Well, take a look at these newspaper clippings.  There was a girl your age who was as pretty as you are and got good grades, just like you.  She went out late against her mother's wishes, got drunk and drugged at a party, and ended up getting robbed, shot, raped, mutilated, and eaten.  That's what happens when people don't listen to their moms."



See?  I learned from the very best.  So really, she couldn't be surprised and she couldn't have blamed anybody when this happened years later:

Like many Asian kids, I was raised to think that there are only three occupations in the world: medicine, law, and accounting.  Unfortunately for me, I never got the Chinese Smart Math Gene, so accounting was out fairly early on.  I was never the best at the sciences, so medicine was out in high school, too.  But I was always a word person much more than a numbers person, so I was always strongly, strongly encouraged to go into law.

Because my family likes to pretend to be somewhat new school and liberal sometimes, I was able to kind of filter out the noise and I didn't think about it much until I was finishing up my postgrad program in public relations.  This was my last chance, they thought.  I'd had my fun and got to study something that I was semi-interested in.  It was time for me to go into law, like everyone knew and expected I would.  I had to maintain the momentum of being in school, because once I started making money, they knew I wouldn't be going back.  They started pushing really, really hard, even when all my closest friends were surprised that I'd even consider it at all, since the industry and the profession were clearly so wrong for my personality, interests, and skill set. 

Not knowing what to do but obey, since that's what I'd done all my life, I enrolled in an LSATs course, took the damned test twice, filled in applications for five schools, and spent over $1,000 of my own money, which I could've travelled with or saved up, on applying for something that was becoming increasingly clear to be completely wrong for me. 

It was down to crunch time.  My family was really excited.  They kept asking me where I was going - no doubt so they could start bragging. 

So without really any explanation, I ran away to Spain to for six months.