"Maybe" by Conner G

 

To misquote award-winning gay filmmaker Hao Wu:

"In my Filipino Chinese family, love means worries."

 

And worries my parents did have. Upon other things, I was allowed to go to very few parties as a child. I'm not really allowed to go to parties now, either. I wasn't allowed to paint my nails until I was 16. I'm not allowed to dye my hair or cut it in a way my parents don't approve of. At fancy events, I have to dress in a way that meets their expectations for me. I was expected to earn all A's (to the point where I thought I would be punished if I didn't). Mental health was always a taboo topic in our house. I'm not allowed to go out with friends my parents have never met before.

 

All of this, for better or for worse, has shaped me into the person I am now. I like staying home. I hate the feeling of nail polish on my nails. I've essentially looked the same since 7th grade. I've been fighting my mother to let me wear a suit to senior prom for months. I've had several anxiety attacks over the single B+ that I earned in junior year. I started seeing a therapist two years ago after my mother yelled at me for not cleaning my room. If my friends ask me to hang out, my initial reaction is to tell them no. Not because I don't want to go, but because I don't think my parents will say yes.

 

Yet I know this has all been out of love. Out of fear. Fear that I won't come home from that party, fear that I won't succeed in life if my grades are low, fear that one day I'll just leave for good and never come back. Because it's not that my parents don't love me, that's not what this is about at all. If anything, they love me too much, smothering me until I can't breathe, making me feel like a stunted version of the person I could've been had I been able to have even just a little more freedom. 

 

Perhaps you've heard of the phrase "saving face." It's a very big concept in many cultures all over Asia, including the worldwide diaspora. For those of you who are unaware, the general definition (via Merriam-Webster's online dictionary) is:

 

save face (idiom)

to avoid having other people lose respect for oneself // He tried to save face by working overtime.

 

In Chinese culture, the concept of face is your honor. Your prestige. How you present yourself to others and how that reflects on you and your family. To save face is to make yourself socially acceptable to those around you, even at the cost of who you really are.

 

This is how face works in my family.

 

This is not to say that the concept of face does not exist in other cultures as well (even if it is not actually called face), or that every single Asian American family operates in the same way that mine does because the vastness of the human experience leaves no room for absolutes. But

 

from how I've lived and what I've been told by other people, this occurs to a level that is so uniquely bittersweet to the Asian American experience that there's barely a day that goes by where I don't think about it and its effect on my life.

 

Though they are not entirely aware of it, my family leans heavily into the concept of face. My mother especially always nags me that I can't wear this because people will make fun of me and think I'm lazy or I can't do that because how will it make her feel when people come to her and tell her her child is strange or childish for their age? As if my feelings about it don't matter. As if I'm not allowed to make decisions for myself just because she personally doesn't like it.

 

And yet I still understand. She's trying to protect herself. To protect me. Because the mortal feeling of shame and embarrassment that I have grown a tolerance for is more than she can bear, because she grew up in a household where how you presented yourself on the outside mattered many times more than who you were on the inside.

 

And if that matters to her then fine, I will let her live as she pleases. She is my mother, after all, why would I try and tell her how to live a life she built for herself out of nearly nothing?

 

But I don't want to live like that.

 

I want to be loud, to be frowned upon, to crush the expectations put upon me for who I am, what I look like, who I love. I'm tired of trying to fit in this little box just to please people I don't care about or that I've never met before because what does their opinion matter if I'm happy and healthy and living a life that makes me feel good about myself?

 

All my life I have wanted nothing more than to be enough for my family, for my parents, running around like a headless chicken trying to be the version of myself that they've fabricated for themselves from when my age could be counted on your fingers. But maybe I don't have to be enough for them. Maybe I don't have to be enough for anyone else. Maybe I can just be enough for myself.

 

Maybe that's all I ever truly wanted.