Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: culture

Figuring out I was neurodivergent

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I’m in my mid-fifties and just coming to grips with me being neurodivergent. I spent most of my early days thinking there was something seriously wrong with me, which I touched on in past posts. In the last one, I talked about how my mother’s very old-fashioned Taiwanese expectations of gender really messed me up. Add to that the fact that I was a weirdo to begin with, and my childhood was miserable.

I remember when I was six or seven, I was on the playground at school during recess. I looked around me and realized that I felt like an alien amongst the humans. Everyone else seemed like they knew what they were supposed to do whereas I was floundering at everything. My parents had no interest in American culture, which meant I was clueless about it as well.

I was also whip smart, which was not a good thing when I was trying to fit in.
I may have been book smart, but I was very people ignorant. I did not know what to say to the other kids, and I was miserable all the time. I had two teachers, one in the fifth grade and one in the sixth, who were really kind to me. I didn’t like the attention at the time, but in retrospect, they were examples of good men.

I had no friends as a kid. I didn’t know how to talk to American kids, and they did not know what to do with me. I got teased for being Asian, and when I brought food to school, I got made fun of for that as well. I was one of maybe three Asian kids in my grade, and that did nothing to help my low self-esteem.

I was good at school, and I was beaten down emotionally by the time I was in school, so most teachers just ignored me. Except the two I mentioned above. I was also bored because I learned very quickly, and back in those days, no one paid much attention to the smart kids.

I did have a reading class in the first grade that was just me and another kid–a boy who was also very smart. We read books that were way above our grade level, and that was my one refuge during the day. I was a voracious reader and tackled War and Peace in the sixth grade because it was the biggest book I knew of. I made it halfway through before realizing I had no clue what was going on because everyone had so many nicknames, so I gave up.

I also read The Scarlet Letter around that time, and even though I did not know much about sex and gender, I was appalled that Hester Prynne took the brunt of the blame. That never made sense to me, and it makes even less sense to me now.

I wasted so much time as a child and teen filing off all my rough edges, watching the others around me, and trying desperately to fit in. I didn’t realize that it was a fool’s errand because no matter how blunted I made myself, it was not going to matter in the long run. I could not twist myself into a tight enough pretzel to fool the normies.


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Dementia is terrible

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My father has dementia. He has had it for over twenty years ago. He’s almost 85, which means it was early-onset dementia. It also meant that we weren’t sure what it was for quite some time. It was obvious he was failing, but we did not know why. He retired around that time, and my mother explained that it was political. In Taiwan. the KMT are like the Republicans and the DPP are like the Democrats. That’s a gross simplification, but it’ll work for my purposes in this post.

My dad worked for a company that has the KMT in all the top positions. This is not unusual. When they were in charge, they had all the top positions. Despite all that, my father rose in the ranks because he was damn good at what he did. In a country that ran on corruption and bribes, he was upright and righteous. In a country where you were almost forced to drink to excess (it was in the culture), my father earned the nickname of ‘one glass Hong’ because he never accepted more than one glass of alcohol (and didn’t drink it).

When he was vice president, I visited him at his company once. The president was KMT, corrupt, and a thorough jerk to boot. Sexually harrassed the women who worked at his company with impunity and made everyone drink with him–whether they wanted to or not. When I met him, it was at a dinner. He was chugging down the vodka by the bottle, and his acolytes/employees/hapless vicitims were meeting him glass for glass. My dad was nursing his one glass (and never bringing it to his lips). I was drinking nothing. I awas accepting nothing. I don’t drink. At all. Well, back then, I probably had two G&Ts with K every six months or so.  I gave up drinking completely–that makes it sound way more serious than it was–when I was forty.

I went out with some friends and had some frothy drink. It had ice cream and chocolate in it (before I gave up gluten and dairy), and my thought was, “This is delicious–or it would be without the alcohol.” That’s when I realized that I was a grown-ass woman. I did not have to drink alcohol if I did not want to. And I have not since. And I don’t miss it at all. Oh, and I’m allergic to alcohol as all East Asians are. We’re missing the gene that processes the booze. That’s why we turn red in the face.

Back to my father’s ex-boss. He kept pusing vodka on me, and he seemed nonplused when I said no. And kept saying no. I was not going to let him push me into drinking. I was not about that at all. It’s such a part of Taiwan’s business culture, though. Drinking to great excess, I mean.


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Counter the culture

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I think often about culture because I’m so often outside it. I am in a culture that is a guess culture (Midwestern) and one that is even more a guess culture (Taiwanese). When my parents were here, my father would ask me I wanted to eat whatever they were eatting–like special delicacies such as mooncakes. Which I love, but cannot eat. I would explain this to him, but he did not seem to grasp it. He would sit there with a stony look on his face, then say, “You don’t want it?”

It was rude for me not to eat it in Taiwanese culture, but I can’t eat it. I can’t eat gluten or dairy. I was reading a thread on Ask A Manager about food and someone said that if they were offered something they couldn’t eat (because of allergies), they would eat it to be polite and just suffer later.

The askers in the crowd just could not understand it. In this weekend’s thread (or maybe the weekday open thread or even an old thread), someone said that they were glad when people said no and meant it. That kicked off this whole thread about ask vs. guess culture. And it reminds me of an incident in my Taiji class. One of my classmates was a pastor’s wife from, I want to say Alabama. She was talking about a church social she planned that everyone was enthused about, but only one person showed up. She voiced her frustrations, and my teacher who is also very ask culture commiserated with her. I interjected and asked my classmate what her parishioners actually said when she told them about the get-together. She said, “One said yes, a few said they had to check their calendars, others said they had to talk to their husbands. But they all said it sounded interesting!”

I told her that a straight-out yes is a yes, but anything else is a no. “I’ll ask my husband” is a no. “I’ll check my calendar” is a no. “That sounds great!” without a yes is a no. That’s the culture where I live, and while it can be frustrating to outsiders, it’s not any more mysterious than ask culture. Once you realize this simple truth, it can make life much easier.

I am a weird hybrid of the two. I can handle the ‘anything but a yes is a no’, but I really don’t like the ‘you have to demur three times until you can say yes’ bit.  In part because I can eat what I can eat, and I can’t eat what I can’t eat. I’m not going to make myself sick because of culture.

That’s where my anarchy streak kicks in. I don’t hate all rules. I don’t even hate most rules. But I don’t like rules that harm, and these kinds of rules do harm people–usually thoes with the least social capital. I do get that there is lubricant to be had for eating together, but the problem is that anything that is a social norms can go from being a welcoming thing to a gate-keeping thing.

That’s the problem with rituals and traditions. It’s easy to go from what they are supposed to mean to a rigid expectation of how things have to be. Then you lose the meaning of the tradition itself. There were two questions on the weekend thread at AAM about wedding invites. The first was about an evite from someone she didn’t really know. She wanted to know if she could just ignore it. She said it felt like a cash grab (later in the thread). One person agreed with her (that it felt like a cash grab), but other people admonished her for being too cynical. They said she should just say no and move on with her life.


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Cause and effect in the wrong order

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After I got out of the hospital, I had to deal with my parents. This was by far the hardest part of the whole ordeal. My mother sent my brother and me this long email about Taiwanese culture and respecting your elders. She said that my brother and I needed to love and respect my father more. She actually wrote that down without wincing at how gross that was.

I’m not saynig that Taiwanese culture is not heavy on elder respect. It is. It’s a patrilineal society–at least it was back in the day. Countries change in time, much as people do. Taiwan was the first Asian countrty to make same-sex marriage legal, and though there have been legislation proposed to change this, it’s still currently legal–more or less. Since that’s not the purpose of this post, I’ll leave it at that for now.They also have a female president and have had her since 2016. In other words, they are more progressive in some ways than we are.

In addition, even though my mother likes to pull out Taiwanese culture like a trump card when she wants to get her way, she refuses to recognize that my brother and I were born and raised in Minnesota. Which, in case you can’t tell, is in the United States of America. We don’t give a shit about elders here! That’s not true, but I’m tempted to say that to my mother when she trots out Taiwanese culture.

The other thing is that not everything about every culture is good. Obviously. There are bad things in every culture so just saying something is part of a culture does not automatically make it worth venerating. I am not against showing respect towards elders, but…and I say this as an elder, it shouldn’t be mindless respect. I’m not saying you have to be disrespectful until they prove their worth, but so many things are covered under the guise of ‘respect your elders’. It’s adjacent to ‘but faaaaaaaaamily’.

 

My point, though, is that you can’t make someone respect or love someone else. It’s galling that my mother would even think that she had the right to order my brother and me to do that. It’s not surprising, mind, as she’s spent her whole adult life catering to my father and slavering over him. She has made being subjugated to him her entire identity and it’s only gotten worse with time. But it’s frustrating that as a therapist, she cannot understand that you can make anyone feel positive about someone.

She seems to think she can order my brother and me to have different feelings for our father. It smacks my gob that she can’t see that my father is getting the amount of love and respect he deserves. They both think that as parents, they should automatically get both because they are our parents. It’s circular reasoning at best. And, yes, this is probably a more Western way of thinking about things, but I don’t give fealty for no reason.

If my parents were not my parents, I would feel more pity for my mother. She has spent 55 years scraping and bowing to my father, who has only taken it as his just due and gets mad when her attention is off him for even a second. She has bent herself into an unrecognizable pretzel, and she doesn’t even realize it.

Making excuses for him is like second nature to her by now. There is an unspoken code in the family that he is not to be upset in any shape, matter, or size. My mother treats him like a baby/toddler who cannot self-soothe. To be clear, he has a low frustration tolerance (so do I, actually), but I do wonder if back in the first years of their marriage, what would have happened if my mother had put her foot down to my father’s nonsense.


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