爸爸妈妈，谢谢多年以来无私的支持和照顾。
I always mention to people here how strong you were. I joke that today’s immigrants come to buy houses — you came with borrowed money. The hardships of your generation are beyond what ours can understand. You are right about that.
But precisely because we cannot understand, we cannot appreciate everything you have done. And there are things you cannot understand either.
You do not understand what it feels like to grow up between two cultures.
The Falls Nobody Noticed
Going from top of the class to the very bottom. The grief and the blow to self-worth — did you ask me how I felt? Your answer might have been: “Who cares what they think? This is nothing compared to when I ate eggs and chicken every day back then.”
Losing touch with all my middle school friends because of the constant moves. When you ask “how’s so-and-so doing these days?” — I am too embarrassed to say we are strangers now. He does not care about me. I do not care about him. We each went our own way.
A baby cries over small things because that is the hardest moment of their entire life. Adults know better than to judge the baby’s reaction by their own standard. But when the child starts growing, they forget this, and begin to resent the crying. “How can you be so immature!”
The Real Question
你们真正理解过我吗？
Did you ever truly understand me? Did your eyes see the real person, or the ideal one? What was my happiest moment as a child? My saddest? Did it matter?
一个小孩，找不到谈心的对象会忘记这个能力。 A child who finds no one to confide in forgets the ability to confide. The person who originally wanted to run and share joy and sorrow ends up talking to corners, heart gradually growing cold. “Nobody cares anyway.”
I understand this about myself very well. My partner sees it as a flaw too. Why did my own parents only notice now?
What Grew in the Silence
I do not know how to be a warm person. I cannot express the gratitude in my heart. You seem to have everything you need. The only thing left is our future. But please understand — everyone walks their own path. When I hit obstacles, I may ask for your advice — your experience is vast. But I may also want to try on my own.
另一个人的生活不能随便插手的。 You cannot casually interfere in another person’s life. To do so is not treating them as family — it is treating them as a puppet controllable within your shadow.
冷漠请原谅。I did not realize my coldness caused you so much pain.
What the Garden Sees
This letter is identity-through-displacement written in first person — the bicultural child who lost their position, their friends, their language of emotional expression, and built a wall of competence around the wound.
The parents’ response — “this is nothing compared to what I went through” — is the second commandment (eat bitterness) deployed against a child’s legitimate grief. The pain is real, but the cultural framework has no category for it. In a system where suffering is competitive, your suffering loses every comparison to the previous generation’s — and so you learn to stop mentioning it.
running-on-empty describes the mechanism: the parents loved their child but could not provide emotional attunement. Not because they were cruel but because their own attunement was never developed — you cannot give what you never received. The love was real. The harm was real. They were the same thing.
Maté names the result: a child who learns to not feel dependent in a family where dependency is not embraced. The phantom child dynamic is the structural version: the parents triangulate the child against an idealized future self, producing a compliant False Self that executes family directives while the real person retreats into exile. The tuning out begins. The emotional coldness is not a character flaw but a locally-optimal strategy — the child protected themselves by withdrawing from a channel that never carried the signal they needed.
The boundaries insight: “another person’s life cannot be casually interfered with” — this is the assertive statement of a person who has finally found the words for what they needed all along. The courage-to-be-disliked is contained in the request itself: please let me walk my own path, even if that path disappoints you.
And the apology at the end — 冷漠请原谅 — is the hardest sentence. It acknowledges the cost of the defense. The wall that protected you also hurt the people who built you. There is no version of this story where nobody gets hurt.
References:
- Personal correspondence