Stigma

I don’t understand how there’s a stigma of having depression or other mental illnesses.

How is it that people bond with each other more when they show their shiny, smiling faces and say only good things about themselves and about their children (if they have any)?

Growing up, I often hear from other Chinese-American families how well the children were doing and my mother used to be frustrated and angry about having nothing to say about her own children to show off to her Chinese co-workers. She used to look at my brother and me in disdain and speak longingly of her co-workers’ children without actually talking to their children, without meeting most of them for even a few minutes. She would talk about her co-workers’ children as if she knew them: “So-and-so won a prize at school”, “So-and-so can speak several Chinese dialects”, “So-and-so gets takes dance and music classes and does both very well”. I used to wish she could speak well, at least once, of my brother and me but she didn’t.

I understand that everyone wants their children to be great; to at least be in excellent health, have a level of satisfaction, and have some goals. I have often pictured myself with children and I often strongly imagine that I may end up worse than my mother; like my mother, I imagine that I would expect my children to be superb and, unfortunately, unlike my mother, I may push them to the point that I’d get carried away. My mother would get upset but not enroll my brother and me in anything. My mother used to talk about not spoiling my brother and me. She always said that life was hard and life was very, very hard work. She didn’t speak of life as anything of enjoyment. Life was just work according to her. She perceived ‘spoiling’ to mean ‘saying kind words’. She has always thought that saying kind words would soften us too much when the world wasn’t soft. I understand her point. My mother has been right at all levels in her thinking but I think it would have been better if there were more balance in the way our household was run.

My mother doesn’t think life is interesting nor beautiful. I think that it’s more effective to educate children about life being hard, yes, but that there was also room for play, for learning how to empathize with others.

Often (not always) in Chinese-American families, communication is focused very little on how anyone feels. Life is perceived as how to be competent and skillful in society enough so that one becomes materially and financially successful and much less about how one feels about this perception. More focus was on how to achieve academically but not socially. I remember when I used to visit many Chinese-American homes with children and teenagers, I used to observe the young people studying, studying, and studying and not looking up once to say hello. I sat on the couch in one home once and there was a teenage boy who was engrossed in a math textbook on the love-seat. He never looked up once. Chinese parents’ words are often limited to anything about studying, how to possibly become prodigies and nothing about how to make friends with someone based on something other than whether a ‘friend’ is of any advantage as a study partner. In middle school, especially, I observed from afar that the Chinese-Americans would sit together with their books and talk academics and extracurriculars and hardly anything about who they really were and life and others around them.

In the Chinese-American family, feelings are of less importance. Recognizing other people, interacting with just about anyone takes very little importance. I criticize the lack of encouragement to create relationships with others than pushing their children to study hard and ace every class.

In the Chinese-American community, admitting to mental illness has a huge stigma. I used to feel fed up inside with hearing only one-dimensional good things about people. Everyone in the community appeared very much to me as if they were puppets made of paper. Any bit of emotion was absent. 
Crying used to be criticized as ‘bad’ behavior in many households. I have always been of the opinion that crying comes when one feels especially touched by something. Being part of the Chinese-American community growing up dampened any emotions I had.

I was born with a lot of feeling. Since I was small, I read and felt for the books I got close to. It was really hard for me to not be encouraged to feel at home and whenever I’m in the Chinese-American community. I noticed at a young age that a lot of the Chinese-American were great at covering up how they really felt. I still remember a story when my mother talked about a time when she was a young teen and a group of teens in her village watched a film where someone was being tortured and the teens laughed. Even my mother who thinks that being emotional is a ‘bad’ thing said that it haunted her when the teens laughed at the torture scene. There wasn’t any bit of not wanting to look, or feeling uncomfortable (I personally feel like I’m the one being tortured when I know that kind of scene is coming up). After she told me that, though, as if she hadn’t mentioned it, she went about not showing much feeling except for frustration and anger.

I couldn’t (and still can’t) understand how revealing a mental illness is something shameful to Chinese people. Mental illnesses are prevalent. The world isn’t great in many ways so it’s understandable that a lot of people have a hard time coping with that; a lot of people are deeply emotionally affected by wrongdoings in this world and may not heal. Instead of showing a facade that everything is ‘perfect’, why not, as a family, talk our feelings out? Why not share with so-called friends how we feel once in a while? Having a mental illness doesn’t mean, to me, that one isn’t successful or isn’t capable of being successful. A mental illness is not something that’s ‘wrong’. Millions of people have a form of mental illness and there are many others who are affected by those who have mental illnesses so why not discuss the issue more openly? Why stigmatize this issue?

I criticize a lot of Chinese-Americans for not being more human in their relationships with their relatives, family members and people whom they call friends. I criticize many of those who perceive a ‘friend’ as someone who can lead them to material and financial success, or to exceptional grades and those parents who encourage such friendships and saying that such friendships are real and the only kind of friendships to have.

A mental illness is an illness. It’s not any indicator of whether one is strong enough to face the world. It’s not any indicator of whether one is strong enough to deal with bad people. A mental illness is a legitimate illness. To have a mental illness doesn’t mean that someone is emotionally out of control.

I remember every Chinese-American I met growing up who used to say that it was no big deal when a parent didn’t give them dinner, or had them kneel on dried beans in a corner of the kitchen floor with their arms raised, or when their parent belittled them, or put a glass of ice cold water on their heads and had them sit still, or punch them; many of them used to laugh about it and it baffled me. They told stories about actions I would never do to anyone else because I am aware of others’ feelings enough to know that such actions would only negatively affect them and they laughed. I only thought about how little I identified with being of Chinese descent; if being of Chinese descent meant to have little regard to how people feel, to do something to children and expect them to never resent me when it’s clear that such actions aren’t meant to create joy then I wanted to distance myself a bit from that community.

A part of why I have always had a desire to go abroad is to experience something different from what I knew growing up. I didn’t want to be in a community that didn’t fit my ideals (Chinese-American and beyond; there were many parts of Boston that I wasn’t fond of so much either. It’s not to say that it’s not a nice city; Boston is a great city but there is a lot that I know in depth about it that put me away from there).

I only speak from my own perspective. I didn’t feel that the Chinese-American community that I got to know well was in touch with being human. They were in touch with money. They were in touch high aims. They were in touch with academic excellence. They were in touch with being the best and only the best. I admit that these are fantastic qualities about the Chinese-American community. The strong work ethic and focus on purpose and goals on behalf of many Chinese-Americans should be emulated by other people but I feel that the Chinese-American community needs to work on improving their emotional intelligence.

I have never felt a connection to the Chinese-Americans I knew growing up. Even now, I don’t talk to anyone I perceive as Chinese-American. All of the interactions I have ever had with them have only gotten me to want something different. I have no bitterness. I have no hatred. I have no bad feelings. I grew drawn to other people growing up. I was simply not pleased with my communication with Chinese-Americans growing up. I have nothing against Chinese culture. I have nothing against Chinese people. I only feel that a lot of Chinese people need to see how they perceive what it is to be human.

They need to take a much, much closer look into how they and others close to them feel.