My Asian Dad is Not a Meme

In my inbox I have an email starred from Nov. 17, 2016. The subject line is “Things you need to know because of my surgery,” sent to me by my dad the night before his quadruple bypass open-heart procedure. In the words of Olivia Rodrigo, my dad is currently happy and healthy—he and my mom would happily tell you about completing the famously grueling Half Dome hike at Yosemite National Park together. Still, I keep his email starred and reread it every so often—even though it’s mostly a list of financial and asset info. It’s the first line that always gets me: “Just in case...”

My dad is always the first person I list as my emergency contact. He is the only person whose phone number I remember by heart. Though he hopefully has many healthy years ahead, I can’t help but sometimes wonder: what will I do once he’s gone? 

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When people ask me to describe my dad, I always say he is the opposite of a stereotypical Asian dad. Truthfully, I don’t like describing him this way. Defining him as the opposite of a stereotype is still defining him by the stereotype. I cannot discount how the popularity of this stereotype is built on shared experiences for other Asian Americans, but I hate how it has become racialized in a way that erases the humanity and individualities of Asian fathers everywhere.

The stern Asian dad who occupies the popular imagination never says he’s proud of his children or that he loves them. He’s robotic and only cares about his children’s report cards when they are younger, their college degree and job title when they are grown. I become enraged when I see other young Asian Americans casually invoke the Asian father stereotype memes.

And as someone who has navigated social circles of both Asian Americans and non-Asians, I notice it’s always other Asians who underestimate my dad the most.

It’s other Asians who are shocked that my dad is fluent enough in English to write geotechnical drilling reports. It’s other Asians who are amazed that my dad can understand and enjoy Ramy, the hit Hulu comedy about a young Egyptian American. It’s other Asians who assume he is unpleasant and brutish from the moment they meet him. They would not be able to guess that I have a political junkie Asian dad who always encouraged me to be an assertive and opinionated critical thinker, who is one of the few people in my life who will take 20 minutes to read an article in The Atlantic and dive into a critical discussion about it afterwards. They wouldn’t know that my dad is one of the most accepting, supportive, and sensitive people in my life. 

I remember being 20 and alone in Tokyo for a two-month internship. I was having the time of my life living in my favorite city. Every night when I returned to my apartment, I would send a check-in text to my dad, who’d set an alarm clock to see my messages in real time. Despite the time difference, he wanted to ensure that I was okay, to be there if I needed to talk.

I remember being 26 and miserable at a toxic job. As soon as I drove out of the parking garage every night, I would call my dad to complain. This happened for months on end, and as the job situation grew increasingly unbearable, my dad also listened to me share my suicidal ideation (trigger warning: and how I started to have daydreams of throwing myself off my apartment’s fifth-floor balcony). Looking back, I honestly can’t believe I put my dad through all that. He never yelled, or screamed, but remained steadfast in urging me to seek professional help.

Eventually, I parted ways with that job, started therapy, and got prescribed medication. Through it all, my dad continued to be a listening ear. Even when I’ve apologized to him through tears for feeling suicidal or weak, he always said that he just wished I’d told him sooner about how I was feeling “because I’m his daughter,” and he wanted to make sure I was okay. While he was initially hesitant to accept that I needed to be medicated long term, he overcame his initial stigma for treating mental illness with medication, especially after he heard me describe that while medication “is not a miracle pill, it clears the haze enough for me to remember and act upon healthier coping mechanisms.”

Now, he has swung to the other side of the pendulum regarding mental health, and reminds me to check in with myself and re-evaluate to see if my therapist is still the right fit. Pre-pandemic, he encouraged me to look into options to see if I could get support for an in-person therapist, as opposed to talk therapy. For an immigrant Asian dad, that is pretty damn progressive. 

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Sometimes I think we Asian Americans can be far too condescending towards our Asian parents. We are too quick to blame every damaging or irritating quality on their “backward Asian ways,” or think of them as simpleton immigrants, stubborn and overly grateful to white Americans for being allowed to take up any sort of space. We are so often dismissive of our Asian parents, insisting they wouldn’t fully understand us because they’re just “conservative Asian parents” who prioritize duty over joy.

I used to believe that my conservative Asian parents, especially my dad, were incapable of understanding my romantic life. For years, I simply told them nothing and tried to present myself as completely asexual to my parents. This meant tailoring stories for my parents’ consumption, like describing the hiking date at Malibu as a hiking hang out with a “friend” I had met from “work.”

This all changed when I had my first breakup and received the devastating text message while out at dim sum with my parents. My dad immediately noticed a change in me and asked what was wrong. I assured him it was nothing but couldn’t eat another bite as heartbreak gripped my body. My dad noticed that I couldn’t eat the Hong Kong egg tarts at all (my favorite) and kept asking me what was wrong. For the first time, I was too distraught to cobble together a story for him.

It was then that I finally admitted that I had been seeing someone I had really liked, and he didn’t want to be in a “real” relationship—a tale as old as time. I was worried that my dad was going to think less of me somehow, but he simply said he was sorry that happened, with no judgment.

This breakup ended up being the catalyst to my transparency with my parents, particularly my dad, about dating and relationships. Looking back, I should’ve known that the man who gave me an “I understand you are an adult who has human urges, but please be careful and be picky” sex talk in my early twenties, was someone who I can safely confide in.

When I first opened up to him about dating, my dad was baffled by the world of dating apps, and for a long time, in his protective capacity, worried only “desperate” people used them, or that they were full of murderers (as if most of these fish in the sea could even commit to a brunch date, let alone to hatching a plan for homicide). But once he came around to how this is just how romance works in today’s world, I would occasionally text him Tinder screenshots of particularly stupid conversations to share a laugh over how dumb and depraved men could be these days.

A while back, I was dealing with a dude who was on what I call his “fuckboy maximum” shit. I told my dad on the phone how Mr. Fuckboy only responded to me two days after my last text, when I unmatched him. My dad, who I occasionally think of as an aged Indonesian fuckboy, replied without missing a beat, “He’s an idiot. If I were him, I would have waited 24 hours to pretend I didn’t notice being unmatched.”

So much for not being able to keep up with the ways of modern romance, this Asian Dad not only has it all figured out but would make a masterful player in the field.

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As my dad and I get older, we continue to learn more about each other, and my respect for him continues to deepen. Amazingly, he keeps surprising me with new aspects of himself that I had no clue about, like when I learned at age 29 that he grew up Catholic. I know there are so many more things I still don’t know about him, and now I keep striving to learn more for as long as I can. My Asian dad will always be one of the most important people in my life, regardless of what happens in the future. And while I understand that I’m incredibly lucky to be able to get to where I’m at with my father, I encourage other people who write off their dads as a “typical, strict Asian dad” to ask questions and get to know them better. Warning: the answers may be more complex and nuanced than expected.