What Exactly Do We Owe Our Parents?

My mother did not believe in mental health until the pandemic.

I understand why. To be an Asian immigrant requires absolute faith that all problems can be overcome through sheer force of will. Pragmatic, stubborn, and armed with sassy Chinese idioms, she used to send me to elementary school with a fever—long before the pandemic made this a social crime—because “you should just focus through it.”

So it shook me to my core to see her crumble during quarantine. While I rode out my sophomore year of college in Zoom’s glaring blue light, she retreated to the darkness of her bedroom, drapes drawn and escapist period dramas blaring. It wasn’t simply being trapped in her home that eroded her. It was being trapped with her parents, who moved in with our family in 2018. My mother’s mood dictated the weather in the house: at baseline we existed in an icy drizzle, until the crackling tension between them exploded into a thunderous fight that shook the window panes in their frames. Afterward, it would pour, and the sound of her sorrow would pull me into one of my earliest memories.

In it, I am 6 years old and afraid. My mother is crying fat, heaving sobs that rip out of her chest while I sit cross-legged in a dining table chair.

“Will you promise to take care of Mommy when she’s old?” Between hiccups, she folds my clammy hand in both of hers, and it is swallowed up by her calloused fingers.

Hunched over, she looks smaller than I have ever seen her. I want to cry because she is crying, but I know instinctively that I should not. The only thing I can think to do is fetch a glass of water and two tissues and rub her back earnestly—circle circle pat pat, the rhythm she keeps when I’m upset—and wonder, in vague panic, when she will stop crying. How long do I need to keep it together until our roles are switched back?

Because of course they would. She would snap upright soon, and after she smoothed out the wrinkles in her face and her shirt, I could bury my head in her neck and cry myself.

It didn’t dawn on me until years later, when my grandparents moved in, that one day being someone’s daughter might mean an irrevocable role reversal between cryer and comforter, or caregiver and care receiver.

I have no memory of what prompted her sobbing, only that I desperately wanted her to stop. Her fear was so far beyond my childlike understanding. What did I know about aging or caregiving? I had no concept of sacrifice or stewardship, of the daily wear and tear on the fabric of a family that accumulates over seasons and generations. It didn’t dawn on me until years later, when my grandparents moved in, that one day being someone’s daughter might mean an irrevocable role reversal between cryer and comforter, or caregiver and care receiver.

My mom's domain

My mom is the best cook in the entire world.

Sometimes I sit in the kitchen before dinner just to watch her chop chives and chilies at breakneck pace, and it frightens me that I won’t be able to provide my children with the same tastes she provided me. What if they expect mac ‘n’ cheese and frozen pizza for dinner instead of steamed rice and stir-fry?

When this particular anxiety bubbles up, I ask her how she learned such skills. She always says, in a frilly red apron she bought on sale from Marshall’s, that she used to be an absolute disaster in the kitchen. “I just learned when I was your age, when I had to,” she yells over the drone of the range hood fan.

As it turns out, “when I was your age,” she was a fresh-faced nurse at the Fuzhou city hospital. She worked there for two years before she met my father in the operating room at 23, when he was the hospital’s youngest and most promising cardiothoracic surgeon. “He was always so hardworking and clever,” she reminds me, beaming. “He was always going to make it to America.”

Every day, she confronted Chinese-English dictionaries and highway driving and racist parents at the ballet studio in the ceaseless toil of parenting.

But moving to the United States meant making sacrifices, and their two tiny daughters would require constant love and attention. So my mother surrendered her career as a respected, professional caregiver for the thankless job of raising me and my sister in a foreign country, on pinched pennies and sofa cushion dimes. Instead of becoming chief nursing officer, she became the greatest homework helper and most meticulous piano teacher, our fiercest protector and most devoted sports fan. Every day, she confronted Chinese-English dictionaries and highway driving and racist parents at the ballet studio in the ceaseless toil of parenting.

And she became the world’s best cook. When Dad finally graduated U.S. medical residency and we could afford meat every week, I was spoiled with braised pork belly and spicy thin-sliced beef and pan-fried dumplings that she taught me to fold into plump crescent moons in my palm. If I ate enough winter gourd and water spinach, I could have dessert: fresh mochi filled with sweet sesame and peanut paste, a treat that took her two days to craft from scratch.

Her kitchen was her sanctuary and her kingdom. It makes sense that a war erupted when my grandmother invaded it.

Two kitchens, one household

To be fair, calling it an invasion is cruel and misleading. We invited them eagerly and welcomed them with open arms. In Chinese tradition, children—usually first-born sons—care for their elderly parents in their own homes until they pass. My grandparents only raised two daughters. As such, this responsibility tumbled onto my mother’s shoulders four years ago, when her parents moved from Fuzhou, where they enjoyed family, friends, and free rides to mahjong in the park, to New Jersey, where their world shrank to the corners of our guest bedroom.

They arrived in a parade of overstuffed suitcases and exquisite gifts, and then they never left. They floundered in the household tedium that followed. How could they not? Between endless cycles of laundry and meal prep, their only joys involved giggling over family gossip with Mom and blasting ‘80s Mandopop, an art form we could all appreciate. Pinned behind an impenetrable language barrier, they could only express themselves through acts of domestic service. So while Wai Gong puttered around the yard and organized our garage, my Wai Po took to the kitchen.

But Wai Po cooked very differently from my mother. She fried everything—noodles, dumplings, fish, and rice—in enormous quantities that created days of leftovers she refused to throw out because, “It’s perfectly good food! Who said we could waste it?” Our refrigerator housed a miniature metropolis populated by towers of Tupperware holding only bites of pickled radish or tilapia. We ran through packages of corn starch and MSG faster than we ever had before, and oil—so much oil!—with the smell and grease always hanging heavily in the air, because Wai Po never remembered to turn on the overhead fan until my mother stormed downstairs, fuming over the fumes that were surely destroying her precious kitchen.

Every small skirmish—over the massive plates, fermenting leftovers, and pure carbohydrates—represented the 25 years of separation during which my mother had grown up, built a household of her own, and assimilated to a culture vastly different from the one Wai Po raised her in.

Of course, Wai Po’s dishes were delicious. But they destroyed my mother’s carefully constructed equilibrium, and her domain over domesticity, too. Mom had long been the sole arbiter of our diet and portion sizes, and after so many years in the United States, she was all aboard the minimize-oil, MSG-is-cancerous, smaller-greener-plates train. And every small skirmish—over the massive plates, fermenting leftovers, and pure carbohydrates—represented the 25 years of separation during which my mother had grown up, built a household of her own, and assimilated to a culture vastly different from the one Wai Po raised her in.

No words can adequately bridge that gap. The chasm between them flooded with torrential downpours of verbal frustration. In their worst fights, they would scream the house down in Hokkien, an abrasive dialect of Fuzhou that I do not understand and which I associate with anger hurled up and down the stairs. Afterward, my mom would vent to me on the car ride to the farmer’s market.

“She called me unfilial and disrespectful. Can you believe it?” My mom clutched the steering wheel so hard the skin around her wedding band turned white. “She said I’m not honoring them or treating them as well as they deserve. What more can I possibly do?”

I would only nod, unsure what kind of response would be adequate for comfort. Then and now, it was hard to imagine either of them being satisfied.

Of hypocrisy and double standards

My grandparents have insisted on staying in the United States for the past four years, even before the pandemic trapped them here. I sometimes wondered why, given that their life in China had been pretty wonderful. I last visited them in Fuzhou five years ago, months before they moved in with us. On one sweaty Sunday, my sister and I accompanied them as they bustled through town. After slurping enormous bowls of beef noodle soup at their regular spot, I pushed their shopping cart through the supermarket as they piled on taro ice cream, lychee jellies, and “American snacks” they thought we might miss during our month-long stay. (If you’re curious, Lay’s cheeseburger-flavored potato chips do not taste like home.) Wai Gong and Wai Po became complete menaces in the street. They weaved between cars and mopeds fearlessly, falling into an effortless rhythm with the bicycle bells and taxi horns, while my sister and I struggled to stay at their heels. We followed them blindly on and off the bus and smelled the open-air fish market before we saw it.

While Wai Po launched into an intense bargain with a mustached fisherman, I stood behind her, losing a staring contest with 25 googley-eyed mackerels resting on ice. I couldn’t follow the prices—again, Hokkien made this civil business deal sound like a bout of unfriendly bickering—but I could track the push and pull of their haggling from the raised eyebrows and head shakes. Eventually Wai Po emerged victorious, gripping plastic bags full of live squid, fresh mussels, and shimmering beltfish like a hard-earned WWE championship belt.

That afternoon, I saw Wai Gong and Wai Po as powerful, independent forces for the first time. But the empowered grandparents I remember barely seem like the same people wilting in our guest bedroom five years later. Why did they leave?

A crucial part of the answer was only revealed to me during the pandemic, after my grandparents had stayed with us for more than two years and my mother had reached the end of her rope. Cocooned in blankets and rubbing red-rimmed eyes, my mother explained that my grandmother’s father—my Da Gong—is still alive. At 95 years old, he is miraculously healthy and still lives independently. He cooks, cleans, and takes all of his medications himself. Mom believes his mental acuity actually surpasses her father’s; he requires very little practical assistance with what geriatricians call “activities of daily living.” But he is profoundly, devastatingly lonely, and he wishes only for the company of his daughter, my Wai Po.

Wai Po has no intention of returning home to care for him, and she hopes to avoid any caregiving responsibilities by staying with us in the United States.

Though this was news to me, these facts alone weren’t surprising. We would have traveled to Fuzhou had he passed, and I imagine the great heartbreak of parenthood is that the hollowness of empty-nesting never ends. What shocked me was that Wai Po has no intention of returning home to care for him, and she hopes to avoid any caregiving responsibilities by staying with us in the United States.

The betrayal! The hypocrisy! I finally glimpsed the resentful logic driving my mother’s downward spiral. The revelation stewed inside me for weeks before I confronted Wai Po. After another fried feast, I broached the subject with as much tact as I could manage in Mandarin. “Wai Po, I know I don’t understand the whole situation. But isn’t Da Gong really old now? Shouldn’t you be in China with him?”

A long beat. We bathed in the soft clinking of dishes in the sink as Wai Gong rinsed the wok behind us. She finally responded, “Well, yes. According to tradition, I should be in Fuzhou to take care of my dad. But you know, I’m getting old too. What if something really happens to me? I mean, look at me,” she gestured to herself.

Slumped into the sofa cushions, she looked smaller than I’d ever seen her. She is no longer quite as strong or as active as she was when I saw her in China. “How can I turn someone over in their bed or carry them down stairs?” she asked.

In her mind, it is her turn to be cared for. While still healthy now, she might receive an alarming diagnosis at any moment. And besides, shouldn’t she enjoy some golden years of her own? Her duty to her father, she explained to me, she fulfills by sending money and gifts to her nieces in China, who provide care and conversation with Da Gong in her stead. She’ll gladly and generously pay them to support him from afar.

But the fact remains that she sits at the center of an obvious double standard. She refuses to offer her father the immediate emotional care in China that she expects from my mother in the United States. She has renounced and invoked traditional filial piety in the same breath.

A perpetual chain of generational debt

It’s difficult for me to make sense of Wai Po’s hypocrisy, especially when I respect her for her wisdom and adore her for her presence. It’s hard to consider that perhaps she, like all of us, is selfish. She has paid her dues in raising my mother and expects equivalent thoughtfulness and care from my mother in raising her now.

Or perhaps she is just one link in a perpetual chain of generational debt. My mother can never fulfill the care demands of her aging mother, just as my grandmother can never fulfill the care demands of her aging father. This inevitable asymmetry will surely occur when my parents and I age, too. I imagine the other great heartbreak of parenting is that our children will always mean more to us than they can understand, and I will probably disappoint my mother just as my daughters will probably disappoint me.

Not to mention that as the tectonic plates of different cultures crash into one another, we are forced to continually renegotiate our parent-child contract. In the process, our expectations for the care we deserve to receive and the care we can afford to give might change, too. Because truthfully, how different is it for Wai Po to compensate her nieces for spending time with her father, compared to paying a trusted professional for the same services? And how different is that outsourced exchange from Western home aides and nursing homes? My Wai Po might swear never to use those services, and my Da Gong would surely never accept them as a substitute for her companionship. But this trade of goods for care still occurs out of sight, and Wai Po still sleeps soundly at night. She still asks more of my mother in the morning.

So maybe we never get back the care that we give, or the care that we think we deserve. Maybe we are doomed to spend our lives sandwiched between generations of dependents who guzzle love and attention from us until we are parched for care ourselves. We might never catch a break or live unburdened golden years. And maybe we still soldier on because we crave security—that illusive guarantee that if we continually pay our debts forward, we ourselves will be taken care of when we are decrepit and diseased.

So maybe we never get back the care that we give, or the care that we think we deserve. Maybe we are doomed to spend our lives sandwiched between generations of dependents who guzzle love and attention from us until we are parched for care ourselves.

But these are selfish motives to discover, and I’m not satisfied with them. Because if we’re all truly so short-changed in this parent-child bargain, why bother with it at all? 

When I wonder why my grandparents insist on staying in the United States, in my head I first hear my mother’s bitter accusation that Wai Po is running from her filial duties in China. Then Wai Po’s voice rings with the fear of fighting long medical battles against her body alone. But I hear other reasons too, in the gentle murmuring of their voices when they talk late into the night. I hear reasons in the identical raucous laugh and sweeping emotional range my mother and I both inherited, and in the hilarious Hokkien conversations I am not privy to. Even when my mother refuses to take Wai Po on her sacred trips to the farmer’s market, she buys each of her parents’ favorite vegetables and new shoes in their size on the way home.

So maybe care is not lost in translation, but in transaction. We may never be able to balance the scales or the ledger or whatever ghostly record keeps track of intergenerational, cross-cultural debts. But even if we could, I imagine the margins would overflow with those soft, transient moments in the kitchen that slip through our fingers like morning light. The scale would break under the immeasurable weight of communion, from the infinite tenderness of being together.

Taking care of each other

My mother still expects me to take care of her in her old age, but her vision for it has transformed dramatically since she clutched my skinny 6-year-old arm, tears rolling down her face. When she talks about the future, she does not want to live in the same house.

Instead, we live in the same town, a few blocks away from each other. She wants me to work. In every formulation of our family’s future, I have a flourishing medical career of my own. As such, she reminds me, beaming, she’s happy to become caregiver extraordinaire again. She plans to be my kids’ greatest homework helper and piano teacher, and she’ll shuttle them from soccer practice to the library before I get home from the hospital every day. And she will still be the world’s best cook: my children will be spoiled with braised pork belly and spicy thin-sliced beef and pan-fried dumplings that she will teach them to fold in their tiny, chubby palms.

I know her expectations might change, and I have no doubt mine will too. But we continue to revisit and revise our hopes for the future together, with honesty and empathy and an enormous, ethereal love that is written into every version of our living contract.

It’s a beautiful vision. It makes me homesick in a way that I never want to outgrow. It reassures me that my kids will grow up eating Chinese food, conversing fluently with their grandparents like I never could with mine. I know her expectations might change, and I have no doubt mine will too. But we continue to revisit and revise our hopes for the future together, with honesty and empathy and an enormous, ethereal love that is written into every version of our living contract.

Sometimes when we talk about it, she mentions that she might occasionally feel lonely and dejected—she believes in mental health now!—or fall ill. But she always interjects that she and Dad have savings ready for the latter. “We won’t need you to drop everything for us. Just remember about us sometimes. Come have dinner once in a while.”

“I’ll take care of you, Mom.” I hold her hand in both of mine. Ours are the same size now, both calloused, and they fold around each other to form a plump waxing moon. 

“Of course you will,” she smiles. “But I’ll take care of you, too.”