galoisien

And I do ask her to write emails, but she doesn't take interest in my facebook page, my blog, or anything that I write. (You know, despite the fact that they're readily accessible to her.) She didn't care about what I wrote for my college essays, as long as they would satisfy an adcom. Whenever I wrote a piece that was tough for me to write because it came from the heart and it was really genuine, she seemed more concerned about how I was unnecessarily talking about delicate subjects than the ideas I was trying to convey. Your essay got you X local scholarship? Oh yay. $2000/yr award? Yay. No questions about the stuff I actually wrote. During my younger teenage years when I took a sudden interest in the different versions of the Internationale she was screaming her head off about the socialist workers' song being demonic and anti-Christian than any of the ideas I was taking interest in then -- you know, ideas that she could shape.

I remember as a child she'd love to lecture me on Chinese proverbs and Chinese history and she'd watch Chinese historical drama with me, but later when I took an interest in linguistics, the makeup of the Han ethnicity and new ideas in the study of Chinese history -- all that passion suddenly disappeared. Except of course, when she wants to invoke a random Chinese proverb to lecture me.

I shared all of that anxiety. She actually tried to hide it, because the family court policy was to keep the children in a state of ignorant bliss and she would be in legal trouble if the law knew my sister and I knew more than what were supposed to know. (It's a stupid law really that insults children ...) During the last 9 years I have been in constant worry about the expenses, our self-sufficiency, income flows and whatnot, and me and my sister ate frugally and asked little. In fact we often tried to prevent our mother from making purchases we didn't need more than the other way round.