Jars of Thoughts

I recently came across an IG reel that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

In it, a daughter calls her traditional asian mum to share that she’s doing well. She’s successful now, earning a good income, and you can feel what she’s hoping for before her mum even responds. She isn’t looking for money or approval. She’s looking for recognition. After years of working hard, she simply wants to hear her mum say, “I’m proud of you.”

Instead, her mum replies that she doesn’t care how much money she earns because she’s never asked her daughter for money. What she really wants, she says, is for her to settle down.

As the conversation continues, the daughter becomes increasingly emotional. Eventually, she breaks down in tears.

I felt for her.

I don’t think she was trying to show off her success. I think she wanted to share a milestone with the person whose opinion mattered most. When that moment of validation never came, it must have felt as though none of her achievements were enough.

The comments reflected that sentiment almost immediately. Thousands of people shared stories of growing up with Asian parents who rarely expressed pride, who constantly moved the goalposts, or who seemed more concerned about marriage than anything else their children had accomplished.

I understood why the video resonated.

But after sitting with it for a while, I realised it had left me thinking about someone else.

Her mum.

Not because I thought the daughter was wrong to feel hurt. Hurt is hurt, and no one gets to tell another person how they should feel. But I couldn’t help wondering whether the mother had been understood in the way the internet had decided she had.

A one minute video is a remarkably small window into a relationship that has existed for decades. We don’t know what sacrifices that mother has made, how she has loved her daughter over the years, or whether this conversation reflects a lifelong pattern or simply one disappointing phone call. Yet within hours, thousands of strangers had reached the same conclusion about who she was.

Perhaps that’s the nature of social media. It rewards stories that are easy to understand. Someone is right. Someone is wrong. Someone is the hero. Someone is the villain.

Real families are rarely that tidy.

Maybe I reacted differently because it reminded me of my own relationship with my mum.

I’ve been with my partner for eight years. He’s my family in every sense of the word. Yet even after all this time, his place in my life has remained largely unacknowledged by my parents.

I came out to them when I was 18, but that’s a story for another time. Years later, I mentioned my partner in passing. They simply stayed silent. There were no questions, no objections, no conversation. We just never spoke about him again.

Growing up, both my mum and dad would occasionally say things like, “Don’t do this kind of thing,” or “Don’t do bad things,” whenever the topic of being gay came up. They never really explained what they meant, and I never asked. I simply grew up knowing they believed it was wrong.

What I never understood was why.

Years passed before I finally found the courage to ask my mum.

To my surprise, she was willing to have the conversation. I had spent years imagining an argument, convinced it would end in conflict. Instead, she listened. She explained. And for the first time, so did I.

I expected her answer to revolve around morality or religion. Instead, what I heard was fear.

She… was afraid.

She spoke about how difficult she imagined life would be for a gay person. She worried that people would discriminate against me, judge me, and make life harder simply because of who I was. She couldn’t fully understand that being gay isn’t something you choose or something you can simply wish away. But beneath all of that misunderstanding was something I hadn’t expected to find.

A mother trying to protect her son.

What struck me most was the contradiction she was carrying.

Like many traditional Asian parents, she has always hoped I would settle down with someone. To her, having a partner to walk through life’s hardest moments with is one of life’s greatest securities.

Yet because I’m gay, she would rather I build a successful career and spend my life alone than be with someone I love if it meant exposing myself to discrimination.

It’s an impossible contradiction.

The very thing she has always wanted for me, companionship, is also the very thing she fears most because of what the world might do to me.

The very loneliness she hoped to spare me from became the future she was willing to accept because she believed the alternative would hurt even more.

That conversation didn’t change my views about being gay.

It changed my understanding of my mum.

I realised she wasn’t rejecting my happiness. She was afraid of my suffering.

Those aren’t the same thing.

Understanding that didn’t erase the pain. There are still conversations we struggle to have, and there are still parts of my life I wish I could share more openly with my family. But it reminded me that love and fear are often tangled together, especially in the people who raised us.

When I think back to that video now, I wonder whether the daughter heard, “Your achievements don’t matter,” while her mum was trying, however imperfectly, to say, “I’ve never worried about your ability to earn a living. I’ve worried about whether you’ll have someone beside you when life becomes difficult.”

Perhaps both walked away feeling unseen.

And perhaps that’s the tragedy of so many parent-child relationships, even beyond asian families.

We’re often speaking about completely different things, convinced we’re having the same conversation.