Why does another Mass times site exist? Read my story →
It's just weed. By the law I'm blameless. But I know what it will do to her. The morning my mom flew across the country to my frat house, and the standard I'm held to because she crossed an ocean for me.
Loading...
We landed in Canada in 1997. I was in seventh grade.
It was the year of the Hong Kong handover, and the families kept arriving. Mostly rich ones, buying houses in Burnaby, filling up the Chinese supermarkets, the T&T that worked exactly like a Ranch 99 does down here. They had their own circles. You could live in that city without learning much English, and a lot of people did.
I was from Hsin-Chu, not Hong Kong, which to a kid mattered and did not matter. There was a racial tension in the air I had never felt in Taiwan. Back home I was just a kid. Here I was a category, and the category had subcategories. The white kids did French immersion and played hockey. The Asians sorted by how fob you were. Cool Asians. Cool fobs. Loser fobs. It wasn't a straight line, there was always mixing. But if you look at the class photos it's almost a gradient, yellow on one side fading to white on the other, and everybody somehow knew where they fell on it.
I learned early that hanging out with the fobs got you bullied, so I leaned harder to the Asian-Canadian side. A Taiwanese kid in Canada reaching for Asian-American, which is funny when you say it out loud. But American culture was the one with gravity. The shows, the slang, the cool. Canada was just where I happened to land. Never quite American enough anyway. My first friends were a Nigerian kid, another fob, and a white Francophone, which is to say my mom hadn't read the map yet either. She put me in hockey. I don't know if that was strategy or just what you did if you were trying. Maybe both.
There's a whole discourse now about Asian parents. I scroll past most of it. The Western good dad plays catch and shows up to the games. Then the other version, the therapy one: the distant Asian parent, cold, maybe abusive, the Tiger Mom, pushing because pushing was the only tool they were handed.
I've written about this before, so I won't relitigate it. I sit at the intersection and mostly I'm numb to it. I trust my gut with my own kids. The voices in the discourse are louder than mine and have tidier categories.
But I notice one thing. Nobody defends the parent.
There's a meme that Asian parents call you fat. No filter, no hello, just you got fat. People online find this devastating. I find it funny, mostly. Of all the things, this is the one?! I guess so. I get self-conscious in Taiwan, too.
Here's what I notice though. The doctor says elevated BMI, cardiovascular risk, and it sounds responsible. The mother says you got fat and it becomes the whole indictment. They might be thinking the same sentence. One of them has no lawyer in the room. Not in the therapist office, not in the media, not usually in the essay. And because I can hear what she means, not just what she said, I don't get the easy version.
For years I was just around 200 and vaguely annoyed about it. Calories in, calories out, eat less than yesterday. That was the whole theology. The apps never worked for me, because the apps were built for people who don't eat what I eat. You scroll forever looking for the right bowl of Asian food, guess the portion, pick the least wrong thing, and quit by week four. Or I did.
For a long time there was no fixing that. Then the vision models got good enough, and one day they were good enough for this. So I built it. You text a photo of your meal to a bot. Ate half of this. Six fries. It figures it out. A separate app tracks the weight and the macros, dark mode, a graph that's satisfying in the way a graph can be when your body is too annoying to read directly.
I lost about twelve pounds over a few months. My wife showed me an article about some high schooler doing millions in ARR with basically the same idea. Good for him. I lost my ten pounds. (A year later I gained it back. Rebooting the app was easy, which is its own kind of joke. It's working, right. The retention is there.)
Weight I can fix. With parents it's harder.
Immigration is a debt paid in private. I don't mean that nobly. Nobody sends you a bill. You just feel the ledger. Or I do.
I was a good kid. A good student. I carried the ambition of a new country to make it, and the strange part is my mom never pressured me about college. The pressure was all mine, internalized, always on. In high school I swallowed a lot of pride. The moving, the isolation, the angst, but I stayed a good kid. When applications came I wanted one of those paid admissions counselors, the afterschool kind that runs into the thousands, and she couldn't afford it and felt bad about it. She asked me to apply to Canadian schools too, just in case. She'd tell you now she always knew I'd make it. I remember it a little differently.
I remember her being surprised more than I remember being happy.
BOOM BOOM BOOM.
"Michael!! Michael!"
Her voice. That familiar anxiety in it. My body knows before I do. I shoot upright, straight-backed, the way she used to slap into me when I slouched, palm flat between the shoulder blades.
It's around eleven in the morning. The light through the blinds is dim. Dirty carpet. The room smells like old beer first, then under it the cached-bowl smell, skunk gone sour, then cigarettes. The two-foot bong is standing by the mattress with the bowl cached. Ashtray. Pack of cigarettes. The landlord is almost never here.
I'm in the frat house. Third year. I'm a good fraternity leader, or I was. By now the marijuana has a hold of me. I skip class. I barely get by. Not probation, nothing that dramatic, just skating by on talent, which is worse, because it lets the thing keep going.
In Chinese there's du, poison, and yiao, medicine. There's no clean word for drugs. My mom has never met anyone who smokes weed. This is before the dispensaries, before any of it got casual. To her, a drug is the kind of thing that takes a son.
My ex called her. I find this out later. Her and a friend, scared it might be more than weed. They picked up the phone. She got on a plane.
A 350 dollar flight, San Jose to Ann Arbor. She came the same day.
I sit on the edge of the mattress, frantically looking for my clothes. The carpet is gritty under my feet. The bong is in the corner of my eye and I know there's no time to hide it.
It's just weed. By the law of the country I live in now, in a year or two it won't even be a law. I'm technically blameless. A college kid smoking weed in a frat house.
But she's not outside a concept. She's not outside a debate. She's outside my door because people who love me got scared enough to put her on a plane.
I know what this will do to her. I don't know if that makes me blameless or if it holds me to a different standard, the one I chose the day I let her cross an ocean for me.
Should I open that door.
I have to.
I get up.
Last post: Return of the Good Student.