respect & love.

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. But if you don't love me, it would be better and more honest to say so.”

-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the conversations I’ve had with friends on family and the nature of love and respect, especially in the traditional East Asian/South-East Asian setting. I joked with an old friend earlier in the month that the more privileged the family the more ingrained the experience of trauma becomes, and that each of us as progeny are extending the ongoing perpetuation of said trauma. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has been one of my favourites when it comes to reminding me of the nature of family, and the idea of the many nuances of the things that people carry.

In a truly bizarre fashion, I find myself coming full circle to the spaces I have departed from, only to realize how much I have missed them and what my life would have been had I not pursued reconciliation and healing. I have always lived on the edge of paradox, and sometimes I wonder where paradox would have brought me had I chosen to follow growth and introspection.

There are things my parents hold that are reflective of the first generation immigrant experience, especially an experience of privilege that was stripped through war and a fleeing from conflict. From additional grief that comes in losing family from the very early stages of adulthood and decisions that were made not of desire but necessity. Love and respect hold very different meanings based on who we ask, and my familial experience of both things are often self-contradictory.

The wrinkles on both my grandmother’s hands would tell a story of resilience in survival, and my parents, a story of pragmatic becoming nurtured through unwanted independence. The stories I have to pry open to learn. The things that they have learnt to not speak but never forget. The unsaid words of passive aggression partially because of a jealousy that they have made the world a better place for those that come after them perhaps is a figment of my own imagination, but perhaps it’s what I tell myself in order to rationalize experiences I will never understand.