From Doing to Being: An Immigrant's Quandary
From compulsively chasing after achievements and wanting to fix other people's problems, to centering on my inner being and focusing on my own growth, it's been a sobering journey.
To be or to do, this is the question.
Up until recently, to be a successful human being in this world meant “doing” my best and achieving as many accomplishments as possible. To move upstream or to drown of hunger — this is the existential question I was ingrained with as a child of immigrants. There didn’t seem to be any other choice. All the famines my ancestors experienced are in my DNA.
The society where I first migrated to — Hong Kong — is a turbo-charged version of America. Its laissez faire-style economic system was lauded by Nobel laureate-economist Milton Friedman as more efficient and productive than the economic system in the United States.1 Social mobility and a business-first mentality are the guiding beacons of this tiny dot on the South China Sea, making its economic power and influence much larger than its physical size starting from the 1980s.
There, achievements are the entrance fee to “the good life.” And a good life is equivalent to a financially secure one where you never have to worry about the next meal or the next month’s rent. As the society got richer, the idea of a good life gradually progressed to owning properties and assets that cost a lot more than most places on earth.
This pursuit of the good life also comes with it a caveat — you do it even if you have to give up what your heart desires.
For many of us ex-refugees who left China in search of freedom and financial security, this drive to secure perpetual prosperity is understandable. It is a trauma-based response.
We children of immigrants inherit a disproportionate amount of psychological burden to achieve, because we’ve been told from the time we were toddlers, that our parents had sacrificed everything for us just so we could have a brighter future. Without question, we had to do our best to repay our parents for their hard work and sacrifice, intended to deliver us — once and for all — from whatever turmoil they experienced back home.
But, there’s more to the desire to avoid poverty and get rich at all cost. When the pendulum swings to the other extreme, achievements carry their own thorns.
Growing up, this is what I learned: Achievements not only make you look good, they also make the whole family proud, especially if the family has never produced a kid with higher education credentials or a big bank account.
Because every single Chinese parent I knew of seemed to have the same wishes for their kids, this kind of expectation was the water in which I swam.
The idea that human worth is intrinsically tied to achievements is a modern one, but because all of us who are alive today are born in the modern era, we all swim in the same water.
This idea is borne out of meritocracy. We are what we do. We count only on the scale of our achievements. And in a capitalistic society, we are what we earn.
It happened that I excelled in school with relative ease. I was a straight-A student and slipped into the role of the proverbial “model child.” During the process, I became a “human doing.” Encouraged by my parents’ and teachers’ praises, I pushed and pushed until I was on top of each mountain I climbed.
None of these achievements ever felt enough. My mother would push me to reach an ever higher peak every time I came home with a 100% score. A teacher in my grade school even moved the top score to 120% to encourage us to do better. Crazy, eh?
Besides academic success, I also pushed myself to join as many extracurricular activities as possible, and played leadership roles in multiple “clubs” and the student council when I was a teenager. At one point, I felt suffocated by my own ambition, but couldn’t find a way out. At graduation, I repeatedly ran up the stage to receive multiple awards, until I felt totally embarrassed for stealing the limelight. The ultimate achievement was when I won a scholarship to study in an American university, beating 8,000 candidates who vied bitterly for this award.
Such was the “rinse and repeat” story of my childhood. The drive to run to the top of the mountain was so strong and abiding, that I regret having lost a big part of my childhood in a mental prison. I didn’t know what fun, relaxation or enjoyment meant. In becoming this achievement machine, I was also deprived of my freedom to express a full range of emotions, including sadness and vulnerability, which were shunned by my hard-core Tiger Mom because they would stop me from having the courage to move forward and upward.
In hindsight, I can see how my natural gifts helped my mother fill the holes of her soul and boost her low self-esteem. There can be any number of factors that contributed to her inner emptiness (which is heavily armored), and it would be presumptuous for me to claim that I know for sure what they are.
However, from our immigrant experience, I can say that being a transplant from mainland China was equivalent to being a second-class citizen. To establish ourselves in the new society, achievements seemed to be the golden ticket for the train to the peak. So in a way, when I showed my ability to achieve stellar results at school, my mom took me as her trophy, with immense pride. This pride filled her up and sustained her as she navigated her life as an immigrant with a heavy non-Cantonese accent, which often invited looks of contempt out there in society.
I suspect that this psychological drive also lies behind many Asian families that produce “model minority” kids in America. The model minority phenomenon (and myth) has its own historical background that I won’t go into here. Besides, I didn’t spend my childhood in the U.S., so I can’t claim any authority in the understanding of the matter. I do invite those of you who grew up in America in an immigrant family, to share your experience and what you think lies behind the drive to achieve.
While I don’t have any unusual career achievements to speak of, for the best part of my working life, I did continue to push myself by following hard-core work ethics. “Hardworking” and “loyal” were my trademark qualities as an employee. Those keywords were on every single job application letter I wrote.
Another way to feel good about myself was through the identity of being a “good daughter” (more like “doing” a good daughter).
I snuggly fitted myself into these roles — a good employee and a good daughter — so I could easily measure the level of my own success.
With vigilance, I tried to outdo myself and be an ever better worker, daughter, and later, wife. What lied behind this compulsion was the fear of disappointing my parents, my ancestors, my culture, and the whole schbang!
But the fear of not excelling in the roles handed down to me and of disappointing others was eating me alive. I kept pushing myself to rush forward in the imaginary hemster wheel of success, until one day, the hamster collapsed.
When the hamster collapsed, she got up again and again, but eventually, she heard her own voice, asking: “Who am I?”
That was one scary question that popped up.
The complete question would be: “Who am I if all my achievements were stripped away?”
At first, when I listened in, all I could hear were admonitions spoken in Chinese, berating or shaming me for being a loser.
Win or lose. That’s the pathetic dichotomy of what my culture (a combination of American and Chinese cultures) wants me to believe about life’s purpose. And winning and losing on the career battlefield is a major preoccupation.
About 10 years ago, I got tired of tying my identity to my career, so I decided to switch to a practice that would allow me to serve people more directly than writing business articles.
After losing my father to cancer, I decided to become a health coach. It was probably a way for the guilty part of me to atone for the “sin” of not caring for him the years before he died.
Being 100% passionate about what I considered my soul’s calling, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with attaching my identity to my coaching practice. Besides, I got to be my own boss. Isn’t that the greatest form of autonomy?
But when I failed to get enough clients to sustain my solopreneurship after 7 years of fumbling, I plunged into a deep depression. My sense of identity disintegrated. If I wasn’t a successful health coach, who was I? I was once known as the “Eat Right Chef,” and while I didn’t amass a big following, I did have many loyal supporters who would eat up all the content I put out on social media — for free.
When I tried to monetize my expertise, and found that very few were willing to pay me for it, I started to seriously doubt myself. I wasn’t prepared for the amount of hustling that would be required to launch a successful business. When I measured myself against the wellness industry’s yardstick, and deemed myself a total failure.
Many successful entrepreneurs get to the finish line and witness their business thrive, because they know what to expect, don’t get personally attached to the outcome, and get up again and again after setbacks. The playground for different people are also uneven. Some have strong financial backing so they can experiment with different strategies. It wasn’t the case for me. And I was too naive. I saw the rise of many successful health coaches and thought that I had it in me, without knowing the in’s and out’s and underneath’s of what made them successful.
I also made the mistake of taking this fledgling business too personally. I thought helping people thrive in their physical health was my life’s purpose. So I put my self-worth into the whole mix.
Eventually, when clients stopped coming in and I realized I had lost a large sum of money to sustain the business, I had to force myself to put all of my labor of love into a coffin. I slumped into a severe depression. This led me to a self-inquiry that woke me up to the dysfunctional way with which I had been running my whole life.
During my self-inquiry, I realized that my obsession to help and fix other people’s problems was actually an expression of unhealthy codependency. This inquiry went deep, and led me to take five steps to transform myself from a human doing to a human being. I will share my discoveries in the next newsletter. Stay tuned!
The Hong Kong Experiment (1998). https://www.hoover.org/research/hong-kong-experiment
Glad you shared this essay with me. It reminded me how much I love your insightsz
Wow Louisa - I feel so seen in your words. Our experiences are so similar! I find myself in a place where I’m exploring what I want to do and who I want to be when I grow up but in the process, feel like I’m being left behind. Sending you so much love as you continue moving forward on your journey home to yourself 🫶