Last Tang Standing

by Lauren Ho

Remember that your relatives are only human— That means they can be killed.

now she basically owns us, emotionally, which is how real power works.

Gluttony, after all, is a Chinese art form and we’ve had millennia to perfect it.

(Not even the most important holiday for the Chinese can stop me from slaving for you! was the subtext they were channeling to their bosses),

When it came to collecting debt, the Chinese never forget.

Why did mothers always think that if they recited random details about a person you’d never met in your life, you’d somehow magically know what they were talking about?

most Asian countries are not welfare states; we basically need the little moppets that come after us to be successful so they can in turn feed us. That’s why family is so important in most traditional Asian cultures.

Problem is, you can’t just shake off centuries of cultural mindfuckery that tell you that you are nothing but a sandworm without the benevolence and sacrificial love of your parents, who fed your worthless child self and molded you into the acceptable, if not exceptional, adult that you are, and that the only way you can ever hope to repay them is if you take the hopes and dreams your parents had for you and gently but surely stuff them down your brain hole, make them yours, and realize them, or betray your parents and burn in the special place in Chinese Hell for unfilial children while eager but inefficient Chinese demons disembowel you ad infinitum.

you can only hate someone so much if you had once loved them in equal measure.”

Every good Chinese knows the proverb: dig your well before you are thirsty.