An example I like to give is when my parents have guests over for dinner. Let’s posit a hypothetical situation: I bring home my significant other to meet my parents. Let’s say her name is Erin. Let us also imagine (reasonably, I might add, if past trends are to be followed) and she is Caucasian, without any significant knowledge of Asian Languages. For dinner, my parents cook an inoffensive, accessible meal, and are careful to provide forks for Erin. Mom makes sure to include at least one ‘can’t-miss’ dish, fried rice or such, in order that even the most Americanized of tastes will have something approachable and familiar to eat. Erin is pleasantly surprised at how good the food is, and her self-consciousness fades. My parents engage her in conversation, making sure to be warm and engaging and never distant, and they are careful to speak almost entirely in English, halting and inelegant though it may be, even when conversing directly with me, if only to have her feel included and welcome and part of the conversation. My dad delivers his standard salvo of canned jokes, my mom asks about her family and her siblings, and they both make sure to steer clear of touchy and or prying subjects, as they are content to watch and see our nervous, polite reactions. A fantastic Meet-the-Parents meal, right? Maybe. But it is also a complete fabrication: this is not what my family life is like, at all.

My real family life is conducted in my native language, peppered in with the occasional English phrase or word. This is what home life is like. As soon as my parents start speaking English, they stop being my parents, the people they are when they are at home, with family, when they are truly themselves, and they turn into the people they become outside the home, the roles they play at work or in daily American life. That is most certainly not my parents. And so much of it has to do with language—in all honesty, my parents are not that great with English. They simply aren’t. It’s not embarrassingly bad, nor are they incapable of getting along well in American society (my dad won’t shut up when works on his patients, much to their amusement, and my mom teaches middle school) but to me and those who know them well, their American personas don’t even remotely come close to showing how articulate, funny, engaging, well-informed and interesting they can be when speaking our native language. What you get instead is what to me is a caricature of their true selves, and it bothers me to no end that this is the only apprehension possible to my American friends. “Your dad’s pretty awesome,“ my friends would say. “He’s a funny guy.” No, I think, you have no idea, you patronizing fuck. Don’t kiss my ass. You have no idea what my parents are like, and there is no way for you to know, so don’t even bother trying, because what you see isn’t even a fraction of the truth.

So herein lies the problem: in nearly all situations regarding friends, my parents shift into American-persona mode immediately. I know they do this out of consideration for my friends, and by extension me, who is obviously concerned about having them feel welcome. This is fine for short-term interactions and one-off meetings. The prospect of a sustained period of this, say in a relationship, where she would fairly regularly interact with them, or the not-unthinkable possibility of a lifetime of this, just—well, it seems beyond excruciating. It would feel like my parents dying to me, replaced by cheap facsimiles.