By Gregory
“You will become closer to your mother this year,” the psychic told me, unaware of what I was doing this year. What I was doing was attempting to do one thing, every day that scared me for a year and write about in a blog called “Scare Yourself Every Day” (SYED).
I had gone to that psychic early on in SYED. Since my blog ended a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been thinking back on those predictions my psychic made. Did that prediction come true?
Honesty is not really something that is typically expressed between Chinese parents and their kids. Chinese parents have tremendous expectations for their kids. They exert an enormous amount of pressure to achieve those expectations. As a result, many Chinese kids lie to their parents. Sometimes, it feels like it’s the only way to survive. Remember The Wedding Banquet? The entire premise of that movie is based on that. The Chinese son doesn’t want to reveal he’s gay to his parents. So he creates an elaborate ruse to marry a Chinese girl just so they will get off his back. Non-Chinese people might not believe that anyone would go to those lengths just to deceive their parents. But Chinese kids just nod their head slowly in understanding.
I was no different. In fact, I like to think that I was some kind of idiot savant at hiding things from my parents. Some Chinese kids were experts at piano and violin. I was an expert at deception.
I lied to my mom because it made my life easier. A simple lie meant no confrontation. A simple lie meant no long talks on the phone about what a disappointment I was. A simple lie always seemed like the better choice. That’s how the relationship between my mother and I was for 35 years. Until I started Scare Yourself Every Day.
As you might expect, my parents had no idea what the hell I was doing with SYED. They knew I had a blog and I did weird and stupid stuff in it. But that was it. They never really asked me about it because they just thought it was a hobby of mine. To me, it was the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Over the course of the year, I revealed some of the biggest lies I ever told to my mother for the blog, a scary undertaking indeed. I told her I had been caught shoplifting when I was 16. A secret that my father and I kept from her for almost 20 years. And almost two decades later, I was still nervous about telling her. Even my father was. When I began telling the story and my father realized what was going on, he shook his head as if to say, “Don’t do it!” My mother’s reaction? She wasn’t upset. She was more shocked that we had been able to hide something like that from her for that long.
When I sent my parents one of the many silly videos I made for the blog, they saw a Q&A video that I didn’t intend for them to see. In it, I revealed that I abused drugs for a period of time in my life. When my mother asked me about it, I didn’t deny it or try to cover it up. “I didn’t know you did that,” my mother said. She didn’t sound angry, just confused and even a little hurt. “I didn’t want to worry you,” I told her. That much was true. Chinese or not, what kid tells their parents they’re abusing hardcore drugs because they’re depressed?
When I broke up with my girlfriend and in the depths of despair, I decided to reach out to my mother. Not because I wanted to, because it scared me. I figured just like anything else, she wouldn’t say the things I wanted her to say. But if there was ever a day when everything my mother said was perfect, it was that day. I had to check my phone a few times to make sure I had dialed the right number. Afterwards, she went back to bad mouthing my ex and saying she “knew it all along” but for that day, she was just a mother comforting her son.
Near the end of the blog, I decided to quit my job to pursue my dream of writing for a living. In the past, this would’ve been a no-brainer lie. Quitting my stable, well-paying job at a big name TV network to become a writer? That was the fuel for Chinese parent’s nightmares.
But again for the blog, I told my mother exactly what I was going to do. I wish I could tell you she surprised me and took it better than I thought she would. At first she did. But pretty quickly it became apparent that she was not happy at all and was going to let me hear about. I stopped talking to her because all she would do was complain and try to make me feel guilty about my decision. It drove a wedge between us that I wasn’t sure would ever be removed.
One night, desperate to do my scary thing for the day, I called my mother and told her I forged my report cards in High School. A crazy thing happened. After I told her, we were both laughing over the ridiculousness of it all. Laughing over all the trouble I went to. Laughing when my mother said, “I wouldn’t have been that mad if you got a B.” Sure, mom. Whatever you say.
Maybe we were glad to talk about something light. Something other than my impending unemployment. But after that day, we began talking every week again and even when we talked about my future, it wasn’t that bad.
When Scare Yourself Every Day ended, I made a video highlighting some of the scary things I did over the past year. The video became viral and I started to get press on the blog. I had several interviews and was up on some of the biggest news sites like Yahoo! and The Huffington Post.
In the past, I might not have even told my mother what was going on because I knew I wouldn’t get the kind of response I’d want. But I was different now. So I told her. Her reaction? “Why are all those people interested in what you wrote?” But even though she didn’t know why, I knew she was proud of me.
I don’t know if that psychic was real or I just subconsciously worked to make her prediction come true through the blog or a combination of both. I do know that for once in my life, I feel like I can tell my mother anything.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gregory Tung is a writer living in Los Angeles. He recently completed his one year journey to do something scared him every day for a year. You can read about his adventures at Scare Yourself Every Day.
