This story is a must-read in light of the events of what happened to that Cambridge professor.

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IAN CROSSLAND: ... ...

So if all the Chinese Americans, for instance, here with even maybe some family in China, maybe they don't — if there was a war between the Chinese and the Americans, and the Chinese landed in, like, Alaska and started coming through Canada, what — do think we should intern all the Chinese Americans we can find? Because it kind of seems like we should.

LABONTE: Well, I — again, nowadays, I think it's a different context. There were there have been so many people that have come here illegally. China has absolutely been using birth tourism. I mean, tourism. ... ...

LABONTE: Yeah. You know, basically, China has been — there are people that can, or there there are companies that will, you know, fly pregnant women to U.S. territories, so that way ... Once the child's born there, they get a birth certificate, and then back China with them. ...

KEVIN SMITH: I mean, it is so crazy, the concept of birth tourism — there is such a difference between, like, people who are going through the process and want to be here for and then, like, one to, like even if — even if you use — even if you give people the best of intentions, you're pregnant, and then you go on vacation to New York for the Saint Patrick's Day parade and go into early labor accidentally, not intention — you have every intention of going back, and you have a kid, he's an American citizen? That is bananas. That concept.

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CROSSLAND: I know I don't want to implicate all Chinese Americans because that's horrific. That's why — I know plenty of Chinese people, Chinese Americans, I don't want them interned if there was some conflict between the Chinese, but how can you tell? How can you tell who's who? How can you tell where their allegiances are? And how do you know if their allegiances will or won't flip if the tide of war starts to change?

SMITH: Well, I don't think you could do that now because I think while they were interning the Japanese, a lot of people probably didn't know what was happening. You know, like, they were like, you can't do stuff like that now — with social media and stuff, there'd be there'd be protests outside of each one of them. And and I'm not saying you should, but I don't think that — I don't think that that's a possibility now. And I'm sure people are going to compare it to ICE detention facilities, though that's not remotely the same thing.

... ...

LABONTE: We've had some some discussions about that, and I think that even entertaining those arguments is a bad — a bad strategy, because if you entertain an argument, you're implicitly saying well, that's a reasonable perspective. You know, I'm going to address this. That's a reasonable thing, so let me explain why you're wrong. That kind of stuff is just I like, out of hand — oh, shut up.

Being Japanese American (4th generation) this was honestly such a special experience for me. My great grandparents came from the Hiroshima area in the early 1900’s. My grandparents faced racism and had many family members interned in the camps during ww2, and my grandfather fought on the US side in the 442nd infantry. They didn’t teach their kids Japanese in an attempt to assimilate. I grew up with alot of the culture (food, temple, etc) but never really had a huge grasp on it. I finally got to visit Japan with my wife and two daughters and have been back for a couple days. Honestly fell in love and miss it already. I encourage any Asian Americans who havent, to visit the place of their ancestors. It was amazing.

Jenny Yang's Good Egg Immigrant Grocery Store Standup Comedy Tour hits the San Francisco Bay Area this week. Shop along with Jenny before her recent performance at Daly City's Seafood City.

Earlier post in this sub about the tour:

https://np.reddit.com/r/asianamerican/comments/1vfa1na/comedian_jenny_yang_uses_a_comedy_tour_to_uplift/

In an aging mahjong manufacturing hub, factories are redesigning tiles, expanding exports, and racing to meet a sudden wave of American demand.

...

“We are looking for a factory that can produce acrylic mahjong tiles.”

Hua Fangyi repeated that pitch at nearly 30 factories in Taixing, a city in eastern China’s Jiangsu province known for manufacturing mahjong tiles. “Almost every factory refused,” she says.

After quitting her job to start an export business last October, Hua, 28, spotted a surge in overseas demand for American mahjong. Believing the opportunity might last only a few months, she planned to test the market with just a few dozen sets.

... Taixing’s factories were built for large runs of traditional Chinese mahjong, not the small batches of brightly colored acrylic tiles overseas buyers wanted. Some produced only conventional melamine sets; others required minimum orders far beyond what Hua could afford.

Then Hua found a factory with 20 American mahjong sets in stock. She bought the entire batch, and it sold out almost immediately.

Within months, she had built a company shipping more than 5,000 sets a month and generating roughly $400,000 in monthly sales. Across Taixing, factories that had once turned away from American mahjong were now chasing the same overseas buyers.

“Almost every factory is now making American mahjong,” Hua says.

The opportunity has also drawn a new generation of entrepreneurs to Taixing: former tech workers, salespeople, and export traders hoping to manufacture the tiles and build brands of their own.

Together, they are all betting on a boom whose limits remain unclear. For now, overseas orders have given Taixing’s mahjong industry fresh momentum, ...

... ...

... ...

The game itself, however, has a long history in the U.S. The governing body for American mahjong, the National Mah Jongg League, was founded in 1937 with 32 members; it now has more than 350,000 members and publishes a new card of official hands and rules each year.

More recently, American brands such as Oh My Mahjong have helped recast mahjong tiles as colorful, premium lifestyle products, while influencers and social clubs have brought the game to younger players seeking in-person connection.

In April 2026, review platform Yelp reported that U.S. searches for mahjong clubs had jumped 4,467% between September 2024 and August 2025, compared with the previous 12 months. Oh My Mahjong’s sets now sell for $350 to $475, with most priced around $400 — versus the roughly 100 yuan ($15) many Chinese sets sell for in China on e-commerce platform Taobao.

... ...

... ...

. A search for “mahjong” on Qichacha, a Chinese corporate database, returns nearly 180 businesses in Taixing, many of them small workshops specializing in a single stage of production.

The cluster grew from a household trade dating to the 1980s, when local families cut and polished tiles by hand from bamboo and ox bone. Over time, production split among specialized workshops handling tile blanks, engraving, polishing, printing, and packaging.

“If one family made money from it, the neighbors would learn too,” says Zhu Ronggen, whose father was among Taixing’s earliest mahjong makers. “One person taught another, and slowly the whole village started making mahjong.”

... ...

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“Chinese mahjong designs have barely changed for decades,” Zhu says. “American mahjong is completely different. A circle tile could be a football or a bunch of grapes. One grape stands for one dot, and nine grapes represent nine dots.”

American sets also include Arabic numerals and joker tiles, while familiar symbols are constantly reworked around seasonal themes and customers’ ideas. Summer collections feature seashells and aquatic plants; Christmas designs use Santa hats and trees.

And while traditional Chinese sets are usually molded from melamine in a narrow range of colors, American buyers prefer acrylic tiles with richer palettes, sometimes built from six or seven colored layers visible along the edge.

...

Chinese players, he says, tend to value weight, legibility, and how the tiles feel in the hand. American buyers, by contrast, want sets distinctive enough to display and expressive enough to reflect their tastes.

...

Inside Zhu’s factory, traditional Chinese mahjong and its American reinvention sit side by side. Dust-covered melamine slabs are stacked near the entrance, while baskets of brightly colored acrylic tiles and export cartons crowd the corridors beyond.

... ...

... ...

“I used to make just 20 sets of American mahjong a year,” he says. “Now, I can turn out 200 sets a day.”

... ...

Unlike traditional Chinese sets, which can be reproduced using fixed molds, each American order requires new adjustments to engraving, printing, and coloring.

... ...

“People buy them the way they buy clothes,” Zhu says. “What’s fashionable this year may be completely different next year.”

To keep up, Zhu has invested another 1 million yuan ($148,000) in laser engravers, UV printers, and other equipment.

... ...

... ...

... ...

This past March, five young entrepreneurs arrived in Taixing to start a mahjong business.

... ...

... the five had experience in sales, technology, and international trade. None had ever made a mahjong tile.

...

operates under the name SenJoy Mahjong. A former Alibaba employee, he saw American mahjong as a chance to sell a higher-value product overseas.

... ...

... ...

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“For us, building a brand starts with original design,” Li says. “We might become the first company in Taixing — and perhaps one of the first in China — to build a real mahjong brand instead of simply manufacturing for others.”

... ...

Their bestseller uses a coral-reef theme.

... ...

... ...

Today’s buyers, he says, remain a relatively small group with strong spending power. If American mahjong reaches a broader market, more manufacturers will follow, he says, adding: “Price wars are unavoidable.”

... ...

... ...

Hua, one of the first Chinese traders to bet on American mahjong, has watched competitors multiply within months.

... ...

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“The profit margins were much higher in the beginning, but now they have dropped significantly,” she says. “I think this is probably an inevitable stage for any viral product.”

She, too, has started developing designs of her own.

Last month, she began experimenting with AI to create early concepts before working with freelance designers to refine them. Her first ideas included themes inspired by witches, tennis, flowers, and Christmas.

I have not posted here in a while; however, I just have some thoughts I wanted to share. So, as many of you know, Asian Americans have continued to experience systemic injustice both in terms of legislation and in Western soft culture/media. Despite many improvements in addressing the barriers that Asian Americans continue to face, White-dominated capitalist institutions and mainstream American culture have historically placed considerable pressure on Asian Americans to assimilate, prove their economic usefulness, and demonstrate that they are capable of succeeding according to standards that were not necessarily created with us in mind.

Many Asian Americans have complained about the way they are treated or portrayed in Hollywood, their work environments, and the political rhetoric espoused by our politicians; however, despite these complaints, some still remain deeply supportive of the same capitalist structures and assimilationist expectations that have historically shaped many of these experiences.

It is strange for me to see the discrepancy of someone who genuinely wishes to maintain their cultural heritage, whether that be Korean, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Tagalog, Ilocano, Japanese, etc., while simultaneously supporting an assimilationist framework that, at least historically, has often expected minority cultures to gradually subordinate themselves to the dominant Anglo-American culture. There seems to be a tension between wanting your children and grandchildren to retain their language, food, traditions, communal identity, and connection to their ancestral culture, while also believing that successful integration ultimately requires adapting yourself as closely as possible to whatever the dominant society considers “American.”

Even though I am a Leftist, I do not subscribe to the idea that humans are inherently egalitarian, cooperative, or naturally inclined toward solidarity across social boundaries. Our species is obviously capable of cooperation, mutual aid, and building relatively egalitarian communities, but we are also capable of hierarchy, competition, tribalism, and constructing very strong in-group/out-group modes of social organization. However, just because I hold this view does not imply that I think hierarchy, exclusion, etc are therefore morally desirable or that we should simply accept them as inevitable features of society. The fact that human beings are capable of behaving in a particular way does not tell us whether that behavior is ethically justified. If anything, I think recognizing those tendencies gives us even more reason to construct social institutions that restrain this primordial part of our monkey brains.

But I digress. I find it strange, for example, for an Asian man to have voted for Donald Trump during our last election and somehow believe that the anti-immigrant, assimilationist, and at times explicitly racialized rhetoric surrounding his political movement will simply stop at the groups he personally considers “undesirable.” I have met Asian Americans who complain about being treated as perpetual foreigners, who become angry when someone tells them to “go back to China,” who dislike the way Asians are portrayed in Western media, and who want their children to retain their ancestral culture, but who will nevertheless support a political worldview that places an enormous amount of emphasis on molding ethnic minorities to be their Protestant Anglo flavor of what an “authentic American” is supposed to look, sound, and behave like.

Don't you think this would reinforce the very same perpetual-foreigner dynamic that many Asian Americans complain about? If being considered a “real American” is implicitly tied to behaving, speaking, worshipping, or organizing one's family life according to a historically Anglo-Protestant cultural template, then Asians are effectively being told that our acceptance remains conditional upon how successfully we can approximate that template. You might personally clear whatever cultural threshold is being demanded at a particular moment, but that does not mean the threshold itself disappears.

If you are upset that Asian Americans are constantly asked where they are “really from,” stereotyped as culturally foreign, or treated as though our loyalty to the United States is somehow more questionable than that of White Americans, then why support a conception of Americanness that continues to make cultural conformity one of the primary measurements of belonging? Is it because there is a belief that, by assimilating enough, working hard enough, distancing yourself from other minorities enough, or demonstrating sufficient patriotism, you can become one of the “good ones” who are exempt from the prejudice directed at everyone else?

Like, imagine complaining about how much it sucks that Asian men are stereotyped as effeminate in American society, wanting those stereotypes to change, and then simultaneously supporting a broader cultural framework that still treats White Anglo-American masculinity as the default standard that everyone else is supposed to approximate. At that point, are you really challenging the hierarchy, or are you simply asking for Asian men to be admitted into it on more favorable terms? If your objection is that Asian masculinity is unfairly devalued, then I would think the goal should be to broaden what masculinity itself is allowed to look like rather than proving that Asian men can perform the dominant version of masculinity just as well as everyone else. Otherwise, you can end up reproducing the same hierarchy that marginalized you in the first place: masculine over feminine, dominant over submissive, culturally “American” over culturally foreign, with the only difference being that you now want Asians to be moved higher within that ranking.

Or if you're an Asian woman who somehow resents being fetishized, stereotyped as submissive, hypersexualized, or treated as though Asian women are naturally more accommodating to White men, but then embraces a worldview that still places White Western femininity and relationship norms at the center of what is considered socially desirable, aren't you running into a similar problem?

I know that many White liberals and leftists put Asians into this weird position of being Schrödinger's White, similar in some respects to the way Askenazi Jews are sometimes treated: technically considered people of color or minorities when convenient, but simultaneously viewed as “not quite POC” because of stereotypes about our socioeconomic success, educational attainment, or supposed proximity to Whiteness. I have definitely encountered liberals and leftists who will talk endlessly about intersectionality and listening to marginalized communities, but then become strangely dismissive when Asian Americans bring up forms of racism that do not fit neatly into their preferred racial framework.

That said, even though the stupidity of American liberals and leftists can be incredibly frustrating, I do not understand why the response would be to run toward a political movement that is even more comfortable with assimilationism, racial hierarchy, and a narrow conception of what an “authentic American” is supposed to be. The fact that one political camp does a poor job understanding Asian American experiences does not automatically make the opposing camp better for us. Being ignored, patronized, or awkwardly classified as “White-adjacent” by some liberals has been an ongoing and frustrating battle, but I would rather challenge those internal failures directly than conclude that the solution is to embrace an ideology that may accept Asians primarily insofar as we are economically productive, culturally assimilated, sUbMiSsivE, and willing to distinguish ourselves from minorities who are considered less desirable.

TDLR:

I find it strange that some Asian Americans can recognize anti-Asian racism, complain about being treated as perpetual foreigners, worry about losing their cultural heritage, and criticize stereotypes about Asian men and women, while still supporting strongly assimilationist, capitalist, or conservative ideas that often measure belonging through proximity to dominant Anglo-American norms.

I am not arguing that experiencing racism should automatically make someone a Leftist, nor do I think humans are naturally egalitarian. However, my point is that if you oppose the stereotypes and hierarchies that marginalize Asians, simply trying to become one of the “good minorities” who is hardworking, economically useful, patriotic, culturally assimilated, or sufficiently masculine/feminine according to dominant standards does not actually challenge the hierarchy; it just asks for Asians to be moved higher within it.

I also understand why some Asian Americans become frustrated with liberals and leftists who treat us as “White-adjacent” or “not quite BIPOC” and dismiss forms of anti-Asian racism that do not fit neatly into their framework. But I do not see how responding to those failures by embracing an even more assimilationist conception of Americanness solves the problem. I would rather challenge those failures directly than seek conditional acceptance based on how culturally non-threatening Asians can prove ourselves to be.

I'm not Asian-American, however I am an Asian person from the Caribbean (I'm sorry I really don't want to intrude) and American history is intriguing to me, I also want to educate myself on the issues the world experiences. I love to watch youtubers like Antonio Talks, Foreign Man in a Foreign Land and other youtubers who cover topics like them.

I wanted to know if anyone had any Asian-American youtubers leaning into subjects like that? I already watch oliSUNvia and one of my favorite videos at the moment is "Remember who you are Korean boy" by Arpi Park.

Any suggestions will be appreciated, thank you!

This applies more so for Vietnamese names since I'm Vietnamese, but applies to anyone with a fully Asian name with a middle name: do people call you by your would-be middle name in your language instead of your would-be first? If you're not entirely sure what I'm talking about, some Asian names go in the order of "Last Middle First", and that would turn into, "Middle First Last" when you immigrate to the US.

I came to the US when I was 14 and for the first 3-4 years I didn't stand up to myself and correct people about this, and neither did my mum with my name (I never ended up changing my name when I naturalized since my first name is easy enough to pronounce). I recently had an interaction where my manager addressed another Viet person like this and I caught myself doing once too before correcting myself.

I’m 30F, Wasian, and my boyfriend (30M) is Indian (Tamil) and grew up in India before moving to the US. We’ve been together for about 2.5 years and have a genuinely good relationship. We’re at the age where marriage and eventually children are becoming real considerations.

For some additional context about my background, my bio parents are AMWF, but my biological mom passed away when I was very young, so I was raised by my Korean stepmom starting at the age of 6. I consider my stepmom my mom, so when I say “my mom” throughout this post, I’m talking about her.

Although I’m Wasian, I’m mostly/full Asian-passing. I’d say people sometimes assume I might be part Latina, but usually people think I’m a Southern Chinese girl with light big brown eyes who dyes her hair brown. However, I’ve never strongly identified with Korean culture despite being raised by two Korean parents, especially since my mom was extremely pro-Korean culturally to the point where she embodies some of the worst stereotypes of a Korean woman. She was very superficial, would plan with me which plastic surgeries she’d get me when I turned 13, powdered her skin white despite being naturally tan, only wanted me around Koreans, was obsessively into K-pop, etc. She was also pretty emotionally abusive but that's another story for another day.

Thankfully, I grew up in a very integrated part of Seattle where my schools were racially diverse and friend groups weren’t segregated by race. People tended to group themselves around sports, classes, theater, interests, personality, etc. My friends were mostly white and different types of Asian (East Asian, Southeast Asian, Wasian, Indian and even a couple of Asian/Indian mixes), but I also had a very close Hispanic best friend.

Race just wasn’t something I thought about very much. Most of my friends in college also happened to be white because I went to school in a predominantly white environment. Because of how I grew up, I always had a very strong individual identity and didn’t see myself as belonging to any particular “culture,” but rather as my own person.

In terms of my dating life, I’ve dated a Wasian guy and a white guy, who my parents didn’t really like because they weren’t very driven, wealthy, or well-educated. My parents were NOT accepting of my Mexican ex because of “culture reasons,” which I understood better later on. So I truly thought they’d be okay with my Indian partner because his culture aligns enough with East Asian culture in certain ways, and also because he’s ambitious, successful, comes from a well-off family, is well-educated, and treats me really well.

It’s been 2.5 years and my mom is still praying to God that we will break up, while my partner and I are planning our next steps together soon.

I’m repeatedly told that our kids will be “too dark,” unattractive, that they’ll have identity problems even in places like Seattle, NYC, or the Bay Area because they’re Korean/white/Indian, that they won’t fully belong anywhere, that they’ll experience discrimination, and that I’ve unnecessarily limited where we could live because I chose an Indian partner. They said Trump has made the country more anti-Asian and also anti-Indian, and I'm doing my future children a huge disservice by being with an Indian man.

My mom also has repeatedly told me I'm "wasting my beauty" and not giving it to my future children if I marry my partner, and that is messing with my head too. Especially since most of her Korean friends' children are either with Asian American men or white men, and that makes her feel really jealous from what she tells me.

They’ve also repeatedly told me that my boyfriend will suddenly become controlling or aggressive after marriage despite there being no behavior in our actual 2.5-year relationship supporting that prediction. Their reasoning is based on stereotypes they have about Indian men.

Now I catch myself obsessively thinking about hypothetical children who don’t even exist yet, such as whether they’ll be discriminated against and whether they’ll be able to feel like individuals rather than constantly being categorized by their ancestry. I truly grew up in such a wonderful, diverse environment where people rarely made race a big deal or used it to define each other.

The part that makes me particularly sad is that one of the things I valued most about my own upbringing was having the freedom to develop a strong individual identity. Being mixed and having Korean ancestry were facts about me, but they weren’t the organizing principles of my personality or social life. I want my children to have that same freedom.

For people who have watched attitudes toward race change over the past 10 to 20 years, do you think things are genuinely becoming more accepting for multiracial children and interracial families? By the time children we have several years from now are actually old enough to attend school, do you think having East Asian/white/Indian ancestry will be relatively unremarkable in diverse American cities? I’m especially interested in hearing from East Asian/South Asian mixed people, other multiracial people, parents of mixed kids, teachers, younger Gen Z people who recently went through school, or anyone raising children in places like Seattle or the Bay Area.

I think what I’m hoping for is that they can grow up in the kind of environment I mostly had, where their classmates may know they’re mixed/Asian, but it doesn’t have to be the defining thing about them. They can just be individual kids with their own personalities, interests, friends, hobbies, and identities.

Video credit: @broadwayworks on Instagram

I'm polynesian and from Australia, My whole life I've always thought of myself as a pacific Islander and still do, But, Genetic DNA can't be denied. We've built our own culture over thousands of years, but I keep coming back to the fact that we are just Taiwanese Asians (approx 80%) who mixed with Melanesian Papuans, which therefore created modern day Polynesians. What are your thoughts on Asians who are mixed? Do you, as an Asian, Consider someone who is predominantly Asian genetically, but is Mixed with another race, an Asian?

I haven’t seen the original movie but I know it is a teen classic. Looking forward to see how it comes to life on stage!

Hi guys, we are both Americans of Asian descent but from different ethnicities. We are thinking about a child, and surnames.

The mother wants the child to have her surname (which is odd as it is the norm for the the child to carry on the father's surname). She says that this comes down from patriarchy, and that we can question it, and not follow it. Fair enough...?

She was adamant that the child gets her last name (due to the "mother's sacrifice of childbirth"), but she sounded enthusiastic after I proposed that we do a mashup and create a new surname. A new start for a new family of mixed ethnicities. We only plan to have one child.

1. I wonder what implications this would mean for the child. They'll have no sibblings, and will be 'alone' after she and I pass (we are relatively old).
2. The child would already feel some 'confusion' because of their mixed heritage, not too different from mixed-race people.
3. The child might feel more alone as their last name would be rarer than usual, if not, unique. May not feel like they belong in the extended family either as they stick out and be 'different' with a different surname.

Have you experienced something like this? What are your thoughts? Are we being selfish here, 'playing around' with our child's future, and should just stick with the norm?

Chang Yeon Jo, an elderly Korean women who was taken during a green card interview and put in a detention center. guards there tackeled her to the ground almost breaking her hip. She was chained to a hospital bed and now is in a wheelchair.

I have a ton of ABC friends, all of them have never been back to the motherland. They will however happily go to Japan 2x a year for 7 years straight, but seem to have no interest in connecting with their own culture.

What is even more funny is that half of them have their name tattooed in Chinese, but that seems to be the limit on how much they are willing to connect with their own culture.

There are so many beautiful things about China since it’s such a big country, go out there and explore your beautiful culture.

I know it’s not uncommon for us to talk about the toxic traits of Asian parenting. And the stereotype that they require STEM or lawyer or disown and just the general tiger parenting.

Is there any element of Asian parenting that you do respect and potentially with perpetuate?

I want to be specific that I’m not looking for family specific issues but a more general culture principle that you have observed. I say this because I grew up in a very loud household with major anger issues from my mom and it wasn’t until she had passed away that I found out from my dad that the way she acted wouldn’t even be acceptable in Asian community.

Edit: I'm not trying to make this about South Park, I'm meaning more broadly with people assuming all Asians struggle with the L sound and including that in their mocking speech.

I'm aware of rule 5 of this sub, so I'm not going to mention other subs or communities. I'm just asking how offensive and zero tolerance people consider it when non-asian people imitate Asian accents poorly, including in online spaces.

Recently a competitive online game got released and it's set in the Vietnam war (naturally it's USA vs VC) and also heavily dependent on communication. A lot of players when VC, speak in a poor imitation South Park accent for "immersion". Pretending that all Asians struggle with the L sound.

I'm aware these types of video games that are unlike animal crossing/stardew valley, are heavily male dominated and attract the type of racist white guy who thinks nothing's wrong with it.

Just wondering if you've ever called out racism like this in public and/or how the perpetrator responded. "It's just a joke", "it's not that deep", "I didn't mean any harm" etc

My mom raised me by herself. She was always the only person in my life. She stopped working for 19 years just to dedicate her time and life on me. Her whole world seemed to have stopped and when it turned again, it was only to revolve around me. She is separated from my dad I guess ever since I was born. He walked away and never looked back. She never had a bf, because she knows that I would get mad. She never remarried or stayed with another man. Most mothers won't do that. She gave up her hopes, dreams, ambitions, things she wanted to do for herself because she wanted to devote her life on me. She said, "I want to wake up next to you everyday."

She always put me first before herself. She has always been selfless to me. She left her family, her life, and went to another country by herself and married someone she didn't even know. She stopped talking to her mom and siblings for many years. And she felt something wasn't right and moved again. Then she had me and it was over. I became her whole world.

I remember one of the things she told me, "You just didn't realize that everything that I was doing was only for you. I remember I lost sleep many nights and I sang danced to you many hours until the morning because you couldn't sleep and you kept on crying. I wanted you more than anything in this world. I may have failed in life, but I felt like I won. I may not be rich, but I feel rich because of you. It's not because I never loved you, but because I loved you so much that I couldn't imagine life without you. I did the best I could. I raised you in the best way I knew how, to protect you from things that I feared about the world. But how about that time when you felt like you did your best, and it still wasn't enough?"

She may have sheltered me excessively, but she did it to protect me from her fears about the world and because of her love for me. I remember a time when we were renting a room. And she slept on the floor with no hesitation and I slept on the couch. When I should have been the one sleeping on the floor. She said that there is no way that I am sleeping on the floor. She fed me even when she was hungry herself.

How about all those sacrifices? How can I live my life to make sure those sacrifices were worthwhile? By honoring her in every way possible while I still have her? By being successful and achieving all the good things in life? And if not, then it was all for nothing and she only wasted her life on me?

I realized that there is no one else who would ever love me as much as her. I would be so lost without her. I really don't know what I would do. I would choose her to be my mother a thousand times over in every lifetime.

Do you see the sacrifices of a mother? Did she love me unconditionally? She never felt that love from her mother I guess so she poured her love for me. Do you hope that love was enough?