I’d mastered silence as a child—shrinking, obeying, vanishing—to survive a warzone where “good behavior” meant erasing myself.
The flicker of MTV and Fashion TV stained our Hong Kong flat blue. At the age of six, my mother pinned me before the screen like a specimen. “See her?” She jabbed at Gisele Bündchen’s jutting ribs. “That’s discipline. You need to look like that, so that you could wear pretty clothes like her.” Her dream was my sentence: Become a model. Be thin. Be seen. Make her proud. Her daily liturgy scripted my worth in calories.
This isn’t just my story—it’s a battle cry for every daughter told to shrink so her mother’s ego can expand.
By playing the “good” kid, I sure had a lot of time on my hands, being curious of my surroundings and daydreaming about the life I’d want for myself, and that eventually sparked my interest and passion in computers, cars, building and tinkering at the age of eight. My hands were born to speak in gears and solder. I’d lose hours writing HTML codes, dismantling DVD players, Walkmans, tracing circuits like sacred texts—fingers buzzing with the voltage of discovery.
One summer night, my mother walked in as I was assembling a Tamiya electric motor kit together in my room. She thought I was struggling with it, as she always did. In her mind, all the smart kids would have finished faster than I did, without trial and error. She didn’t see ingenuity, she saw gender treason. “This is for boys,” she hissed and asked me to put it away. Plastic shards scattered like my hope. “Focus on studying, learning an instrument and practice dancing instead.”
The unspoken equation: My worth was whatever she wanted. Not my mind. Not my hands. Never my joy. Her dreams for my sister and I came stamped with gold seals: lawyer, doctor. Prestige over passion. Proven paths over perilous creation. And in my mother’s world, I had a big “empty brain”, I was lazy, I was stupid, I was talentless, who shall be a decorative vessel, not programmers or engineers. What my mother did wasn’t just rejection—it was spiritual amputation. She severed me from my native language to force me into her suffocating script.
I asked myself, “Why must I choose between her love and my soul?” I became a ghost in my own skin, and happiness became a foreign feeling.
This time around, I‘d realized that I wasn’t stupid or lazy, I was just at the wrong place with the wrong people.”
