“Why Can’t Our Family Do That?”

Navigating Expectations During a Family Crisis

By Paul Youngbin Kim, Ph.D.

F

amily comes first. No matter what.

This was the mentality that my parents instilled in me when I was growing up. Grounded in cultural (i.e., Korean) and biblical principles, a part of this mindset was for my sister and me to be kind to one another as siblings. But make no mistake about it: in my family, the “family comes first” mentality disproportionately emphasized the need to honor our parents. 

It is telling that the Korean compound word for filial piety hyo-doh (효도) contains the word doh (도), which refers to a sense duty. For most of my life, I have viewed the construct of filial piety as an interpersonal obligation. For those in individualistic cultures that prize the congruence between how one feels and behaves, the notion of honoring parents as a sense of duty might feel strange; “honor them because you want to, not because you have to,” one might say. But as someone who grew up in a Korean culture that normalizes the occasional (regular?) dissonance between the internal and external aspects of the person, I had no qualms about seeing filial piety as something I must practice, even if I do not feel like it at times. 

I always thought of myself as decent at fulfilling my obligations as a firstborn son. Even when my elderly parents moved back to Korea and thousands of miles separated us (I am in Seattle), I felt that I had a clear grasp of what was expected of me. To visit my parents whenever it was financially feasible. To call them every week. To send videos and pictures of their grandchildren over Kakao Talk messenger. To send money to them. To pray for them and with them. 

But when my mother suffered a stroke that left her in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for 2.5 years, bedridden in a hospital bed in Cheong-Ju, what it meant to honor my parents shifted dramatically and confusingly. 

During this dark season of my family’s life, I struggled to figure out my obligations. There are too many examples to list here, but one complicated question that I grappled with for the entirety of my mother’s hospitalization and her eventual death pertained to the expectations regarding my physical presence. That is, what was my mother’s expectation about how often and how long I should visit Korea? Granted, even before her hospitalization, she would never directly tell me how long I should visit. But like a good Korean grandmother and mother, there would be subtle comments and looks dropped here and there; and like a good Korean son, I would use my nunchi (눈치) to decipher her wishes and plan accordingly. 

But how do you decipher the expectations and wishes of someone who has lost their ability to communicate, verbally or nonverbally? How do you know that you are honoring a parent adequately, when they cannot give you any kind of feedback, reassurance, or response? 

Eventually, I turned to my father to decipher the expectations. And for my father, the “family comes first, no matter what” mindset was magnified during this time; it translated to setting aside everything—and I truly mean, everything—to devote himself to taking care of mom. In my case, however, I tried to apply the “family comes first” mentality in this particular situation with more nuance. 

This difference and eventual conflict between my father and me brought to mind a theory in family studies. Desiree Baolian Qin, in writing about the experiences of Chinese immigrant parents and their children in the U.S., uses the term, parallel dual frame of reference (Qin, “Our Child Doesn’t Talk to Us Anymore,” 2006). Briefly, the “dual frame of reference” part signifies that both the immigrant parents and their children rely on their own comparison groups to make sense of their experiences (e.g., immigrant parents comparing their children to the typical child back in their country of origin; children comparing their immigrant parents to their American peers’ parents). The “parallel” part of the terminology conveys that these reference points can differ to the degree that they are not connecting to one another, like parallel lines that never meet. 

Consistent with this framework, my father, implicitly or explicitly, formulated his expectations of me based on what he saw in Korean people and how they took care of their elderly parents. Like my Korean cousins who were exceptional in their filial duties. Why can’t you be more like them? 

As for me, implicitly or explicitly, my perspectives were influenced by what I saw my American peers’ parents typically doing, in coping with major illnesses that impacted their spouses. Specifically, I was struck by how they drew relational boundaries to be able to live their lives, to go on, while also taking care of the ill family member. Why can’t we do that? 

I would tentatively ask my father to take breaks from his daily visits to the hospital that were clearly taking a toll on this well-being. I would suggest that he go away for a few days and then come back to his routine of taking care of mom. My dad would look at me and shake his head, as if I had suggested something so outlandish.  

At this point in the essay, I wish I could offer a concrete list of suggestions to counter the generational and cultural differences that might arise in your relationships with parents. Sorry if that is what you were expecting. My father and I continue to struggle with our parallel dual frame of reference, across different life situations. I have accepted that this is part of what it means to live in a multigenerational relationship that is both enriched and challenged by a multicultural dynamic. 

I do think that there is a real glimpse of hope in the relationship, though, in those moments and seasons when the parallel is no longer perfectly parallel. At the risk of overusing the parallel lines analogy, when there is an effort from both of us to bend that line slightly, like non-parallel lines that will eventually meet, there is a sense that we are headed somewhere, together.  

When my father said to me with a heavy sigh, during my lengthy visit to Korea, “you should go back to Seattle to be with your wife and kids,” that was a meaningful bending of that parallel line. Or, when I extended my already drawn-out stay in Korea to be with my parents, even if it resulted in additional hardships for my immediate family in Seattle, I would like to say that there was a bending of that parallel frame of reference. 

And in these efforts to see eye to eye, to understand the differences in cultural and generational needs, is a way for me to try to live faithfully into the biblical mandate to honor my parents (Exodus 20:12; Ephesians 6:2–3). It is also a way to try to live into the exhortation to, “in humility value others above yourselves” (Philippians 2:3). 

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

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Paul Youngbin Kim, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at Seattle Pacific University. As a counseling psychologist, Paul has written extensively about Asian and Asian American experiences and how religion might intersect with these experiences. He writes for the Psychology Today and Christian Scholar's Review blogs. 

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