"He wasted his life", sounds so dramatic, but what does it really mean. It's just an emotion like regret triggered by made up standards. If things were different and in the end they would have said "he lived his best life", what difference would it make except a few different words, differently arranged.

Not sure what my point is, but perhaps being too much into Buddhism and similar things made me lose touch with more normal human emotions.. or I live in regret myself and push it aside, ha.

> “He wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. His entire life, and mine as well.”

What a burden of expectations to lay on both yourself & your own family.

I’m glad the author was able to put those aside & live her own life more authentically than her father did.

One of the few posts where I was happy to not see any comments yet, lest I would just read all the comments and not the story

I love all the unexpected twists in this. And it’s very beautifully written and sobering.

> the most important thing was to find xin fu in life, not to live your life in accordance to the expectations of anyone else

That is why I write all of my code in uncommented C. Your expectation of a maintainable program that doesn’t segfault all the time is just your expectation.

> he wasted his entire life, my mom said

In some ways, she did too by listening to her mother and not just getting divorced as she had wanted to. But I recognize that going against your family’s core beliefs is easier said than done.

It mentions “boskovitch's installation”. I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Fan_(Feel_It_Motherfu...

I like the storytelling, but the sentences without caps are pretty hard for me to parse. The constant search for the beginning of the next sentence destroys the emotional experience for me; I just can't dive into the text and feel "submerged".

A very adept writer.

Thats so sad, and good reminder that we shouldn’t force others onto lifestyles that we want.