Ask my mother about my life and she can tell you how I’m sleeping, how I’m eating, if I’m under any stress, and much more besides. But ask her where I work and what exactly I do each day? Good luck.
I have tried to explain. “So I’m freelancing for a few places; I am working on one story about cheese, another about Brexit, and another about cheese during Brexit.” Her eyes glaze over and her body begins to go limp as all enthusiasm and interest drain from her.
“It’s confusing!” she’ll complain, when I tell her other parents know what their children do. “You’re always saying silly words. ‘Pieline…’”
“Byline.”
“‘Content…’ Why are you always talking about content, anyway? You’re happy enough.”
Her job, as she sees it, is to make sure I am happy and healthy; any newfangled non-job I might be involved with is irrelevant. At least, that was the situation until she happened to hear my chance appearance on LBC radio when she was in a cab.
“So proud!” began her new Facebook status. “Just heard my daughter… on the BBC!”
That might seem like a simple mistake, but it isn’t. All media is the BBC to my mum. There’s the BBC (anything on radio, or anything on television where someone in a suit sits behind a desk talking about the news), or the internet, and nothing in between.
Things on the internet aren’t bad necessarily, but they’re not as good as the BBC. And, crucially, all things on the internet are equal. When my mum tells me she read an article about how eating beetroot that you dig from the ground with your bare hands is the key to weight loss, and I ask what website, because it doesn’t sound credible, she’ll scoff and say: “Hello! I just told you: it was on the internet.”
Back to the Facebook status. I didn’t think this misunderstanding mattered, but I’d forgotten the most important aspect of Asian parenthood: your parents don’t care what you do – unless they can brag about it. The speed at which the news of my BBC triumph circulated bent the laws of physics. Few use the “Send to all” WhatsApp functionality, but my mum, she dared. “Everyone is very impressed,” she messaged me later. And with one of the most on-point iPhone autocorrects I’ve ever seen, she summed it up: “Honestly, no one ever expected that one day you’d be a generalist.”
But being an adult is about telling people the hard truths, the stuff they don’t want to hear. So I had to do it. I had to say, “Mum, I don’t actually work for the BBC.”
