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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/Glad_Woodpecker_1361 on 2023-08-09 14:50:02.
My parents moved to the US from China when I (28M) was 6. They quickly befriended another Chinese couple once they arrived. The other couple had a son (David) who was my age, and we became friends as well.
I had a typical Asian childhood. There was immense pressure put on me to earn top grades and get into a top-ranked college. Like many other Asian kids, I took violin lessons and started prepping for the SAT in middle school. To make everything worse, David was always slightly better than me at academics and violin. “Why can’t you be more like David?” was a phrase I heard hundreds of times while growing up.
As college decisions were coming in during my senior year of high school, David was accepted at Harvard, MIT, and many other top schools. I was rejected everywhere but my safety. As a result, mom broke down crying everyday because I was a failure in her eyes, and dad called me a disgrace because he spent so much of his hard-earned money on my violin lessons, SAT prep, and college counseling and I only had an XYZ State University acceptance to show for it. My parents then decided that I was unworthy of my college fund and used it to go on a cruise because they “deserved something nice after wasting 18 years of effort on a disappointment.”
I went NC with my parents when I started college. College was hard. I worked nearly full-time in order to afford rent, and even then I had to take out loans for tuition. It took me longer than usual to graduate, but I did it and I’m currently working as a SWE at an insurance company. I don’t make as much as someone who works in big tech, but I’m doing OK for myself. Meanwhile, David graduated from MIT and Harvard Medical school, and he’s currently in a neurosurgery residency.
About a year ago, my parents told me that they wanted to reconcile. They apologized for what they put me through in high school and offered to pay off my student loans (~$30k). I accepted their offer and for the past year I truly believed that our relationship was improving.
David recently got engaged. Both my parents and I were invited to the engagement party. There, my dad told David’s parents that they were lucky because they raised a son who could soon buy them luxury cars and first class plane tickets to China. My mom then said “we weren’t as lucky, unfortunately.”
I almost lost it then and there, but I held it in. When we got back to my parents’ house I completely lost it, saying that they had no right to compare me to David when they hung me out to dry in college while David could focus solely on school since his parents paid for everything (tuition, rent, and food), I could’ve gone to medical school if I received the same support that David did (I soon realized that I was not a superhuman who could juggle working nearly full-time, getting enough sleep, and earning A’s in pre-med classes), and the only disappointments and disgraces in the family were them because they only cared about material things and prestige.