我不是你的父母，只是你们的长女

Coming to a foreign land, the cost of immigration is never just the silence of language, nor merely the fear of an uncertain future. It is a reconstruction—a tearing apart—of roles within a family, a shift in power, and the quiet fracturing of the self.

My younger brother was just 11 when he arrived in Canada with us, not long after we left China. Back in Fujian, he had been a top student at one of the province’s best elementary schools—quiet, thoughtful, with glasses perched neatly on his nose. But everything changed when we arrived in Vancouver and he started attending Strathcona Elementary.

Language barriers. Cultural disconnection. The absence of our father. The weight our mother bore alone in a strange land—all of it pressed down on his young shoulders and began to split him open in places no one could see.

One day, he was shoved in the hallway by classmates and fell hard onto the floor. The only pair of glasses our father had left him were crushed under the feet of a passing student. My brother tried to pick himself up and quietly said, in broken English, “Sorry.”

What he got in return was a chorus of laughter—and a sentence that sliced straight through him:

My mother told me this story later. I was sixteen at the time, sitting alone in a university library corner. I still had my headphones in. My textbook lay open in front of me, but my hands wouldn’t move. Tears welled in my eyes, but I couldn’t even cry. Because I knew exactly how he felt: lost in language, rejected by identity, suffocated by isolation.

That year, I hadn’t even figured out how British Columbia’s school system worked, yet I was already forced to take on the role of a parent. No one explained to me how summer school courses worked, how credit transfers functioned, or how to navigate the enrollment process. I had to learn everything—through websites, phone calls, email threads—just to piece together a future for someone else.

Later, my brother resented me. He said I didn’t pick the right courses for him. He said I held him back from skipping a grade. But what I wanted to tell him—what I still want to say—is this:

I didn’t even have a roadmap for my own life. Around that time, I got my high school English transcript. The marks were so low, I wanted to disappear. That piece of paper wasn’t an assessment—it was a humiliation. I gave up asking our parents to invest in my education, and instead gave them permission—quietly, without words—to pour all their hope and money into you.

And in return?

I got your accusations. I got the blame from our parents, who passed on to me the stress they couldn’t speak aloud at work. I got treated like a stand-in adult, not like a child who was still trying to grow.

No one else knows that summer, when I was nineteen, you were held at knifepoint by an older student from your school. It happened in a park. He demanded your pocket money. You said no. The police took a statement. But we were never told what happened after that. We didn’t know if they caught him. We didn’t know if it might happen again. We didn’t even know if we were allowed to ask.

You were around 170 cm tall then—the only boy in the family. Everyone saw you as the “man of the house.” But you were still just a teenager—still soft, still scared.

Even after that knife, you never cried in front of our parents. You didn’t talk about it. You just kept swallowing the fear and shame over and over again.

But I remember one night, passing by your bedroom. The door was slightly ajar. The lights were off. Everything was still.

Except for the sound. A soft, muffled crying. Almost silent—but there.

You didn’t let it become sobbing. You bit it down into your chest, into your throat, like you were wrestling yourself not to feel it. You didn’t want to be a burden to a family already falling apart. So you chose to bleed in private.

And I did the same.

We were never the kids chasing a glittering “Canadian dream.” We knew better. We knew our parents fought over money on long-distance calls—our mother standing all day in a greasy kitchen, our father working seven days a week at a hotel owned by distant relatives in China.

So we both gave up our bright futures.
Just so the family wouldn’t collapse under the weight of our needs.

Sometimes I wonder: Maybe we weren’t “not good enough.” Maybe we weren’t “unmotivated.”
Maybe we just learned to give up too early.

We didn’t stop because we didn’t want to try.
We stopped because we knew: the world doesn’t pause for the needs of the powerless.

So we stayed silent. We didn’t cry. We did our best to look strong.
Just so our exhausted parents could have a little less to carry.

At the time, Mom was working in a Chinese restaurant kitchen—ten to twelve hours a day, swollen feet, stiff fingers, never once daring to ask for a day off. Dad was in China, managing a hotel for relatives, never a day of rest. Every phone call from him ended in frustration, scolding, or silence.

Faced with your trauma, Mom and I stayed silent.
Dad stayed far away.
And we—we just clenched our teeth and lived through the next day.

Because we didn’t know the law.
Didn’t know how to file a complaint.
Didn’t know how to demand our right to know what happened to you.
We feared the blank stares, the institutional indifference, the possibility that one language mistake could shut a door forever.

I remember another time we received a court summons—dozens of pages, all in English. My parents couldn’t understand a single word. I was still a teenager then. Culturally displaced. Linguistically unarmed. The sight of that thick stack of legalese filled me with dread.

That wasn’t a reading assignment.
It was a gate. A wall. A test.
And no one had taught me how to get through it.

I grabbed our tattered Chinese-English dictionary. Line by line, I translated every paragraph, barely grasping what “pre-trial motion” or “court date” even meant. But I remembered the hearing date. I held on to that.

I don’t know how you felt during that time. But I know this:

You were the “only son,” the assumed protector. But no one knew what it took for you to stand there outside that cold, gray courthouse, holding yourself together.

No parents by your side.
No legal counsel.
No translator.
Just you.

And me? I was still in school, filling out your summer program applications. Telling myself, Maybe if I try a little harder, I can protect him from the world’s violence.

But I was never your parent.
I was never your savior.