My mom still calls me bao bei even as I approach twenty-one. To her, I am nowhere near being an adult. The truth is, I don’t feel like one either. If I could, I’d probably push adulthood off until thirty.
Lately, I’ve been wondering what twenty-one looked like for my parents, if they had also felt half-grown, half-lost, unsure of what comes next?
They didn’t.
When my mom was twenty-one, she was rarely home. She worked at a hydroelectric power plant away from her home, having to ride the bus out to the countryside there days at a time before returning. I’ve been there once, years later, when she brought me to visit China for the first time. I remember thinking it was beautiful; sunlight pouring through the dorm room windows, wild plants spilling out of every corner, the quiet trickling of water flowing through perfectly clean gutters. The beds were simple wooden planks softened only by folded blankets. Everything felt peaceful.
My dad’s life at twenty-one felt, at first, like something out of a story. He was a high school math teacher. In the spring, he would take his students on picnics by the river, and sometimes even mountain climbing. The mountains were abundant in bamboo and fiddleheads, which he would gather and bring home to his family. Once, after a long climb, he and his students were caught in the cold and had to spend the night in a small cabin at the summit.
I admired the lives my parents lived at twenty-one. They seemed so full, so connected, as if their life moved forward naturally, like a river in motion. Meanwhile, mine felt stuck, like a chunky rock lodged stubbornly in the riverbed. My days are filled with deadlines, grades, applications, and rejections. Every free moment feels like it must be spent striving for more, yet the sense of being enough always seems just out of reach.
I found myself wishing that I could have lived their lives.
But the version of their lives I had been holding onto wasn’t the full picture. My parents didn’t push back against my comparison right away. Instead, they filled in the parts I had never seen.
As the eldest daughter, almost everything at home fell to my mom. Aside from her younger sister, who was still too young to help, she was the only one responsible for the housework; taking care of her sister, cooking dinner, and washing clothes for all her cousins after they returned from working in the fields. That was simply how things were back then: the men worked the land, and the women carried everything at home. Money was tight, too. When she wasn’t working at the hydroelectric plant, she worked at a small convenience store selling flowers. She was exhausted all the time, and she doesn’t remember ever really having a proper day of rest.
My dad remembers his life back then as being much more difficult than it is now. In his village, food was rationed. Each family was given tickets that allowed them to buy only half a kilogram of meat for an entire month. Starving every once in a while had been normal. When he and his brothers were young, they would sneak into the farmers’ fields after they harvested, digging through the soil for anything that had been left behind. Finding a few yams felt like a victory, as they would bring them home to share among the family.
I had read about lives like my mom and dad’s before, in storybooks. But hearing it from them made it feel real, in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to fully grasp.
I began to realize how much I had romanticized their stories. Even with the peaceful countryside setting and the mountain adventures, their lives at the time were largely shaped by relentless work and the need to endure hunger.
My mom helped me understand why I had envied their lives so much over my own. “It’s not our lives you want, but what you saw in them.”
She was right. I wasn’t longing for hunger or exhaustion. I was longing for a sense of purpose, of being needed, of belonging to a world where the mountains and rivers were just… there, a part of everything. She told me that ever since I started bringing home report cards, I had been carrying a constant pressure to succeed, always pushing myself and comparing myself to others. It wasn’t just me; many people my age felt the same way. It was simply how the world had evolved. And perhaps, she told me, what I was hearing in their stories was something I felt was missing from my own life.
What she said stayed with me, because it felt so true. My parents had struggled, but their lives seemed to move forward with a kind of steadiness. Mine, in contrast, often feels like an endless cycle of chasing a version of success I’ve defined for myself, always just out of reach and impossible to fully grasp. And that’s what exhausts me most: not moving forward, but feeling stuck in the same loop.
At the same time, that feeling brought a sense of guilt. How could I even be complaining, when my parents had faced so much more at my age?
However, they didn’t see it that way.
They reminded me that their struggles were not “harder,” just different. Their lives had been defined by survival and sacrifice. Mine, in many ways, is defined by academic pressure and anxiety about the future, which takes a toll on me in a way they had never experienced.
Every generation, they told me, faces unique challenges of its time.
My parents’ twenty-ones and my own exist in entirely different worlds. And maybe that doesn’t mean one is better or worse, or that one is easier and harder, because they cannot be measured against each other in the way I once did.
So when my mom calls me bao bei, it feels like she’s reminding me that I don’t have to rush into becoming an adult all at once.
That it’s okay to still be figuring it out.
