Do other members feel disconnected from their families?

Will N. Dowd · Post by **Will N. Dowd** » March 11th, 2012, 9:09 pm

Just wondering if others here feel more mentally and socially disconnected from their parents, siblings and extended families and even friends since you've adopted the HA mentality and/or moved abroad? I've always been somewhat of the black sheep of the family since I was young. I was lazy, moody, bad at school, not interested in culture or history. I dreaded the piano lessons my mother forced on me and the church I was forced to go to. If I had my way then I would have played with lego's all day long. I failed high school math, and although I went to a fancy private school, I didn't really like it. Then I quit university and didn't use the $$$ my Dads had put aside for my education, instead working at jobs he thought were bad. Then more recently I've sort of withdrawn from society by becoming anti-social, and non-conformist. I stopped watching TV, rarely attend family gatherings, won't accept or give gifts anymore and have started to sell a lot of my stuff in anticipation of living in Asia. My parents and siblings have complained about me recently saying I don't seem to care about them or much else and don't contact them much. They all live far away from me and complain I don't visit them enough or at all. I hardly even hang out or see my friends anymore, and they are all in the exact situation that I don't want to be in and horrifies me: Big debt, small house, fat wife, 2 kids. I am much happier here when I have one of the foreign girlfriends I have had and feel much more alive, but then they always go home and I feel lonely and sad until I get another one which is becoming increasingly more difficult the older I get. I won't date any local girls anymore and even if I did, I won't marry or live with them, since the laws here are skewed in girls favour so much that it is insanity to even live with one.
Right now my contempt for North American society is so great I try to stay at home as much as possible in order to avoid having to deal with people. I have to work five days a week in retail so that's as much social contact as I want, as soon as I am off I usually flee to go home and relax and be by myself. I'm stockpiling money by living incredibly cheaply and selling every thing I can find in my apartment. Every time i have to go out to work and be in public I am horrified my most western women's appearance. They are fat, loud, obnoxious, and ugly. Then luckily I see some of the many Asian girls that live here and feel happy to see what real women should be. When I tell my family about my plans to move to the Philippines, they seem interested but I suspect they think I am crazy.
Has anyone here have or had the same problem with family and extended family and friends? Did you have the same kind of behaviour I did when I was younger? I think since I was young I've basically been an outcast, free-thinker, loner, non-conformist and will only be truly be happy somewhere like the philippines. I got along famously with the pinays and pinoys I meet. HA is really the website and people I connect with the most.

polya · Post by **polya** » March 11th, 2012, 10:28 pm

I feel totally different to everyone else. I have been disconnected from friends and family since i went to college. There's no going back, I can't "un-know" things. America has taken a wrong turn and I can't live there.

zboy1 · Post by **zboy1** » March 11th, 2012, 11:35 pm

Well, I'm lucky that my parents are both Korean, so when I tell them I want to move overseas they are actually not opposed to my line of thinking. It also helps that I still have relatives living in Korea--so that is a big help. My friends are also kind of understanding because more and more of them feel the same way as I do about the state of the US. In fact, some of them are also in the process moving overseas to countries like Germany, Costa Rica, China, India, etc.

chanta76 · Post by **chanta76** » March 12th, 2012, 12:57 am

zboy1,

I wish I had your parents. I'm Korean also...but my family is bit more controlling..and I'm 35 years old. I think it has to do with the old school Korean mentality and my parents are special case.

Post by **Winston** » March 12th, 2012, 2:07 am

Definitely. But it's not that they aren't friendly. They are polite to me. But the problem is, no one in my family thinks outside the box or has any comment on any alternative topics or unconventional subjects. All they do is try to make a living and keep a polite face. Even my Americanized cousins simply have no comment about anything that we talk about. They are too busy and cannot analyze such issues and have no interest either.

Most people are sheep and zombies. So what do you expect? Only a small minority think for themselves and tell it like it is.

Mangus the Red · Post by **Mangus the Red** » March 12th, 2012, 2:47 pm

My family moved to the Anglosphere when I was young. I have studied, worked, and lived abroad for many years. They still believe that the Anglosphere 'will always be home for us' even though they are increasingly unable to deny the monumental debt loads that the Anglosphere contains and how it is unsustainable.

ExpeditionSailor · Post by **ExpeditionSailor** » April 5th, 2012, 5:55 pm

Will, your situation almost exactly describes my own. Both of my parents are dead, and the only relatives I have left are an aunt and an uncle, two cousins and two sisters.

I basically never see my relatives except at Christmas. I see my aunt and uncle occasionally outside of Xmas, and only because I initiate a visit. I never see my sister - we don't get along. I get along OK with my other sister, who is really a half-sister, but I almost never see her either, but we chat on Facebook from time to time.

I sometimes wonder what I did in this life (or a past one) to deserve being basically ignored like this. Needless to say, I feel hugely disconnected from my family.

I have no friends, either. And so I feel disconnected from the world too.

I often feel I could disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow and nobody would really notice.

E_Irizarry · Post by **E_Irizarry** » April 5th, 2012, 9:13 pm

ExpeditionSailor wrote:Will, your situation almost exactly describes my own. Both of my parents are dead, and the only relatives I have left are an aunt and an uncle, two cousins and two sisters.

I basically never see my relatives except at Christmas. I see my aunt and uncle occasionally outside of Xmas, and only because I initiate a visit. I never see my sister - we don't get along. I get along OK with my other sister, who is really a half-sister, but I almost never see her either, but we chat on Facebook from time to time.

I sometimes wonder what I did in this life (or a past one) to deserve being basically ignored like this. Needless to say, I feel hugely disconnected from my family.

I have no friends, either. And so I feel disconnected from the world too.

I often feel I could disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow and nobody would really notice.

All sarcasm aside, I am totally empathetic to your situation here. Good news is that it's going to make me leave this country that much easier. I am glad for being written off in this society, especially by "my nuclear and extended" "family". And i for two years after I left the Philippines, I still had women talking to me online. Two years after I left Chile (although we don't speak anymore for whatever reason), I had them speaking to me. AND ALL I DID WAS f**k THEM FOR HOURS AND MAKE THEM LAUGH..AND I DIDN'T BUY THEM S-H-I-T.

Even my biological father confessed that my sister should have called the cops on me and get me arrested just because I visited unannounced. What type of shit is that that they're on? I said I was sorry on a daily basis, but that was feebly incorrigible to them. Go America; it's known for its synergy. Family only wants to see you just to compete with each other at annual functions, never to rejoice in being family!!

Ya heard me??

And I didn't buy a lot of things for my family members, but I tried to give them conversations and updates and why I'm so frugal and why it's hard to buy gifts and stay in touch with members. I never had a job for longer than a year and a half, and I always thought it was how this society was so dysfunctional.

I used to lose jobs due to tardiness and lackluster performance. Now due to the shift paradigm of this culture's contemporary pro-feminist, pro-gay vernacular, I LOSE jobs due to BLANTANT CONSPIRACIES AGAINST ME as well as feminism. I have to act gay just to get an interview now because husky burly men such as myself are not food for thought: such as male feminists or metrosexualized faggots.

A lot of you guys complain about America, but at least most of you cats on here have a nice fallback from becoming homeless.

I'm living proof that I'm homeless and that I'm going to make it!!!!! Resilience is the key to foreign residence. You better muthafuckin' ask somebody! I'm out!

Falcon · Post by **Falcon** » April 5th, 2012, 10:26 pm

My close friends are all on the fringes of mainstream American society. They are immigrants, international types, or intellectual oddballs. I cannot connect with the Average Joe of mainstream American society.

As for family: I still talk to them on a regular basis and get along with them well.

My parents aren't telling me not to date Mexican women, but they and my relatives in Taiwan certainly can't help but feel suspicious about all that. They grill me with silly questions, give me silly pieces of advice, and keep telling me not to have a child down in Mexico.

However, they do allow me to date Mexican women, since they have figured out that this is who I am, and that I have my own choices as an independent adult. This acceptance stems also partly from the fact that they know I don't want to completely immerse myself in American culture as the other Asian-American kids do, and they assume it's because I've always been interested in foreign cultures and history as a little kid.

However, I get annoyed when my parents would tell me stories of how such-and-such's son is now dating a fellow Chinese/Taiwanese-American girl that they met in school or church.

"啊呀，XXX 的兒子在教會/Carnegie Mellon/UCLA/Berkeley 認識到個很不錯的女孩子！她父母也是台灣來的 engineer 哦！那個女孩子的功課滿不錯，品性也很好！" Um, sorry, but what's the point of telling me such things? Me importa madre cabrones.

emh · Post by **emh** » April 5th, 2012, 10:58 pm

I can definitely relate. I have two Masters degrees..neither of my parents, nor my older sister ever want to college. My younger sister did but she's too traditional in her outlook for me to relate to. Everyone else in my family is Catholic, whereas I gave up on Catholicism when I was 16 (I'm now 42). I've visited about 20 different countries whereas no one else in my family even has a passport. Needless to say, I've never felt like I fit in with my family. They do help out with my travels (taking in my mail, letting me store stuff) so I do appreciate them for that. That being said, I have extended family - cousins, aunts, uncles - that I'm much closer with than my own immediate family. I sometimes wish some of them could be my immediate family, rather than my own parents and sisters.

As for friends, I've never been that great at making friends and I've drifted apart from most of the ones I had. Again, they're very traditional and as my outlook has changed we have fewer and fewer things in common. Plus most of them are now married and have kids so we're just in very different places in our lives.

E_Irizarry · Post by **E_Irizarry** » April 6th, 2012, 4:11 am

Falcon wrote:My close friends are all on the fringes of mainstream American society. They are immigrants, international types, or intellectual oddballs. I cannot connect with the Average Joe of mainstream American society.

As for family: I still talk to them on a regular basis and get along with them well.

My parents aren't telling me not to date Mexican women, but they and my relatives in Taiwan certainly can't help but feel suspicious about all that. They grill me with silly questions, give me silly pieces of advice, and keep telling me not to have a child down in Mexico. However, they do allow me to date Mexican women, since they have figured out that this is who I am, and that I have my own choices as an independent adult. This acceptance stems also partly from the fact that they know I don't want to completely immerse myself in American culture as the other Asian-American kids do, and they assume it's because I've always been interested in foreign cultures and history as a little kid.

However, I get annoyed when my parents would tell me stories of how such-and-such's son is now dating a fellow Chinese/Taiwanese-American girl that they met in school or church. "啊呀，XXX 的兒子在教會/Carnegie Mellon/UCLA/Berkeley 認識到個很不錯的女孩子！她父母也是台灣來的 engineer 哦！那個女孩子的功課滿不錯，品性也很好！" Um, sorry, but what's the point of telling me such things? Me importa madre cabrones.

Me importa madre cabrones? LOL So you meant to say my mother is important to me, bastards?

Falcon · Post by **Falcon** » April 6th, 2012, 9:04 am

Me importa madre = "I don't give a ****" in Mexican Spanish. Literally it means "My mother matters to me," which is of course sarcastic.

The English translation of the Chinese is:

Aahh - XXX's son met a super good girl at church/Carnegie Mellon/UCLA/Berkeley! Her parents are also engineers from Taiwan! That girl has really good grades, and great moral character too!

As they say, I'm a one-of-a-kind hybrid between a FOB and a paisa. (Search urbandictionary.com if you don't know these terms.)

Post by **Winston** » April 6th, 2012, 2:01 pm

Falcon wrote: However, I get annoyed when my parents would tell me stories of how such-and-such's son is now dating a fellow Chinese/Taiwanese-American girl that they met in school or church. "啊呀，XXX 的兒子在教會/Carnegie Mellon/UCLA/Berkeley 認識到個很不錯的女孩子！她父母也是台灣來的 engineer 哦！那個女孩子的功課滿不錯，品性也很好！" Um, sorry, but what's the point of telling me such things? Me importa madre cabrones.

Mine do that too. It's so petty and shallow. I guess it's their way of shaming you or showing off their relatives? lol

Does your Taiwanese family also brag when one of your cousins becomes a doctor or engineer and/or marries another doctor or engineer? lol I've never understood why becoming a doctor or engineer was something to brag about in a Taiwanese family. I mean, sheesh, why isn't becoming an artist or philosophy teacher something to brag about? Why isn't becoming self-employed or having more freedom something to brag about? They are so shallow and one-dimensional. Where is the proof that becoming a doctor or engineer makes one more happy or more great?

I wish the Taiwanese media would have me go on and let me give them a piece of my freethinking mind. Instead, as usual, they only have mundane people on saying mundane things, not deep or enlightening things.

Falcon · Post by **Falcon** » April 6th, 2012, 4:15 pm

They don't brag about such things because none of my cousins have ever become doctors or engineers.

What irritates me is why working-class Mexican girlfriends/wives aren't something to brag about. Mexicans are delighted when I show them pictures of me with my girlfriend, and they would applaud me and talk about how Mexican women are extraordinarily hard-working and wonderful people. On the other hand, Taiwanese people get really suspicious when I tell them I have a Mexican girlfriend. A common question I get when showing them the pictures is, "Oh, she's Mexican?" (as if they don't know what Mexicans look like). Then a suite of silly questions follow. You should be able to guess what some of them are.

Only Chinese/Taiwanese women with fancy degrees from well-to-do families are something to brag about. Perhaps a well-to-do white woman too. And they keep telling me to "be careful" (小心) when dating Mexican women, but they have never told me to "be careful" when dating East Asian women.

How do Taiwanese people respond to your preference for Filipina women? How did your relatives react to you being with Dianne?

ErikHeaven · Post by **ErikHeaven** » April 17th, 2012, 5:40 pm

My family are a bunch of rabid Jesus freak Jehovah's Witnesses cult members. We never have a family reunion. Its like we are all dead. Oh well nothing to see here.