Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby picks her up. The show allows itself a stillness here it doesn’t usually permit—fifteen hours of controlled ER chaos and then this: a man and an infant who don’t belong to each other, both of them quieter for it. The baby settles. He settles.

Many on social media predicted he would foster and even adopt her. I understand the impulse completely, and I want to gently push on it, because I think what we’re actually watching is more complicated and more true than the ending we want.

Dr. Robby is not okay. This is not a secret the show keeps. He is brilliant and great at what he does, but he is also coming apart in ways he hasn’t fully reckoned with. He has what the show carefully refuses to label but what looks, from the outside, a great deal like PTSD—the accumulated weight of losing his mentor during the pandemic and watching so many people die in the ER.

The people who care for others are complicated. They’re not always perfect. But at least they cared.

And many of us have heard about Punch, the monkey who captured the internet’s heart after being rejected by his mother at a Japanese zoo, who I wrote about in an MS Now essay. You may or may not have heard about the elephant calf at a German zoo whose mother walked away, and an older female stepped in without ceremony or explanation. These stories keep coming, and we keep stopping everything for them.

I’ve been sitting with why.

Not the easy answer, which is that baby animals are cute and people are sentimental. That’s true but it’s not the whole thing. There’s something else happening when strangers fly across the world to stand in front of a zoo enclosure and bear witness. That’s not sentimentality. That’s recognition.

We keep watching because we’ve all felt it. Not the literal version—most of us weren’t abandoned at birth by a parent, though there are different kinds of abandonment, rejection or distancing because of divorce, illness, or other reasons. But the feeling underneath it, the question that stories about abandoned babies and animals speak to is the questions that many have asked themselves at one time or another? Am I worthy of being loved?

That question doesn’t require an abandonment to take root.

We want Robby to adopt Baby Jane because we want the story to close cleanly. Broken man finds abandoned child. Child, through the mysterious alchemy of innocence, heals the broken man. Everyone is saved. It’s not a bad story. It’s the story we need to believe, because the alternative—that your biological parents are not equipped or willing to keep you — is something we don’t know what to do with.

We recognize the abandoned baby because we have all, at some point, been the one holding the stuffed animal. The one waiting to see if someone cares.

I was a Baby Jane Doe. Not the hospital kind — I wasn’t left in an ER the way Baby Jane is in The Pitt. I was left in a stairwell in Hong Kong.

I like to think that someone in the orphanage held me like Dr. Robby did.

Growing up, I watched the Oscars every year with my mother and begged to stay up long past bedtime to see the final awards announced. Back then I watched for the glamour and beauty. The night felt magical: the shimmering gowns, the music swelling in the theater, the luminous faces stepping onto that stage. It all seemed like the ultimate moment of arrival, proof that someone had made it to the very top.

Now when I watch, I admire something very different.

What moves me most is the persistence behind it. I think about the decades of effort that came before that brief walk to the podium: the seasons when the work went unnoticed, the failures, the near misses, the quiet disappointments, and the stubborn decision to keep going even when there was no evidence the dream would lead anywhere. That is what the Oscars represent to me now.

Not simply success.

But endurance.

If you listen carefully to acceptance speeches, that is often what you hear beneath the gratitude. People are trying, in just a few minutes, to acknowledge the long road that brought them there. Michael B. Jordan captured it in six words: “Thank you for betting on me.”

Such a short sentence, but it contains an entire journey. Every meaningful pursuit depends on someone who believes in you before success is obvious. Sometimes that person is a mentor, a parent, a teacher, or a friend. My high school journalism teacher believed in me and changed my life. And sometimes the person who has to keep betting on you the longest is yourself.

Most dreams begin quietly. Composer Ludwig Göransson once traced his journey back to childhood, recalling that his father placed a guitar in his arms when he was seven years old. Not with recognition or applause, but with a small spark of curiosity that slowly grows over time. Then life intervenes. Reality enters. The dream has to survive doubt, rejection, comparison, and time itself. That is why the most powerful speeches are rarely about the award. They are about the road that led there.

A few years ago, my daughter and son-in-law gave me a Mother’s Day gift that unexpectedly touched that childhood dream. They took me to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where visitors can stand on a stage and deliver a simulated Oscar acceptance speech before a filmed virtual audience. It was meant to be fun, a lighthearted afternoon outing. But when I stood on that stage and clutched an Oscar statue, something in me opened unexpectedly.

I cried.

I had not expected that reaction. But standing there awakened the child who once watched the Oscars with her mother and believed in possibilities. It was the symbolism of it, the feeling of being seen, of imagining that your work might matter enough to be recognized. I had not realized how much I was still carrying that little girl’s dream until that moment made it visible.

I was honored last year to be named a recipient of the James Patterson “Go Finish Your Book” grant. Not an Oscar. Not Hollywood. Not that stage. But it touched the same place in me and reminded me of something I think many of us need to hear: dreams do not always arrive in the form we first imagined. Sometimes they find us through a different door.

I think about how many people quietly set aside a dream not because they chose to abandon it, but because life accumulated. Responsibilities multiplied. The years passed. Somewhere along the way, the voice that said keep going became harder to hear.

Dreams rarely disappear all at once. More often they fade slowly, worn down by doubt or the fear that it may simply be too late. I never would have imagined that in my sixties I would be a full-time writer fortunate enough to publish essays in national outlets.

The people standing on that Oscar stage refused to quit during the long stretches when nothing seemed to be happening. They kept working through the in-between years when the dream offered very little in return.

Not every dream ends with applause. Not every life’s work is publicly recognized. But sometimes the real triumph is simpler than that. It is that you stayed with it. That you kept showing up for something you believed in, long after it would have been easier to walk away.

What looks from the outside like one shining moment is almost always the result of years of quietly refusing to give up. And maybe that is what is truly worth celebrating, not only the people who make it onto the stage, but everyone who continues to show up for the work, even when no one is watching.

As a child, I watched the Academy Awards with my mother every year. We treated those nights like holidays: snacks on the coffee table, the glow of the TV filling our living room, the sense that we were witnessing something “important.”

But year after year, I never saw someone who looked like me step up to the podium and claim the moment. No AAPI winners. The message was clear: you don’t truly belong.

For many immigrant families, practicality is the name of the game. So when I dreamed of being a writer, it did not land as a dream. It landed as a threat. My parents made it clear that the only accomplishments that counted were the ones that sounded practicality in a room full of other serious people. That kind of practicality was supposed to keep you from disappointment and worthy of your parents’ sacrificies.

For a long time, I internalized the message: art was indulgent, and visibility was dangerous.

That is why wins by Chloe Zao and Michelle Yeoh matter. Not as celebrity trivia, not as a “finally” that fixes everything, but as proof that the story is still shifting. Proof that the gates are not as locked as they once were.

In 2023, Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar win cracked something open. She became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress at the Academy Awards, a line that still feels surreal to type because it took nearly a century for it to happen.

I did not just feel happy for her. I felt unsteady, like something inside me was reorienting. Because when someone who looks like you is honored on that scale, it does not stay on the stage. It travels. It lands in living rooms. It reaches the younger version of you who was watching beside her mother, absorbing the unspoken lesson that certain people get to be celebrated and others are meant to applaud politely from the dark.

For creatives, seeing someone who looks like me on the podium is so affirming.

Yesterday, at the 83rd Golden Globe Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet won Best Motion Picture for Drama. Zhao’s acceptance speech did something deeper than celebrate a trophy. It named the cost of making art, and it named the choice at the center of it: vulnerability.

Here is the part that hit home for me, the part that made me feel like she was speaking directly to every person who has ever edited themselves into something more “acceptable”:

“The most important thing about being an artist is learning to be vulnerable enough to allow ourselves to be seen for who we are, not who we ought to be…even the parts we’re ashamed of, that we’re afraid of, that are imperfect…Let’s keep our hearts open, and let’s keep seeing each other and allow ourselves to be seen.”

That message is not just for artists.

Because so many of us, especially those raised in cultures where saving face is survival, learn to present a polished self. A high-achieving self. A self that does not need too much, feel too much, ask too much. We learn the difference between what is true and what is permitted. And then we spend decades trying to untangle the two.

Zhao’s message, in that room and on that broadcast, felt like permission to stop performing the version of yourself that other people can digest.

And it reminded me of the thread connecting these moments. Michelle Yeoh’s win mattered because it expanded the idea of whose stories get to be told…and celebrated.

Zhao’s win, and the way she framed it, mattered because it named what art requires from us once we finally step into the light: not perfection, not palatability, not “good representation.” Just honesty.

They also widen the emotional vocabulary we are allowed to use publicly. When Zhao stands there and says the job is to be vulnerable, she is pushing against an entire cultural structure that teaches us to hide what is inconvenient: grief, longing, imperfection, need.

And because Hamnet is a story shaped around loss and the aftershocks of grief, the win itself feels symbolically aligned with what Zhao said in that moment: if we are going to make something that reaches others, we cannot keep sealing ourselves off.

That is the part I want to carry forward into my own work.

Here is my 2023 essay on Michelle Yeoh’s wins for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once for Today.com.

https://www.today.com/popculture/essay/michelle-yeoh-success-asian-american-women-rcna73603

My husband and I were enjoying an intimate moment after a romantic anniversary dinner when an odd look suddenly crossed his face. “I just felt a small lump on your breast,” he said. We carried on and fell asleep.

The next day, he insisted: “You should get it checked out.”

I called my doctor. It turned out to be cancer. I am alive 36 years later only because of sheer luck—only by chance I didn’t become a statistic.

A Dangerous Reality

Cancer is the leading cause of death among Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Vietnamese Americans, unlike other racial groups where heart disease typically claims more lives. In 2024, approximately 310,720 women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, and about 42,250 women will die from the disease. Yet despite these sobering numbers, Asian Americans are screened for cancer at lower rates than the majority of Americans, with general screening rates ranging from only 40.5% to 67.5%.

The disparities are stark. Compared with Americans overall, Asian American screening rates are lower for cervical cancer (75.4% vs. 83.0%), breast cancer (64.1% vs. 72.4%), and colorectal cancer (46.9% vs. 58.6%). This isn’t just about numbers—it’s about lives that could be saved through early detection.

My Hidden Battle

When I heard I had breast cancer, sobs racked my body. I was only 29. I didn’t think young women, much less young Asian women, got breast cancer. The survival rates for the disease weren’t as good as they are today.

Doctors were able to save my breast, but the treatment regimen was grueling. Six weeks of radiation followed by months of chemotherapy. With the drugs available back then, I stayed in I l I lay in bed for hours after toxic chemicals were dripped into me, battling waves of nausea that today’s patients mostly avoid.

Yet instead of seeking the support of friends and fellow churchgoers, I suffered in silence. For 28 years, I kept my breast cancer a secret. I lived in fear that my Chinese American friends would shun me if they told them what I had endured.

The Weight of Cultural Shame

This fear wasn’t unfounded. Some Asian Americans believe that illness results from karma or bad choices. Previous studies have suggested several barriers for Asian Americans to screening cancers, including language barriers and neighborhood environment, but cultural stigma remains one of the most insidious obstacles.

I thought Asian Americans would ghost me if they believed bad luck would befall them by association. Some might even believe cancer was contagious. A friend’s Chinese American neighbor treated her like a pariah after she got breast cancer, refusing to speak to her for years.

I was ashamed to be sick, ashamed to be imperfect. For most of my life, I had worked relentlessly to succeed—graduating as high school valedictorian and from one of the top MBA programs in the country. The model-minority myth had done a number on me, and cancer wasn’t supposed to be part of that image.

My mother blamed me, asking my doctor if I caused my disease because I ate so many sweets. This belief that I or my ancestors did something wrong for such misfortune to fall upon me stemmed from traditional beliefs that run deep in our communities.

The Cost of Silence

While hiding my cancer might have kept some of the shame at bay, it isolated me in my pain. Save for my husband and immediate family members, I was alone and wallowed in depression for much of the time. Research backs up what I experienced—studies show that cancer self-stigma is associated with poorer quality of life among cancer patients, and stigmatization can lead to lower quality of life specifically among Chinese American breast cancer survivors.

When I finished my last chemotherapy, I shouted, “I’m done! I’m done!” We waited two years until it was safe, and then, at age 32, I had a healthy baby girl. Another girl and a boy soon followed. Busy with work, kids, community, and church activities, I never talked about my secret.

Breaking the Silence

Eight years ago, I was having lunch with an Asian American friend and mentioned I was going to get my annual mammogram.

“I never get one. I’m afraid to find out,” she said.

Another friend declared she would rather die than get one.

These conversations convinced me I had to speak up. I already knew my mother-in-law was one of them. I pleaded with her until she finally got her first mammogram at age 60. The doctors found a malignancy, but it was caught early. Surrounded by her children and grandchildren, we joined for her Thanksgiving last year. She is 96.

Gripping the podium in my sweat-stained blue dress at my Chinese American church, I looked out at the 300 congregants. I took in the encouraging smiles on the faces of close friends. I shared my breast cancer publicly and encouraged women to attend the breast cancer seminar I was helping to organize at the church. Minutes before I spoke, I begged myself not to cry. I did anyway. Twenty-eight years of secret-keeping just spilled out. I saw tears on the cheeks of my teenage children.

The Power of Speaking Up

During the event, one after another, women raised their hands, starting their questions with words like, “My friend has breast cancer,” or, “I know someone with the disease.” Later, some people approached me and whispered their own cancer secrets.

A month later, one attendee was diagnosed with breast cancer after her first mammogram in years. Watching others hug and encourage her at church, hearing that others brought her meals, called, and visited her, I understood how I’d suffered needlessly.

Why This Matters Now

The statistics are getting more concerning. Asian American/Pacific Islander women have experienced the fastest increase in breast cancer incidence, with rates rising 2.7% per year among younger women and 2.5% per year among older women. Young Asian American/Pacific Islander women went from having the second lowest breast cancer rate in 2000 (57.4 per 100,000) to the highest rate in 2021 (86.3 per 100,000), surpassing both White and Black women.

Only 1 in 2 breast cancers in Guamanian, Samoan, Pakistani, Tongan, Laotian, and Hmong women are diagnosed at an early stage compared with 2 in 3 White women and 3 in 4 Japanese women, likely reflecting challenges in access to care and cultural barriers to screening.

A Call to Action

Every year, I get a mammogram—and my family celebrates and worries along with me. My two 20-something daughters know they are at higher risk because of their genetic history.

When I shower and towel myself dry, my lumpectomy scar reminds me to never take life for granted. I’m grateful to be alive and share my story to help others.

Treating disease like it’s a curse has to stop. We need to normalize conversations about cancer in Asian American communities. We need to encourage screening without shame. We need to support each other through diagnosis and treatment, not treat cancer survivors as pariahs.

Let’s do what we can for our own health. Schedule that mammogram. Get that screening. Talk to your loved ones about the importance of early detection.Share this essay with women you love.

Let’s break the silence that could cost lives.

We’ll be glad we did.

Updated from my previously published essays in NBC News and Business Insider.

When I saw Kristen Bell’s anniversary post on Instagram earlier this week, I froze. She celebrated 12 years of marriage to her husband, actor and podcaster Dax Shepard, by writing:

I would never kill you. A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point. Even though I’m heavily incentivized to kill you, I never would.

I’m sure she meant it to be funny and irreverent, but reading it made my blood run cold. I know what real death threats sound like.

I can remember pressing a pink pillow over my 10-year-old ears in an attempt to block out my mother’s screams as my father beat her with a belt. Fifty-six years later, I can still hear the sharp and rhythmic sound of leather on skin, broken only by her crying, “Please, stop! Please!”

It was winter break, the time I dreaded most. There were too many hours for my parents to share the same space. Too much silence before the eventual storm.

We lived in a custom-built home beside a lake outside of Detroit. My father had a Ph.D. in chemistry. From the outside, we looked like the perfect immigrant family. Inside, however, the air was always thick with tension — the kind that made you hold your breath without realizing it.

Anything could set my father off — a wrong word, a burnt meal. Whenever a letter arrived from his siblings in China, it felt like we were living through a world war inside our home. China was mostly closed off from the world at that point, and letters rarely arrived. When they did, reading them left my father feeling guilty and angry — guilty that he was the only one of his eight siblings who had been able to immigrate to America and furious at my mother for not allowing him to send money home to them.

“Why didn’t you tell me they wrote?” he’d shout when he discovered a letter had arrived and my mother hadn’t given it to him.

“They’re doing fine,” my mother would say.

“Don’t lie to me!”

My mother struggled with her mental health, but she refused to stand down. She’d scream in Chinese back at my father — her words fast and sharp. The house became a boxing arena. My brother and I would sit on the couch while they pushed each other — our heads both bowed, with me usually crying. Sometimes I’d cower in my bed, clutching the pink pillow and praying it would end.

When it finally did, I’d find my mother sitting on the floor, her face blank, her hands trembling. I’d put my arms around her and whisper, “It’s OK, Mom,” but we both knew it wasn’t.

I’ll never forget the time I accompanied her to see a doctor to have her wounds treated. I sat on a metal chair and listened to him tell her, “This has got to stop.” The man who should have heard those words was waiting outside, smoking in his company car.

Sometimes my father’s rage turned toward me. Individuals who attack their partners often attack their children, too. I didn’t know that then — I only knew I had to stay small and quiet in hopes of becoming invisible.

One particular experience is etched deep in my memory.

It was in the middle of the night, in the middle of a frigid Michigan winter. My parents had been fighting for hours. Their voices rose and fell in waves of fury until, sometime after midnight, I drifted into an uneasy sleep. Suddenly, I felt my father’s hand yank me from my bed. I hit the floor before I could even open my eyes.

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll throw her out,” he shouted to my mother, his face twisted with rage.

He dragged me down the hallway toward the front door. My brother ran from his room, yelling, “Dad! Stop! Let her go!”

My father pulled harder, trying to drag me outside into the snow. I grasped the stair rail with all of my strength. Finally, he let go. I slumped to the floor, my body shaking uncontrollably. My brother helped me up and whispered, “Go back to sleep. It’s OK.”

But it wasn’t OK. It never was. That was just one of many nightmarish nights I experienced.

As far as I know, my mother never considered leaving. She had no options — no money of her own, only limited English and nowhere to go. Divorce would have brought unbearable embarrassment to my traditional Chinese American mother. My parents were desperate to project the image of a respectable family. We were the “model minority” family before that phrase became commonplace.

“Don’t tell anyone,” my mother would say. “People won’t understand.” And even if she did tell someone, the shame and humiliation would have been unbearable. So, I stayed silent at school and at Brownie meetings. I never tried to convince her to leave, and I never confronted my father directly. Even after I graduated as valedictorian of my high school, got accepted into a top MBA program, and became a wife and mother, the silence stayed with me.

During college, my brother and I had to rush home from our respective campuses whenever things got bad. I’ll never forget one night after an especially violent fight. My brother sat on our parents’ living room couch, his face drained and his shoulders slumped.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said quietly.

But he did. We both did. We kept witnessing their violence until we finally fled thousands of miles away to California after graduate school. Our parents eventually moved to California and lived with my brother. Although the physical abuse subsided, the verbal fights lasted until my father died.

I suffer from complex PTSD and have struggled with depression for years — unable to shake the feeling that chaos could erupt at any moment. Now, decades later, I still flinch when I hear sudden noises. Slammed doors and raised voices make my heart race. The trauma hasn’t faded; it’s always there waiting for me to experience it again.

My mother died 13 years ago without ever telling her story of domestic violence, but I can tell mine. I can name what happened, and in doing so, reclaim what was stolen — safety, peace, and the belief that love shouldn’t hurt.

Kristen Bell may have thought she was making a joke, but there’s nothing funny about domestic violence. A recent report found that roughly 1 in 5 homicides in America is committed by an intimate partner, and over half of female homicide victims are killed by a current or former male intimate partner. For those of us who grew up in homes marked by fear and violence, that reality can never be a punchline. It’s a memory we carry for life.

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

Yvonne Liu is a writer working on a memoir about mental health, adoption and surviving a traumatic childhood. Her work can be found in the New York Times, Salon, Newsweek, NBC News and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a James Patterson “Go Finish Your Book” grant and a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar in nonfiction.

Keaton didn’t just navigate Hollywood’s brutal treatment of older women. She subverted it. From “The Godfather” to “Book Club,” her career charted the evolution of women both on and off-screen.

When Keaton appeared as Kay Adams in “The Godfather” in 1972, she showed us what happens when a woman disappears into a man’s story. Kay was intelligent, educated and devoted, but became trapped in Michael Corleone’s world, her goodness consumed by his obligations and family. As a teenager watching that film, I recognized the warning. My traditional Chinese American immigrant mother wanted me to marry well and be a homemaker. Kay represented the woman I feared I’d become if I stayed silent and didn’t fight for my own wants and needs.

Five years later, “Annie Hall” blew us away. Keaton’s Annie was funny, self-conscious and original. She wore men’s vests and ties, sang off-key, and made uncertainty magnetic. For audiences used to seeing polished, ornamental heroines, Annie was a revelation. Keaton won an Oscar, but the role’s lasting impact was showing that authenticity was its own form of beauty.

By 1987, Keaton was forty-one and starring in “Baby Boom.” As corporate executive J.C. Wiatt, she portrayed a woman torn between ambition and caretaking, independence and expectation. She made the chaos of modern womanhood visible and funny, proving that competence and vulnerability could coexist. I watched that film in my late twenties, when I worked in the corporate world.

At 57, Keaton was the romantic lead in “Something’s Gotta Give,” playing a successful playwright who falls in love, gets her heart broken, and finds love again. The 2003 film grossed $266 million worldwide, demonstrating that audiences will turn out for stories about older women. The film’s success wasn’t just financial vindication; it was a cultural statement: desire, vulnerability, and reinvention don’t expire at menopause.

In 2018, at 72, Keaton starred in “Book Club,” a comedy about older women rediscovering friendship, adventure, and intimacy. She followed it with “Book Club: The Next Chapter” five years later. These weren’t just feel-good movies. They reminded us that women don’t stop craving adventure or connection—romantic and otherwise—with age. Keaton, alongside Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen, portrayed women who had come into their own.

Yet even as Keaton celebrated women’s full arcs, Hollywood still treats them as expendable after 40. Women make up less than one-third of speaking roles in major films, and that number plummets for women over forty. Many actresses go to great lengths to erase the passage of time. Keaton refused. She aged on her own terms, never hiding her wrinkles. That refusal was its own form of power.

For over five decades, Keaton worked within the system and proved that films about complex women can be both meaningful and commercially successful. She showed that women’s stories matter at every age.

I was born on the same day as Keaton, fourteen years later, and I’ve watched her career unfold alongside my life: wife, career woman, mother and writer. Keaton showed us that our stories never end; they just evolve.

She taught us that becoming yourself is a lifelong act of re-creation. She never stopped changing. And neither should we.

An excerpt of this appeared as a Letter to the Editor on October 15, 20205.

It was the 1970s, I was 13 years old, and like most teenage girls of that time, I had faithfully grown my hair long to look like celebrity idols of the day. I sobbed as clumps of my shiny black hair fell to the floor.

Mom grabbed a patch of the hair that people had called “black silk” and shrieked, “Frame this for memory.”

Decades later, curled up on my sofa in Los Angeles, I was reminded of that horrific day as I watched Andie MacDowell portray Paula, a mother with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, in the popular Netflix series, “Maid.”

A lot has been said about the miniseries and the book written by Stephanie Land that the show was based on. Many focused on how the show sheds light on domestic violence through the experience of Alex (played by MacDowell’s real-life daughter, Margaret Qualley), but what I haven’t seen enough of is how the series highlights the struggle of having a parent with a mental illness.

In the U.S. where, according to a recent study, over seven percent of children have at least one parent or guardian who has poor mental health, it’s important that we continue to see examples on our screens of what mental illness looks like.

Watching Paula create chaos in her daughter’s life was like watching my mother’s volatile, narcissistic and paranoid behavior. Both Mom and Paula left a trail of damage they were oblivious to.

It’s a trail that is all too common for children of mentally ill parents, who are a high-risk population. A 2020 Swiss study showed that these children have a 3 to 5 times increased risk of developing mental health problems that require treatment. Compared to their peers, they are twice as likely to be abused and more than twice as likely to be placed in foster care than other children, according to the Department of Social Services and the Department of Mental Health.

I never went into foster care, but like so many children who grow up in homes with mentally ill parents, I continue to endure the reverberations of years of emotional and physical abuse. After years of being screamed at by my mother, I avoided conflict at all costs, giving in too easily in my personal and professional relationships. I agonized over major and minor decisions, knowing my mother never let me forget a mistake. While raising my three children, I overreacted to normal childhood behavior and noises. After all, I tried to be the perfect daughter, dutiful and quiet, because I feared triggering my mother.

Like Paula, my mother’s mental illness caused her to shout hateful and damaging words. She blamed me for almost everything that went wrong in her life — from arguments with my father to her mother’s (who I called Mee Ma) debilitating stroke. I didn’t know any better. Guilt and shame engulfed me. I believed I caused Mee Ma’s stroke and eventual death because when I was 17, I pushed open her bedroom door to clean her room and my 90-pound grandmother fell to the floor. She was shaken but seemed OK. A few months later, she had a stroke.

Many moments with Mom were extreme and filled with outbursts, but there were also everyday signs of how her mental illness routinely played out in the background of our lives. Since she spent most of her days lying in bed reading, writing, napping or incessantly calling others about some imagined slight or drama, my brother and I ate a steady diet of Banquet chicken pot pies and Campbell’s soup.

Different scenes in the series took me back to those everyday scenarios. Like when Alex picks up her young daughter, Maddy, from Paula’s care, she repeatedly asks if Maddy was fed. Alex had desperately needed someone to watch her daughter so she could keep her job. Her mentally ill mother was her last resort for child care.

According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly 20 percent of adults in the U.S. live with a mental illness (in 2019 that meant 51.5 million people).

When children couldn’t go to school because of the Covid-19 lockdown, I thought of the ones living at home with unstable parents, the way I did. I thought of the little triggers that might have set off episodes similar to my devastating haircut.

When Mom hacked away at my hair that day, she screamed that she couldn’t stand seeing it everywhere when she cleaned. This was ironic since my brother and I were the maids at home. Starting at a young age, we vacuumed, scoured and scrubbed.

After Dad, who also suffered bouts of depression, returned from work and saw my shorn tresses, he shook his head. He couldn’t rein Mom in when she was in a frenzy, though he did tell her to take me to a local beauty school that weekend to have the cut at least shaped. Dad believed in the Chinese cultural concept of favoring sons over daughters, so he gave whatever emotional labor he could manage to my brother.

In my traditional Chinese American family, we put on a good show and never spoke about mental illness openly. It was considered shameful, and my mother didn’t get adequate treatment because of that belief.

Long-term repercussions of having a parent with mental illness may include feelings of abandonment, difficulty trusting others, grief, low self-esteem and depression. I have struggled with these all my life.

For me, the most heart-wrenching “Maid” scenes depict Alex’s unfailing love for Maddy. I cried while watching them. Without the benefit of years of therapy, Alex was determined to minimize the damage of generational trauma.

It took years and hard work to claw out of the sinkhole that results from being the child of a mentally ill parent. The scars are still there, though time, maturity and therapy have helped cover the open wounds.

As a child and for far too long as an adult, I tried to make my mother happy, to make her better ... until I realized I couldn’t. In order to save my own family, to save myself, I had to stop trying to save Mom. I limited my in-person interactions with her to fewer than six times a year.

I see the benefits of that decision in my own family.

My three children are now in graduate school programs. In between their visits home to see my husband and me, we meet on Sunday night family Zooms. My two daughters and I have dubbed ourselves “the Liu ladies” and enjoy sharing funny memes and interesting articles. They have even asked for my input on potential suitors on dating apps. These close relationships with my children mean everything to me because I never had them with my parents. I’m committed to giving my children what my parents couldn’t give me: steadfast love and emotional support.

My mother has been dead for over a decade. Looking back, I feel more empathy towards her. As I often say, “Mental illness is not a choice.” And yes, I loved her.

Edited and updated from my NBC News essay in 2021

https://oldster.substack.com/p/this-is-64-yvonne-liu-responds-to

I write for them. I write for anyone who believes that speaking the truth can change lives—including our own.

Throwing off the shackles of shame surrounding mental illness, childhood trauma, and more

After decades of secrecy and wanting to appear perfect, I finally revealed my own emotional struggles, sharing my story in publications like Newsweek, NBC News, and Business Insider. Speaking out felt necessary—not just for my healing, but to help normalize these conversations.

Today, I'm filled with pride as my oldest daughter, who earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, just passed the EPPP (Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology). This standardized test is a crucial milestone on her path to becoming a licensed clinical psychologist. Her achievement feels especially meaningful given our family's history.

Her career choice highlights a critical need in communities of color. BIPOC mental health providers remain severely underrepresented compared to our population's needs. When people see themselves reflected in their therapists and have access to counselors who can speak their language and understand their culture, it can make all the difference in seeking and receiving care.

It's time to stop the stigma and shame that surrounds mental illness, particularly in communities of color. Every story shared, every barrier removed, and every new mental health professional who joins the field brings us closer to a world where everyone has access to the support they need—and will take that critical step to get help.

https://www.newsweek.com/im-asian-american-battled-shame-about-mental-health-1674468

Below, you'll find my Newsweek essay—the first time I publicly revealed my own emotional struggles. It was scary to write and have it out the world, but I hope it helped others feel less alone in their journey.

[Link to Newsweek essay would go here]