Preface My past experiences with narrative writing in school have been okay. I had no problems with this genre of writing when I was in middle school. I did pretty well with it in my freshman year of high school, but that's when it started going south. My sophomore and junior years of high school were okay with the genre, but the only problem was the amount of teacher experience and teacher bias in both years. I found out my sophomore year English teacher wasn't really fit to teach my class because they were too flexible with some assignments. My junior year English teacher favored athletes and sociable students more than other students. My senior year English was the worst teacher I ever had. They were very disorganized and graded papers incorrectly. For our narrative papers, they said "Whatever you have as your essay, you can go ahead and delete it. All of it, because that will never be close to my standards." They didn't even make an attempt to edit/revise your paper copy, they threw it into the trash. And, it was the first two or three weeks of class.
I decided this memoir to be about my struggles on telling my family what I want to do as a future career. Out of the many emotional events in my life, this one was my most emotional event because I've struggled with this for 7 years. When I was younger, I wanted to follow my family's footsteps of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers. I realized I didn't want to pursue a STEM career in my first year of middle school. Instead, I wanted to be an artist, but I didn't know how to tell anyone in my family for two reasons. The first reason is because of the many known stereotypes. The biggest stereotypes pertaining to my memoir is that "Asians are only good in science and math." or "Asians are only good in STEM careers." I felt distraught because every single child is told by their parent "You can be anything you want to be, as long as you work hard". This phrase always came with one, heartbreaking condition in an Asian household. An Asian parent would say "You can be anything you want to be...as long as it's a doctor, lawyer, pharmacist...". Basically, your career had to be a STEM career and if it wasn't, your relatives would gossip about your "poor" career choice behind your back. The second reason is because I feared that my family would shun me for not choosing a STEM career. My family heavily relied on STEM careers because they were in high demand, had financial stability, and most STEM careers couldn't be replaced by machines, they needed at least one person to operate the machine. My family is very fond of art, but it was looked at as a hobby more than a respected career. At first, my parents only thought of careers that would give me financial stability. Then, after the first semester of my freshman year in a pharmacy program, they realized that getting me financial stability was trivial compared to my metal well-being. I hope that by writing my struggle, I have given someone the chance to voice their own dream and create their future.