The Art of Pretending: A Skill Taught to Many Asians from a Young Age
In many Asian cultures, we are taught from a young age to pretend. This means acting as though everything is fine when we are sad or pretending to be well-off even when we are not. We are instructed to always smile and be polite, regardless of our comfort with the situation. It’s considered polite to initially decline offers of food, waiting instead for the host to insist.
This behaviour extends to how we manage our households during social gatherings. Even if it means giving away our last provisions, we are expected to present the best food to our guests. Such actions are driven by a deeply ingrained principle of saving face, which is crucial in Chinese culture. The importance placed on not airing your dirty laundry outside the family means that suffering is often done in silence to avoid disgracing the family.
One vivid memory involves the tradition of giving red packets during the Lunar New Year. My father used to give us generous amounts, but one year, he secretly had us redistribute the money we received to other children. By the end of it, all our saved money was gone. This pattern of behaviour, which prioritises appearances and familial honour over personal hardship, can be puzzling to those unfamiliar with it, such as in New Zealand. In our culture, issues within a family are not to be discussed externally, as doing so could bring shame.
The consequences of such a culture of secrecy are significant. To preserve dignity, individuals might go to great lengths to cover up problems rather than acknowledge them and seek help. Hence, you rarely see Asians openly discussing problems; they confide only within a close, trusted group, often when it’s tragically too late. When something happens within a family, it’s not a matter to tell tales, especially to outsiders.
The impact of this on mental health can be profound. I have given recovery talks to students from various institutions, including AUT and UoA. An Asian student once thanked me for my honesty and candour about my experiences with mental distress and the gambling harm caused by my father. In individualistic cultures, openly highlighting challenges and overcoming adversity is admired because it emphasises resilience and determination. However, in our collectivistic culture, such openness is often perceived as a failure, reflecting poorly on the family and their support networks, as well-being is facilitated through group harmony.
Thus, we learn to pretend — to seem okay to everyone, friends, and sometimes even family, at the expense of our own well-being and out of fear of shame. Help is often delayed until it becomes unmanageable and self-destructive. We continue to pretend because the collective ‘we’ often takes precedence over the individual ‘I’, even if it means preserving face at a great cost. We pretend because we don’t want to tarnish our family name or jeopardise potential future relationships, fearing the gossip that might persist for years.
Even far from our homeland, we continue this pretence to the extent that governments in the Western world might believe we are doing well, leading to a lack of necessary support. For older generations, this might seem preferable to losing face. Younger Asians raised in the West find this baffling, but not wanting to disappoint their parents, they, too, learn to pretend. When the opportunity to speak truthfully finally arises, many of us don’t know how because we were taught to respect hierarchy and suppress our voices. Every stressor then manifests as a somatic issue. Even when help arrives, trusting it is difficult because we default to pretence — it’s easier than confronting painful truths. We weren’t taught how to handle these truths, so we continue the act, finding it simpler than facing reality.
