Lessons from Living with My Strict Father | Original
Disclaimer: This is my personal reflection on our differences, written with a desire to understand each other better.
In his essay Welcome to Hogwarts, Yin Wang writes:
I still haven’t figured out what “reincarnation” really means, but many people are born different from their parents, with different hobbies and different personalities. As they grow up, they realize that their parents and themselves are completely different people, as if they’re not from the same family. It’s the same with parents, similar with siblings, and “friends” are no exception, of course.
After returning from Beijing and living in Guangzhou for more than five years, I realized that one of my biggest mistakes was living with my strict father.
Before discussing arguments, let me recall some good memories with my father. I was very happy when, in my first year at university, I asked my father to send me money so that I could buy a Xiaomi 2s mobile phone. My father also cooked for our family many times; over the 15 years I lived with him, he cooked often. My father gave us about half a million CNY to buy the house that my wife and I own. My father also helped us prepare for the wedding. My father brought my mother, my sister, and me to Guangzhou from our village; He took exams to earn his qualifications as an electrical engineer and prepared for our household move to Guangzhou. He also commuted with my sister and me to and from primary school for 3 years in Guangzhou.
However, we have had many arguments in recent years. In 2020, when I started living with my parents in their home in Huangpu District, one of the things we had different opinions on was that I tended to make the toilet messy. Sometimes, when I pee, drops of urine fall outside the bowl. They are very strict about cleanliness. My mother and father often complain about me being unclean in this regard.
I have improved and adapted. When I lived by myself in Beijing, I didn’t have this kind of problem. Most of the time, I rented a house with an independent toilet. If you go to a public toilet, you’ll find that for men, it’s very normal to pee a little off target.
When I lived outside, I spent one year in a house in a different building but the same community as my parents. I would go to their house for dinners. Another year, I lived in my house in Zengcheng District. I was okay with this issue because once a week, I would clean the toilet. I use strong acid to clean it, then a stick to scrub, and finally my clothes that are about to be washed to wipe it up.
I don’t avoid hassle. I just want the freedom to decide when to deal with it.
Another big argument that hurt me was when I was playing with Arduino and a breadboard. Hobbies like that recharge me, and balancing them with studies is something I’m learning. My father saw it and criticized me, saying I should be preparing for exams to get an associate degree because I dropped out of my bachelor’s program 10 years ago. We have had too many arguments about this dropout and the degree issue.
I have to say that the essays Paul Graham wrote encouraging people to drop out and create startups are not responsible, at least for young Chinese people. After Credentials. For himself, he got a bachelor’s from Cornell and master’s and PhD degrees from Harvard University. A lot of his essays he wrote are just to encourage most ambitious young people in their 20s to apply to his Y Combinator. It seems well-intentioned to encourage people to earn enough money first and retire early, in a short period to earn a lifetime’s expenses. But actually, that is not for everyone. For myself, as a Chinese person who just enrolled in Beijing Forestry University instead of Stanford or Harvard, I regret not seeing the other side of his ideas before.
I printed out his blog to read carefully when I was in high school in the early 2010s. The startup seed he planted in me is huge. For himself, he seems not to lose anything by doing that. Y Combinator wants to put $100k or $250k into tens or hundreds of startups in its batches. His model is okay. He made a platform just like crypto or stock; no matter whether people win or lose, he will always profit. Y Combinator should be transparent about some of its failures and some miserable lives of founders who failed hard. By encouraging people to work hard, somehow he wrapped risks in this sweet clothing, which is really dangerous. His behavior is like Elon Musk’s advocacy to deliver autopilot to people. Some of the users got killed because the autopilot was not mature.
For myself, my startup journey actually resulted in no loss of money for me. I did it for like 4 years: cofounded for half a year, and did my own startup for 3.5 years. My company lost half a million and earned back half a million CNY to give back to investors. That’s an acceptable ending, and I learned so much and had such intensive life experiences, which I am grateful for.
But the point is that lacking a bachelor’s degree made me rejected by a lot of Chinese companies, especially in a hard economy. They often don’t have patience for those who graduated from 211 or 985 universities, let alone those who dropped out. You can say it is a problem of Chinese companies instead of those in the USA. But Paul Graham didn’t warn me about this.
For me now, as my critical thinking is much better, I can see that his Lisp or programming skill is not as good as most people thought; his level is below Daniel P. Friedman and R. Kent Dybvig.
So, because of this, I somehow pursued my hobby projects while my father criticized me about it. I felt grieved, and it was painful.
From October 2022 to now, I have passed 9 courses of the National Higher Education Self-Study Examination in China, with 7 courses left to get an associate degree in Computer Applications.
Without a bachelor’s degree and facing a hard economy, with a house mortgage, I am kind of scared and under a lot of pressure.
One argument was that someday I rode my bike to Guangzhou Tower for three hours and posted a video joking about my chauffeur service.
That bike is a folding bicycle. He somehow thought that probably because of mortgage pressure, I was going to do chauffeur service, which would require me to ride my bike in the city and help people drive their cars home to earn some fees.
He somehow misunderstood me, and without saying much, he warned me and asked me not to do it. I got angry and said I was just joking. At that time, even though I had just bought a house with my wife 20 km away, it needed one year to be delivered. I was impatient to move out from my parents’ house.
Why did I buy that house? It was still because of one argument with my father. I don’t remember the details of that argument. The frequent arguments with my father made me want to move out of the house. And then we bought the house for 2 million in 2022. As of 2025, it has dropped down to be worth just 1 million. We have around one million in mortgage for this. It will probably still need me and my wife to spend 10 years to pay off the mortgage.
It is not fair to blame my father for this. Without the arguments with my father, I probably would have bought that house too. Few people in China in 2022 could have known that the housing market would face such a severe downturn in the following years.
However, I do have my own personal issues, including a problem with vanity. I wanted to impress others and aimed to buy a house to showcase my success after ending my 3.5-year startup journey. I also had too much confidence in my ability to maintain a stable position while working as a contractor for an international bank. I probably should not have financial problems carrying a 1.2 million debt.
And the most important external reason to blame is that China’s economy largely depends on turning this country into a big construction site, which is not sustainable. That created foam and pumped up the house prices. The second reason is that in my city and district, the leaders of the construction department or mayor were corrupt in the last two decades. Some of them went to prison. They pushed the movement for large-scale demolition and reconstruction and gained large amounts of bribes from businessmen who sold houses to people.
What I cannot easily forgive myself for is having already written the essay, ‘The Present and Future of China’s Economy,’ after reading books by He Qinglian, including ‘The Pitfalls of Modernization’ and ‘China: Crumbling but Not Collapsing.’ It is easy to know what is right but hard to do it.
To come back to my father. My father has high expectations and often has specific ways he believes things should be done. While his intentions may be good, I sometimes find it challenging to meet these expectations as an adult around 30 years old.
My late 20s are behind me. I was born in January 1995. Those five years in my late 20s were somewhat of a nightmare in my life. It is not healthy to frequently allow myself to feel angry, regretful, or self-critical.
For my 6.5 years in Beijing, looking back, that was actually the happiest time in my life. After one year in university, I worked in startups, cofounded with others, or ran my own startup for 5.5 years. In the middle, I went to the USA twice, each time for about 20 days.
Those were wild years; only later could I appreciate how intensive and exciting that life was.
“The fastest way to destroy a person is constantly correcting them, even over small things.” I saw this in TikTok videos. It hit me. My father is using this way to treat me, wanting to correct me with good intentions but actually destroying me.
I hate people who always think they are right, that they do things best, and that others should follow. I hate people correcting me. I already try to become the best version of myself. I already have tons of hassles and troubles to deal with. Why still correct me? They are creating distrust and somehow don’t believe others can do the right things.
And I don’t believe what they say. There are just tons of ways of doing things; even how to eat and what to eat vary a lot among humans. Why should we all be the same?
It is just like writing code. If you tell me how to write this and that, and I follow your exact steps, it will be very painful. However, if you let me play with the compiler, I can work out the working code.
I write this down to avoid them. I should escape from my parents. And now I live in my own house, just coming to see them when I log off work and go home when passing their house. Then I meet them for like half an hour. This is perfect for me: living alone and taking care of family. I need to be alone to carry out my work and study.
My father should find more things to do instead of focusing on me. In this world, there are just too many things to do.
Lessons are unpleasant, but I have to speak out and write it down here so I can avoid it in later life. Parents are something you are hard to break up with, so I have to keep it in mind to avoid such negative things happening again in my life.
This is probably very normal. My grandfather had four sons, with my father ranking third. They had a lot of arguments too. My grandfather passed away in 2021 in his 80s.
So now, I probably still need to deal with my parents for 30 or 40 years. I hope that we can live more peacefully. So the solution is to live in different places. We have seldom chances to meet, let alone argue.
I value our family bond and hope living separately allows us to appreciate each other more, without the daily frictions.