Something's Got to Give

• Monday and Tuesday night, Tony didn't go to bed till 11:20 PM and 11:00 PM respectively because my wife Jenny was tiger-mothering him. If I protest, it will result in violence. But it is hard for me to stand by while she is doing this because she is loud when she is doing it and she is loud for hours on end. I can't escape her noise by reading, watching a tv episode or a movie, listening to a podcast, or plugging my ears. I do try praying. The effect of her screeching on me is that I get very agitated. I feel like a person stuck on a bus or on a airplane with a crying baby. And despite being exposed to this for six years, I can never get used it. On Tuesday evening, I was fighting a tension headache and spasm thoughts of violence. I didn't act on the latter but I got back at my wife by walking around naked and turning my glance away from her. When she called me an idiot for walking around naked, I said I agreed with her that I was an idiot. This got her annoyed and she ended the evening by her yelling "fuck your family off!"

• She then said she wanted a divorce after Tony finished middle school. If I was paid for every time, Jenny said the "d" word, I would have enough money to make her happy.

• Jenny tells me she goes through her tiger-mothering essentially because she doesn't want to lose face if Tony is the worst student in class. The way I see it, she is making the lives the people, she should be caring about: her husband and her son, a living hell so as to not look bad in the eyes of people who don't give two fucks about us. These people don't like Tony because he is not one of them and don't want him to succeed. They would rather he went away.

• How is my son Tony doing? He is rather sullen these days. His only escapes are the phone and computer games he likes, but Jenny has it that he is to feel guilty about playing on these things. I feel ashamed at the narrow life he leads here in China. He's never used a screwdriver, never used a hammer, never swam in a river, never did any physical work, never did anything that a boy striving to a man should do.

• I would go to Canada tomorrow if I could. Problem is I can't. It is not even an option to try to improve my situation in China. It is very hard and expensive to change schools now in China, and I hate dealing with paperwork.

• "Oh! It's for his future!" some idiots would say. To which I respond, they never define what they mean by "da future." The future when it comes will be lived in the present. And when it comes, how will we know it is the future we hoped for? The future I had hoped for, many years ago, was one where I would not be scared to come home because it would enduring horrible evenings of having to listen to my wife be angry at me or my son about things that aren't worth getting mad about because they will pass. The future will become past as well, so we might as well try to make good memories in the present moment as much as we can.