Dear Cary,

I grew up as the good daughter of two conservative Asian parents. I got into the best college (fulfilling the Asian-American dream) and then came the liberation of me. Now, I swear occasionally, I'm a goddamn liberal, and I almost didn't go to medical school (I took a few years off after college). I learned to drink beer, did pot once, smoked cigarettes, dated non-Asian men, and lost my virginity. Now, I am dating a non-Asian man who sleeps over when he comes to visit from far away. I am not the person of my parents' expectations.

Problem is, my parents had no inkling of my evolution. They still don't know, or want to know, that I drink, although they've caught on to my liberal inclinations. This blindness is no longer tenable for a number of reasons. The main one is the sweet boyfriend who is unfortunately caught in the crossfire of culture. I told my parents about him, they met him once, and they don't approve: You're not compatible, he's too old, he corrupted you, etc. My mother is having a hard time dealing with the fact that I might be sleeping over at his place when I visit (I now evade her questions when she asks where I'm staying). This has meant that my parents treat my boyfriend very coolly. They refuse to see him. He was specifically not invited to come over for Thanksgiving, for example, which really hurt his feelings, and mine, too. From a distance they can still make their feelings pretty apparent. The disapproval is taking its toll, as I feel that I constantly have to choose between boyfriend and family, and both feel that I choose the other.

At the heart of it, I really think my parents would love to see me set up with a nice Asian surgery resident, one who preferably speaks the native language. I want my parents to accept that I've grown up and that they must love me as I am, because I like who I am. I mean, I'm 25 fucking years old, for fuck's sake, but I hate myself for feeling like I'm 15 when I'm talking to them. They don't bring up the subject of boyfriend, or the subject of what I do after 10, unless I do. In fact, they don't really bring up much of anything.

I do love my parents. We have a good relationship. But how do I get them to accept the man who might be The One, and more important, to understand who I am and what that means? Does this mean brutal honesty about everything that I've ever done, or does it mean that I continue to not discuss certain parts of my life (like the part that streaked across the freshman quad my senior year)? Meanwhile, how do I get the sweet boyfriend to understand that the disapproval is no reflection of how I feel or the kind of person he really is?

Why can't everyone just get along?

Bad Asian Girl

Dear Bad Asian Girl,

Everyone cannot just get along because everyone disapproves of everyone else. Which wouldn't matter except we seem to think that a) it matters what the fuck they think about us and b) we must do something about it. The truth is, it doesn't matter and there's nothing we could do about it if it did.

So for your own good, rather than try to get your parents to accept this man, try instead to get yourself to accept your parents. Accept their disapproval. Accept their inability to change. Accept their stolid fealty to ancestral whatever. That doesn't mean obey them. It just means accept their disapproval of your disobedience.

The only way to live serenely is to accept it all, accept the dagger eyes, the haughty deafness, the back turned, the silent treatment, the withholding. Live with it. It doesn't mean they don't love you. It just means that they think you should marry an Asian surgical resident. Don't fall for it. Because if you marry an Asian surgical resident, it won't stop there. Then you'll have to have three children, one a future surgeon, one a future lawyer, and one a future bond trader. And even if you finish medical school as they want you to, now that you have the three little future BMW-driving conservative professionals, you won't be spending enough time with your children because of the selfish pursuit of your career, which only makes your husband look bad every time you get promoted and your parents look bad every time they have to take care of your kids because you were called away to save the life of some poor Caucasian sucker who was probably unhealthy from not eating enough duck with his family at a big round table.

Their disapproval probably feels like a withholding of love, but it's really the opposite; in a twisted way their withholding of love is their love itself. It's just not a love of your ego. It's a love of you their daughter, the projected avatar of themselves that in their eyes has no ego because it's just a projection of them. Hey, you're Asian: You ought to understand this better than me.

Your parents are being incredibly selfish, of course, and cruel, because all you want is their blessing. But that's the way parents are, and they're much better at this game than you are. As long as you continue to try to get your parents' blessing, you're playing right into their hands. So have fun with your boyfriend and tell him that what your parents think of him doesn't matter. And get back to your studying, because if you're not going to marry the Asian surgical resident, somebody is going to have to make the money.

A man walks into a room, fumbles for the remote, and turns on the TV. This is the quintessential act of modern life. It obliterates the three rarest commodities of our age: silence, solitude, darkness.

Weather one hundred times a day. Sportscenter. CNN, People, WFAN. "You give us twenty-two minutes, we'll give you the world." MTV - no drifting away into reverie, too busy counting thighs. Enough Sunday paper to last till evening. Blockbuster Video. The Comedy Channel. The op-ed page. The Sharper Image catalogue, the computer bulletin board, the phone in the airplane-toilet. The fax unrolling, the pager chirping. Two weeks of previews for the Academy Awards, the Academy Awards,three days of Academy Awards postmortem. Ours is the age of distraction.

I live in a house without a television, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, far enough out that no one will deliver us a daily newspaper. And yet the magazines and newsletters arrive with each morning's mail, and every time I plunk myself down on the sofa I reach for them. The radio fills the silence half the day.

Because our minds are jazzed. Because we fear boredom. Because we are so hooked on infodrug, on intravenous entertainment, that any break in the action seems unnatural, a vacuum. And yet each of us intuits this too: We are lacking something, something for which Siskel, Ebert, Safire, Keanu, Shaq, and Naughty by Nature are insufficient substitutes. Solitude, silence, darkness.

Some years ago I went on a long solo backpacking trip. Only a week, but that was as long as I'd ever been by myself, all alone except for the occasional chance meeting. The hiking was not hard; there was no high adventure. And for a day or two my mind still rang with the almost literal buzz of regular life. My opinions on presidential politics, the plots of shows I'd seen, my plans for the projects I'd take up next--I was my own little CNN, neurons chattering happily away. And I hardly noticed where I was hiking. My eyes were fixed on some invisible middle distance, the same place you look when you're driving a car on the highway.

But after a few days my head started to quiet down. I started to notice my body--to notice, almost for the first time in my life, when I was really hungry as opposed to feeling like it was time for dinner. I started to notice the woods, notice them deeply--stop for long stretches to watch birds, stare at strange mushrooms, feel scaly bark. Feel the sun, feel it letting me stretch out. Feel the faint breeze lift the hairs on my back. See twilight turn detail to geometry and then to suggestion. Stare for hours.

And so what? That is a hard question to answer, hard because the answers are subtle, hard because they are easy to ridicule. I think the answer goes like this: There are other broadcasts, on wavelengths that do not appear on our cable boxes, other commentaries, which do not appear in the back pages of newspapers.

These natural broadcasts are timeless--the sense of presence of the divine, for instance, that has marked human beings in every culture as far back as anthropologists can go and that we now try unsuccessfully to buy from televangelists or crystal merchants. These broadcasts are low, resonant only in stillness. They are easily jammed--we don't have to be in the woods to hear them, but we have to be quiet.

What do these broadcasts concern? Nothing new. Nothing new. Nothing novel. Only the most basic information, the sort that can ground us; that we are part, a seamless part, of something very much bigger, which is an almost incomprehensible notion for us. We have no dark, so we do not see the stars--the Hubble telescope sending back radio images of the big bang is no substitute for a score of nights under the blanket of stars or for the luminous enfolding of the northern lights.

All this sounds trippy. And is it not self-indulgent in a world and an age that demand responsibility, attention? In point of cold, hard fact, there's no real danger of escaping information. It would be wrong to choose ignorance of the genocide underway in Bosnia. But day after day to stare distractedly at the latest scene of devastation, the latest dying child, the latest grieving mother? What we need is not additional information--we have, the least-informed of us, more information than a king two centuries ago--but more reflection, more silence and solitude and darkness to put into context what we know. What we know about Bosnia, what we know about our lives and our wives and children.

Self-obsession is no risk, either. Self-obsession is what comes through the TV set--the ceaseless preoccupation with keeping us from becoming bored for even an instant. Reminding us at every break that our immediate satisfaction is the purpose of a consumer society. Listening to this other broadcast, this low level rumbling, opens us to the world. If it seems at first superficially dull--if meditation seems maddening, if the sunset seems to take a hell of a long time--at some deeper level the absence of distraction soon becomes a chuckling thrill.

We are past the point in human history where the deep currents of existence belong to us by birthright--we have to fight to block out some of the endless rain of information, entertainment, stress. We have to fight not to turn on the TV, to walk into the room and savor the quiet. To get started we have to take the long view and remind ourselves that no one ever lay on his deathbed wishing he'd watched more "Matlock."

This language is woefully inadequate to express what I feel right now. And I am woefully inadequate in any other language.

But I will continue, even if the sight of diluted emotion is disheartening.

Outside the rain has ceased to pour, perhaps only a stray drop lands every now and then. The smell of wet earth is strong. Raag Marwa fills my senses and the room, if ever music had a perfume, it is now.

From my window, I see the rear courtyards of houses. Houses that look ostentatiously ugly from the front, displaying a confused mix of architectural flaws, have plain, beautiful rear entrances. For these are not to impress big people in big cars. Clothes hung limply on lines across the courtyards. Signs of ordinary men living ordinary lives.

Wooden doors that open to a service lane. Old ladders strewn about, and a broken wheelbarrow with layers of rust. In this evening light, the rust seems red, as though on fire. A gentle fire lying in a pool of muddy water.

A child has found its hiding playmates.

The ceaseless din of households at work, an easy stillness punctuated by a slight breeze.

My sister looks suspiciously at me. There is probably a sense of serenity that she cannot place or name. She thinks I have just wept, I can see it in her eyes. For this look of serenity fills in, only when everything has been purged out of the system. And since there is nothing lying broken around me, nothing that indicates a violent catharsis, there must have been a tearful one. My eyes are clear she says, as though washed by tears.

I tell her, the skies have wept for me today, I have no need to cry.

Raag Shree. A raga that graces the evening. That entwines itself like a creeper around the last rays of the setting sun. The creeper that grows from this soaked mud, and clings and climbs all the way to the Surya.

With tender leaves, a young plant. A plant that flowers in this thin sunlight. A languid lover that weaves itself upon this ray. That slides water from its edges onto the terraces of this city.

In the night, one can hide in the dark, or seek attention beneath the streetlamp. In the afternoon, the sun glares, and everyone is inside. And in the morning, the eyes are turned inward; it is too peaceful yet to seek beauty outside.

But in the evening, no one can be an extremist. Sandhya. Soaring neither too high nor too low. The evening, when one gently glides on a swing that hangs from the gnarled trunks of ancient trees.

I found this a few days ago, as I was cleaning out my mailbox, among other things to make space for junk to arrive. It was written by a beautiful spirit a long time ago and I thought I would put it here for others to see, read and enjoy.