Danny ChaiI doubt this will mean anything to you at all, but I struggle with the same self-worth and pride things. I’m not trivializing it by saying my struggle is as deep is yours, but I have the same issues. Like in your story of Kamloops, if you consider your profession the lowest on the totem pole, my profession is the next lowest. I spend time thinking about how my peers have passed me by, either in better professions or even in my own; they’re senior or managerial while I’m still a scrub. And it’s more of a struggle than it should be.
It doesn’t make sense – reasonably, I have every reason to be “proud”, even on a worldly standard. But I can’t help but feel like I’m being passed by. You know what I’ve concluded, and maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t think that feeling ever goes away. I’ve read about those insane hedge fund managers who take home hundreds of millions of dollars and what motivates them. They have far more money than they could ever spend. But they’re still afraid of being passed over by their peers. Their standard is absurdly different, e.g. their rank on the Fortune 500 list. But it’s the same feeling.
So I’ve concluded that everyone has those feelings of not measuring up on some level, and that they’re Satanic, not meaning that dramatically, just that it’s a method Satan uses to chip away at our sense of worth. No matter where you are in life, I think most people (or maybe it’s more a man thing) will struggle with self-worth/status/pride thing.
I also agree that many Asian Christian parents haven’t reconciled their competing values. That’s why I keep saying I’m going to send my kids to a Christian college. It’s not that I’m against good schools. It’s just that when you say that you should follow Jesus but that it shouldn’t interfere with getting into a good school or getting a good job, you’re implicitly valuing education above Jesus whether you realize it or not. I don’t know what the right balance is, but when push comes to shove, Jesus comes above education, so if (and only if) pushing a good education confuses the issue, screw it.