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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

A friend from high school - he got top grades, got into a great school, got a MD and a PhD, married a beautiful, smart wife, became a surgeon, and had a healthy son.

After all of this, he went back to his grandfather overseas (who was very old) and told him, "I did everything you told me to do".

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You forgot the last step, he has to raise his son to do all those things too.

This closes the loop to create the "asian circle of life".

so he didn't want to be a Doctor? He didn't want a wife? who was smart? beautiful? He didn't want to be wealthy? He didn't want a family?

I don't get what you are trying to say here... Maybe you are trying to say that he wasn't happy? If you get all of that and you aren't happy, what will make you happy? being unemployed? being famous? maybe infamous?

With the emphasis on 'did,' I would assume that the grandfather was still acting like he hadn't done enough and, "I did everything that you asked me to," is the rebuttal to that. Sort of like this scary Asian dad that my wife encountered on the subway once (yelling at his ~7 year old kid):

  This is not perfect! It must be perfect! Not 80%.
  Not 90%. That's not perfect! Must be perfect!

The gist was that his grandfather had pushed him very, very hard to study and work very, very hard from a very early age. And he was finally able to tell his grandfather that he could no longer tell him what to do/order him to work hard - he had done it all - he had done everything that the grandfather had pushed him to do. It is a sense of closure, more than anything but still very significant. My friend had ulcers in high school, if that is any indication of how hard he studied.

Don't mean to hijack the thread but ulcers have nothing to do with how hard you study or how stressfull your life is; it is a misconception that really needs to be put to rest.

Most ulcers are caused by h. pylori infection (and sometimes by over-medication in childrens cases).

Your friend most likely ate unshashed fruits/vegetables overseas, or had access to someone who did

We all have h. pylori in our stomachs, but only some of us have ulcers. This is because stress plays a role in weakening the stomach's defenses, giving h. pylori a chance to create ulcers.

i believe the nobel prize committee begs to differ: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2005/p...

> Helicobacter pylori is a spiral-shaped Gram-negative bacterium that colonizes the stomach in about 50% of all humans.

To make iteration feel more "asian":

"I did everything you told me to do, thanks grandpa!"

Did the grandfather say "and look at the great life it got you!"

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