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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid your posts in this thread (that is, this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35847273) have broken the site guidelines. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit? It's extremely important on sensitive subjects to remain respectful towards other users.

To be clear, you are both welcome here and welcome to share your experience. But please do it without crossing into personal attack or flamewar. There's plenty of room to share your experience without those things, and doing so will increase the odds of you being heard correctly.

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I appreciate the fine line HN does at moderation, so feel free to delete the comments. I'm not going to delete them myself because OP's original comment is incredibly insulting and trivializes the cultural roots of abuse suffered by Asian children. There's a reason r/asianparentstories aren't funny hahaha stories and all center around abuse experiences.

It's one thing to trivialize asian abuse situations with what-abouts. It's another to make a bold statement that trivializes everything else.

I feel like I pissed you off inadvertently, I certainly didn't mean to. I am putting together a memorial for my mother and had been thinking about whether to be honest about the abuse my sister and I suffered when we were young. I know my mother too was abused as a child by her mother so I have decided it is worth telling because her abuse toward us illustrates as much her own abusive childhood.

I simply wanted to make it clear that the pattern of abuse is not a cultural thing, it is a human thing.

I worry that my adding "but you probably know that" came across wrong and I wish I could go back and edit/delete that part. I added it because I thought my comment that non-Asians can show patterns of abuse was kind of obvious and I was acknowledging that it was obvious. It reads to me now like a snarky attack on your motives but it was not intended to be.

I'll take your word for it though that this is a prevalent pattern in Asian culture. I have worked for 26 years alongside Asians in the Bay Area, 50% of my managers in my career were Asian, I hosted an Asian as a foreign exchange student for a year ... I have never heard of this darker side of the culture.

All these years I never realized Stockholm was in Asia.

While it may be prevalent among Asian cultures, it is absolutely not specific to them. To defend, and even praise an abuser is a common, human, cross-cultural response to abuse. It's a coping mechanism people use to justify the things that have happened to them, so they can carry on without having to face their awful experiences. It helps relieve them (temporarily) of the "double burden" the abused feel -- they had to suffer the abuse, and then they have to do the work to move past it. Easier to insist the abuser was right, and they themselves are at fault.

To insist this is somehow confined to Asian families negates the experience of people everywhere. The original post was about an Asian family, but unless everyone in here is also Asian, these comments only serve to reinforce the breadth and variety of people for whom this resonates.

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