Growing Up in the Absence of My Parents
This is not an easy topic for me. I believe that for many Chinese people, the subject of one’s family of origin is often a heavy one. The issues surrounding Chinese families are far too complex to be fully addressed in a short essay. Here, I simply want to share my personal experience and feelings.
My clearer impression of my parents began in middle school. Before that, I was almost entirely raised by my grandparents. Although we lived under the same roof, my parents left early for work and came home late. I shared a room with my grandparents, so I spent very little time with my parents. Even on weekends and holidays, they rarely had time to rest.
As a result, before middle school, my impression of my parents was vague. I did not even have a strong sense of what “parents” meant. In my eyes, they were more like strangers living in the same house. Most of my outings on rest days, as well as many activities that elderly people would find difficult, were done under the guidance of my aunt. Compared with my parents, my grandparents and my aunt were the ones closest to me. They gave me a childhood that, though marked by the absence of parents, was still carefree. My emotional attachment to them had long surpassed that toward my parents.
This long-term absence of my parents seemed, on the surface, to have little impact on my growth—at least not on my academic performance. Yet it planted hidden problems that gradually surfaced during my middle school years and have continued to affect me ever since.
Not long after I started middle school, my grandmother passed away due to illness. My grandfather returned to live alone in his hometown, and I was left to live with my parents. About five years later, my grandfather also passed away. My grandmother’s death was a devastating blow. Even today, I have not fully recovered from that loss. It remains an unresolved pain in my heart, and I often find myself imagining that my grandparents are still alive.
At that time, as a teenager, I was forced to live closely with parents who felt like strangers. To me, it was as if I had entered The Truman Show—two people suddenly stepped into my life, claiming the role of my parents. I did not know how to interact with them. Meanwhile, without my grandmother as a bridge in the family, my parents also seemed unsure how to balance work and family life. Their jobs had already exhausted them, leaving little emotional energy to care for a sensitive and fragile child.
They continued to leave early and return late. I ate lunch at school, relied on food delivery after school, and even on rest days they were often busy with work. Spending long periods alone at home, I gradually became addicted to the internet, devoting large amounts of time to online games as a way to numb the pain of losing my grandmother. My grades declined sharply, and I became increasingly withdrawn and unwilling to communicate with others.
My parents and teachers noticed the changes, but they simply attributed them to “teenage rebellion.” By the time I reached the final year of middle school, academic pressure combined with long-term emotional distress caused everything to collapse. I experienced emotional outbursts, cried constantly, lost interest in studying, and even developed suicidal thoughts. Only then did my parents realize the seriousness of the situation. They temporarily set aside their work and, together with relatives, tried to comfort me and help me.
But only I knew what I truly wanted—something so simple yet impossible: I wanted my grandmother back. I wanted to continue living with my grandparents. I wanted to escape from this unfamiliar world. Even now, more than ten years later, writing this still brings me to tears.
In my final year of middle school, I had already given up on myself. I believed that with my grades, I could only enter a vocational high school, and that my life would fade into emptiness. Yet life proved unexpectedly dramatic. In the entrance exam, I performed far better than expected and was admitted to a key high school in my district. This surprised my parents, my teachers, and even myself. I accepted the result with mixed emotions, like a small boat drifting wherever fate might take me.
Due to space limitations, I will stop here for now. My high school years will be shared in a future piece.
I am not writing this to blame my parents. Family changes are often beyond anyone’s control, and my parents’ generation had limited awareness of mental health issues. I simply hope that by sharing my experience, more people can recognize the complexity of adolescent mental health struggles. How parents and children should relate to each other is far too complex to be explained in just a few sentences, so I will not go deeper into it here.
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