At the end of fifth grade, I was asked to fill in a page in the class “memory book”, which was a glorified personality profile that included our class picture, our height and eye color, and a slew of mostly banal questions. The most trite in the list was the age old “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, a quintessentially American question that adults ask children despite knowing full well that nothing that a 10 year old child tells you about their future will come true. Regardless, the adults in the room seemed to place a lot of weight on this question. “Did you know that Rohan wants to be the president when he grows up?”, Amma would ask me. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Perhaps I was feeling edgy, rebellious, honest, or a mix of the three, but I didn’t put down a stereotypical South Asian American career. Plenty of people that looked like me would eventually become doctors, lawyers, and engineers. I wanted to stand out. So when I answered the question, I wrote in: “comedian”. Now, I wasn’t a particularly funny 10 year old. Nor was I performance inclined – I would get bashful any time Amma asked me to play violin or sing for the guests we were entertaining on any given weekend. Still, I knew the benefits of being able to make other people laugh. The funny kids transcended social circles, avoided bullies, and even got out of trouble with teachers with their quick wit and charm. I wanted to be like them.

I’ll never forget the day the memory books were printed and I hurried home to show my parents my page. They gushed over my picture (which was very cute), my favorite subject (math, which was very boring), my favorite book (Harry Potter, a cliche), but paused when they got to the bottom of the page. “Comedian?” Amma asked, tears welling up in her eyes. “Why do you want to be a comedian?” I explained to her that funny people were highly respected in our 10 year old social circles and that it seemed like “comedians have a pretty happy life”. She nodded, trying to understand. But she couldn’t hold back her tears. She could only bring herself to say one thing: “Comedians don’t make a lot of money, Deepak”.

For a while since then, I accepted the idea that the quest for financial stability was the end-all be-all of our short time on the planet. I realigned my priorities and optimized life for a career that would do two things: make lots of money and not make my mother cry. Though I seem to have solved the second requirement (I, for better or worse, am not a comedian), I continue to struggle with the first. I have aligned, realigned, readjusted, and realigned again my prospective career path at least twelve times in the last five years, bouncing between careers that pay a lot (like going into business or securing a nice corporate software job) and careers that seem to make me happy (like being a writer or a teacher).

Conversations about my career are challenging to have with my parents mainly because in their minds, a career that doesn’t make lots of money is a career designed for someone else. I regularly have arguments with my parents about my desire to be a professor (which, by the way, pays just fine). They’re not unhappy about this choice, but it clearly makes them anxious in private. “Why don’t you consider industry research?”, Amma asked me two days after I defended my PhD thesis. In spite of four years of me affirming that I wanted to be a professor, she still did not trust that I had done the hard work of carefully thinking through my future profession. In some ways, she would almost prefer that I follow the same life she did – prioritize financial stability so that my children, her grandchildren, can also live a happy life.

My uncomfortable, unspoken truth is this: my parents worked hard to earn financial stability so that I don’t have to. They slogged through the boring, time-consuming, medium-paying, stable desk jobs so that I could have the luxury of pontificating about the world for a smaller paycheck. They afforded me the opportunity to do what I want rather than what I must. When I reject my immigrant parents’ ideas of what makes for a good career, what they don’t realize is that I’m not doing it to spite them. I’m doing it because I feel it’s the only way to respect a lifetime of their hard work. Even though I didn’t end up a comedian like my 10 year old self said I would, I am at least pursuing something that I love to do. At the end of the day, isn’t that what being American is all about?