This week, I’m contemplating on the nature of risk, sacrifice, losses, and gains. I grew up hearing that my parents, especially my mother, sacrificed a lot to ensure my siblings’ and my success. It’s a common Vietnamese story about the war, US immigration, and working odd minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. Many of my Viet friends have similar stories despite being deemed successful or not (here we are busting the model minority myth by just being our unsuccessful bad model self). I’m not sure my siblings and I are considered successful either, but the pressure is still there because our parents sacrificed so much. However, sobering reality makes me not so easily swayed by such simplistic narratives. Behind every story are hidden pages of intergenerational traumas, abuse masked as discipline from some bygone era, and manipulative psychological warfare between parent and child to save face for superficial social standing. It was all done for our own good. Or so it is still being said. What was the true cost of all these sacrifices?

When my dad passed away six months after his brain surgery from cancer, we sold our house in Oklahoma. It was a house my parents scrimped and saved to buy and promptly—much to my surprise—paid off their loan less than halfway through. My mother gave me a chunk of money for the house, saying that it was my inheritance since my parents never gave me any money growing up like they did to all my siblings. Confused for years afterward, I was waiting for the strings to be pulled and to hear the terms of the money. For my mother, money was always a way to get us to do what she wanted. Much to her dislike, I paid for my own college education to get an art degree, so she was driven by ulterior motives. When I finally declared that this was money my late father left for me, and when my move 700 miles away proved too difficult for her to control me through the phone, my mother backed off.

But the strings weren’t the sticking point. It was the opportunity cost. How was it when I didn’t need money that I received this useless gift from my mother with the idea to control me from afar? The sleepless nights when I worried over being able to afford a class field trip or the materials to make a mandatory bottle rocket that the teacher never graded, the long school days I waded through Pre-Calculus on an empty stomach because I didn’t have money to buy lunch but still graduated Valedictorian, the nights where my brother and I ate Dollar General cookies because dinner was not available again, and the countless events that would have been easily solved if my mother had loosened her purse strings to actually feed and clothe us rather than pretending. That level of narcissistic control baffled me for years afterward. But there was one thing that I was very clear on even at a young age: that behind every action, whether with good or ill intent, there are gains and costs. I later learned in my college economics class about cost/benefit analysis and the term opportunity cost.

Years after I moved out of my parents’ roof, I still battle those opportunity costs of saving money for my mother. The gains for my mother was a chunk of money that she still waves around my siblings face, but the costs for me were a poor adolescent and teenage diet that still wreaked havoc on my health, anxiety and bad habits from stress to succeed without the tools, the unending imposter syndrome from being boxed into outdated cultural gender roles, and the inherited intergenerational traumas going unresolved. The opportunity costs were exponential but the gains are frustratingly and almost flatly linear.

These are some of the personal thoughts that surfaced as I sketched out OPPORTUNITY COST IS SOMEONE’S SACRIFICE. There’s more to it on a broader and different social level—how marginalized groups have had to sacrifice their due gains to benefit someone else, and that novel will be written with ample space for it in the future. For now I leave you with the following sketches, which took a digital turn this week.

“It’s in the intersections—those deviations from straight lines as I plan out the shapes of text. These little intersections are so indicative of each letter that I decided to highlight those areas and see what they look like superimposed on an imag… — “It’s in the intersections—those deviations from straight lines as I plan out the shapes of text. These little intersections are so indicative of each letter that I decided to highlight those areas and see what they look like superimposed on an image. In this case, it’s a custard apple.”

“I scanned each sketch as text and created a selection of lines of shapes in Photoshop, and superimposed them onto a heavily edited fair use image. These are dragon fruits. I wanted to see what these lines and shapes would look like superimposed on … — “I scanned each sketch as text and created a selection of lines of shapes in Photoshop, and superimposed them onto a heavily edited fair use image. These are dragon fruits. I wanted to see what these lines and shapes would look like superimposed on an image, and something I may have to do with the previous developed sketch.”