Lunch with Friends

Last Friday, I had lunch with 3 female friends of mine. Among the four of us, two graduated from Harvard, one graduated from Caltech, and one from the "Harvard of China" - Peking University. All of us have received PhD degrees from MIT, UC Berkeley or Stanford. All of us are professional women married with kids.

It's at those lunches that I realize how others truly live. We usually don't confide in other people about the troubles in our lives, unless we feel really understood and safe. With my friends, I have learned about the struggles they have in their professional and personal lives, and I have learned many things. Indeed, as Michelle Obama famously said, "marriage is hard but no one tells you that." It requires a lot of effort on both parties, and still even then, it will be complicated and challenging. And that's fine, because that's how most people live.

The eagerness to portray a "better" image to the outsiders is understandable. It is perhaps similar to the notorious notion of "saving face" by the Chinese. Now I realize that those who are willing to share their troubles are actually the most confident and secure people. As the son of the famous Chinese scholar Hu Shi said, "my father always claimed to everyone that my mother was the boss in everything. Just imagine - those men whose wives really boss them around and feel utterly miserable would never dare to say such things to others."