Imagine you are in a foreign country to learn about your history and experience your heritage inspired by your mother. While you've left your boyfriend behind you have a good relationship, and then you join the program your mother organized for you, excited and then learn the entire trip was to set you up with a good Chinese doctor. One that you've never met before where you have no friends and no support to go to when you realize that your mother betrayed you and is trying to force you to get married. So you find a temple and find yourself in that place you were meant to be in, what you've been looking for your entire life and you like the person you are now, so you stay.
At best, everyone can be annoyed and a little sad you've been gone so long, but how in the hell can your mother who cut you to the core like that and not bother to be in the least little bit remorseful? She's never apologized or acknowledged what she did and then on TOP of that she befriends your boyfriend while you were gone. Lo and behold, she actually likes him which means she never took the chance to know him in the first place. Why is everyone mad at Nicky? What kind of sense does that make? Her mother is her harshest critic and ignores the fact that her actions cause a three year estrangement. I really don't get it and it upsets me to no end, the level of gaslighting Nicky's mom does.
- Welcome to Asian parenting.
- Maybe he loved her and would have liked to be more of a father in an ideal life that didn't involve bodyswapping, but his treatment of her stunted that relationship and he knew it. In that case, "It could have been you" would mean something like "it could have been you... that I had a decent parent-child relationship with".
