Dear Mina:

I understood that his post of questions and prices was a joke (with real life components, of course). But I didn’t thoroughly understand the joke. I understand a bit better now, thank you for elaborating.

Regarding the real life components of the joke, it reveals the following values: education, employment and income,  marriage and children (future family). Too many expectations on Gyunnie led to his drive to be perfect, an impossibility. It was an act of mercy on his mother’s part when she told him it is okay to fail. Maybe that relaxed him and made it possible for him to get the best grade.

Life is very difficult for him, being torn between family and societal expectations of him and his differing individual preferences, values, interests. Here is a moment of fantasy on my part, and I am sharing it as a Fantasy: if you and Gyunnie left your respective families, and society, and took your combined very high intelligence to another country that offers quality education and employment possibilities, where you were free from expectations, from family obligations, the two of you would … conquer the world, so to speak, get the highest education possible, the highest income, and make the best life for yourselves in every way, making your own choices that fit your own shared preferences and values.

You wrote: “I feel kind of guilty for not really seeing his struggles now”- his struggles are much greater than what you could possibly help him with, in the context of interacting with him for only four months as a peer (not a parent, an elder family member, an employer and such). If you saw more of his struggles, what could you have done differently that would be of help to him?

anita