If I had followed “996”.
On 04/17/19, the below story was published on Medium.com, my first ever article outside my family blog.
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Just recently, CNN flashed late breaking news on my cellphone that actually gave me pause.
“Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, has spoken out on social media in recent days in support of the Chinese work practice known as “996.” The number refers to working from 9 am to 9 pm six (6) days a week and is said to be common among the country’s big technology companies and start-ups.” (source: CNN article dated 04/15/19 at 10:05 PM ET by Serenitie Wang and Daniel Shane of CNN Business).
The article further noted that Ma “added that any prospective employees of Alibaba, one of the world’s biggest tech companies, should be prepared to work 12 hours a day if they want to succeed. Or why bother joining? We don’t lack those who work eight hours comfortably, he said.”
I’m an American born Chinese to parents who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s. I’m as American as they are Chinese, but I’m all too familiar with what “996” is all about.
Both my father and mother worked together in various Chinese kitchens throughout my upbringing. After school, my brother and I would usually come to these kitchens because they were the actual locations of where my parents were for at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Sorry, Jack Ma, but my folks got you beat.
If not for the fact that they tolled in these kitchens, and not in occupations that required them to work in places, like, say, Alibaba, my brother and I would never have seen them. We would never have had sit-down dinners every night with them. We would never have had the face-to-face family togetherness that usually happened in those pre-Internet days.
Fast forward to current day.
I’m in my high forties, and I’m now taking care of my folks. Pop will be 77 years old in May, while Mom will be 70 in October.
In Chinese culture, the expectation used to be that the daughter would become the caregiver of her elderly parents. To say that that expectation has gone by the wayside is an understatement. Allow me to point to Exhibit A as proof of its miserable demise: The Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly People. It’s a law in China that went into effect July, 2013 that required adult children to visit and take care of their own parents.
I chose to take care of my aging parents not because of Chinese filial devotion. (gone by the wayside, remember?)
And certainly not because of that silly law (because we’re all American citizens so that law doesn’t even apply).
But because I love them.
Taking care of very independent and active elderly folks was a handful.
That was before Pop had a stroke in 2016.
I understood then what it meant to care for aging parents.
If I had worked at Alibaba, the following descriptions would have been posted into my HR file:
- Not a “hardworking employee” because I skipped work to rush Pop to the ER. (We got there in 30 minutes flat, from the time the stroke occurred to when we reached the hospital.)
- Unqualified for any promotion for those days that I took off work to stay, day and night, with my father while he was in the ER, and subsequently, in ICU for almost a week.
- Downgraded to a true slacker for racing out of my job at the end of my shift every night to go visit him while he was an inpatient at the rehab hospital for almost 4 months.
- Placed on a disciplinary improvement plan for when I took Pop and Mom out for a nice dinner when he was finally released from rehab.
It is 2019 and Pop is still here with Mom and me, healthy and happy for the second lease on life.
If things had not worked out, if Pop had actually left us, I would have been fired from my job for attending his funeral.
I would truly have been a horrible daughter if I had followed “996”.
