For as long as I can remember, two of the hardest things for me to do are asking for help and learning to say no. When I came to the US, my mom drilled the phrase into my brain, “Always say I can, never say I can’t.” I feel like the phase is so similar to “always say yes, never say no.” So that’s me, always “I can” and never “I can’t.”

Recently, I’ve begun to practice saying no. As easy as saying that one word is, it’s actually been pretty hard. I remember when my mom requested me to go to China with her at the end of last year. I said no but then she kept insisting, offering me incentives like paying for my flight and hotel but still, I kept saying no. She even berated me of taking my job too seriously. Why won’t she accept my no? Why do I need to give her a million legitimate reasons of not wanting to travel with her?

More recently, my mom cooked up this crazy idea of wanting to open a restaurant. It’s not as though her siblings were desperate for jobs. She has a job and her siblings all have jobs. She wanted to enlist me to help with the finance aspect of things. The first thing I said was “No, you leave me out of this.”

When I became unemployed in 2018 and decided I wanted to become an entrepreneur, I did my research into this venture. Before getting the business going, one must go through the legal procedure of setting up the business and after reading up on the procedure, I immediately moved on. Becoming an entrepreneur was not in my future.

Thankfully, of my mother’s siblings, the only one willing to put in the work was my moms’ sister. Her brother said no to the idea and so did her youngest sister.

Speaking of her youngest sister, she’s the one who dredged up this thought because I am now repeatedly saying no to her. “I refuse to get involve in this.” She wants me to help her apply for a multi-entry Japanese visa. She is obsessed with this figure skating star, so obsessed that she is setting alarms just to see his live-stream, spend thousands of dollars to fly to Japan to see his live events, and carry a key-chain with his face on it so she can photograph like he’s there with her. Talk about a crazy fan.

Applying for a Japanese visa is not easy as the form is lengthy and some of the instructions are quite vague. I’ve already helped her apply for a visa twice and now, she’s begging me to help her apply for multi-entry visa, which is a more complex procedure. What a pain for a one-week trip.

The only reason she won’t fill it out herself is because the form is not in Chinese, it’s only available in Japanese or in English. She can also go next door and have my cousin do it for her. After all, she’s over there all the time. I think she wants me to do it because she thinks she can bully me into it.

Not anymore, from now on, I’m saying no. It’s time for everyone in this family to grow up and learn to do things for themselves.