This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 19, 2019 - August 25, 2019

Always follow your dreams, we have often been told. Well, unless you’re Asian, then you ought to follow your parents’ dreams.

Over the past few decades, Asian kids basically had three career options: lawyer, doctor or engineer.

I’ve been a journalist for 10 years so I am obviously not in any of the above categories and likely never will be.

At 30 plus, I think it is too late to venture into highly lucrative fields held in high esteem by my parents’ generation, such as law and medicine.

It is not too early to write myself off as “a complete failure”, going by the Asian parent’s definition of success.

But come to think of it, it isn’t entirely my fault.

I will tell you why later.

Last month, it was reported that a six-year-old South Korean YouTuber with 30 million subscribers had purchased a five-storey property in the Seoul suburb of Gangnam.

According to CNN, the girl, known simply as Boram, paid 9.5 billion Korean won (US$8 million) for the building through the Boram Family company, set up by her parents.

She has two popular YouTube accounts — a toy review channel with 13.6 million subscribers and a video blog with 17.6 million.

In one of her most popular clips, which drew more than 376 million views, she makes instant noodles in a plastic toy kitchen and then slurps them down.

Just for perspective, I only have 561 friends on Facebook and most couldn’t care less what I eat or drink.

The last time I checked, only three people responded to a recent Facebook post of me at a bubble milk tea shop. All they said was “bojio”, literally, “no invite” in Hokkien. And their comments did not mean anything because they were just saying it for fun.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Jaden Ashman, a 15-year-old boy who ignored his mother’s pleas to not spend so many hours on video game Fortnite, plans to buy her a house and a car after winning almost £1 million playing the game.

Like millions of mothers, including my Asian mum, Lisa Dallman often despaired of her son’s obsession with computer games. Desperate to make him do his homework instead of sitting in his bedroom staring at a screen, she once threw out his X-Box and even snapped his headset into two.

But now, according to news reports, young Jaden is having the last laugh after scooping up the grand prize in the first Fortnite World Cup.

So, let me get this straight — a little Korean girl bought a multimillion-dollar property while a British teenager is buying his mum a house and a car, and here I am, a Malaysian in his early thirties with a 30-year housing loan.

Seriously, what on earth am I doing with my life?

But then, like I said earlier, it’s not entirely my fault.

If my mum had not thrown out my plastic toy and confiscated my video games after I failed my exams when I was a little boy, perhaps I would have become a social influencer or professional gamer who can afford to buy her a lavish home and a luxury car.

Well, what can I say?

Joke’s on you, Mum!

On a more serious note, perhaps Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik should seriously consider making video games or esports (which sounds a whole lot better, don’t you think?) a subject to be taught in schools.

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