Pineapple is the Underdog of Pizza Toppings
Around the time I started college, I began to collect pineapples. I have a pineapple print dress, a pineapple print backpack, a pineapple tattoo, I decorated my college graduation cap with pineapple stickers, and I eat pineapples every chance I get–in fried rice, on pizza, and on my birthday, my father bakes me a pineapple upside down cake (I eat pineapple every chance I get provided that it’s in something that tastes good; Kroger’s pineapple pie is not one of those things). Some people associate pineapples with swingers, which I did not know until after I began my collection. Some people associate it with royalty or with the TV show Psych (which used to be one of my favorite shows until I realized it was copaganda, but the show isn’t the reason why I collect pineapples). I’m still not entirely sure why I collect them.
My love for pineapples started when I half-jokingly argued with my best friend about pineapple on pizza. Pineapple is my favorite pizza topping. I enjoy the taste of it, but it also symbolizes something to me. Pineapple is the most hated pizza topping in the United States, and possibly the world. I’m always one to root for the underdog. As the black sheep and certified fuckup of my family, I feel that rooting for the underdog is my duty. My target audience for this post is any other family fuckups, especially those in immigrant households, who struggle to love themselves and find their way in life. I am sharing my story hoping it will comfort and possibly even inspire those who have struggled similarly.
Growing up, I was everything my parents didn’t like. I have ADHD, which I did not find out until I saw a psychiatrist at my first college’s health center. My parents don’t like to talk about this. Looking back, I think that they knew I had it, but kept it a secret, thinking that if I didn’t know I had it, they would be able to discipline the disability out of me. Due to my ADHD, I was a socially awkward child growing up. I didn’t dress very well. I performed poorly in school, with the vast majority of my teachers complaining that I was disrespectful, unorganized, and lazy. On top of that, I was and still am naturally heavyset. I even have a testosterone imbalance that makes me grow facial hair, despite being DFAB. My parents blatantly favored my sister over me, as she was everything I was not. She was talented at school, a social butterfly, and thin, with no facial hair. I realize how cliché this story sounds; lots of people have been overshadowed by a sibling in their lives. Lots of south Asians in particular may know firsthand what it’s like to have parents whose love is so conditional.
I am writing this post from my aunt’s guest bedroom in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India, where I have been volunteering as an ESL teacher and a desk worker at a psychiatric hospital. During my time here, I have witnessed children being abused by their teachers and parents. As awful as it sounds to say, abuse is normalized in Indian culture, and in several other developing countries as well. When I was in middle school, Amy Chua published her nonfiction book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which was about abusive Asian parenting. I was terrified that my mother would read it and get ideas. When I read it, I related to a couple of the anecdotes Chua wrote about her daughters.
I would dearly love to vent in detail about my familial abuse, but to keep this post concise, I will not do that. Depending on who you are reading this, you may find the specific anecdotes either relatable or horrifying. The relevant information that I will disclose is that my parents were physically and verbally violent and emotionally abusive. Most of the violence was provoked by my poor grades in school, and the vast majority of it was perpetrated by my mother, although my father and sister would sometimes play a hand in it. My PTSD flashbacks started at age fourteen, but I did not receive help for it until age twenty. Up until college, the best source of support I had for my mental health issues was the Internet. I could not go to my sister or cousin for support, as they defended the abuse from my parents, being brainwashed by Indian culture.
My family forced me to see a therapist at one point in highschool, and even my therapist did not sympathize with me, telling me that my mother loved me, that she didn’t believe me about some of the things I told her, and that I was unreasonable for bringing up traumatic events from years ago. I was angry at my mother for giving me PTSD, but I also thought that I was weak for having it, as I knew others who were abused by parents and none had mental health issues as severe as mine. I did, however, have one close friend who supported me, also Indian American; she has been there for me my whole life and I consider her my true family. Aside from her, my biggest comfort was talking to my followers on Tumblr, where I not only received support for mental health, but also embraced my identity as a nonbinary (any pronouns) bisexual queer individual.
Most young adults are excited to move into their dorms at college, but as a survivor of familial abuse, I was more excited than most to get away from my family. I chose engineering as my first major, as my upbringing in a stereotypical Asian household had made me believe that I would be stupid if I pursued something non-STEM. As I mentioned before, the first time in my life that I saw competent mental health professionals was my sophomore year of college. I did not see them for the trauma from my parents, but rather, when my roommate and friends were mean to me. Again, I will not go into detail about their actions towards me, but their rudeness felt several magnitudes more traumatic than my parents’ abuse, even the physical abuse. One thing that not many people know about having abusive parents is that it makes one’s social interactions with friends much more difficult, and immeasurably more traumatic if said social interactions go wrong. My former friends’ lack of kindness and acceptance towards me made it even more difficult for me to love myself. My mental health continued to deteriorate at college until I was expelled in my fourth year for attempting revenge on my fake friends, which was the lowest point of my life.
The devastation of the dismissal led me to check myself into a psychiatric hospital. Ironically, my mother had always threatened to put me in a mental hospital as a child, but then when I ended up in one as an adult, she cried and asked what she did to deserve a child like me. Despite being a doctor and calling me mentally ill, she did not want me to take my psychiatric medication, saying it was only for "really crazy people". I was hospitalized a total of five times between 2019 and 2022, but the first hospitalization was the beginning of gaining real support from my father. I had to have a few uncomfortable conversations with him over the course of a few years.
The first time I seriously spoke to him about my mental health was when I told him how I was bullied at college, and he sympathized. The second time was over the phone from my uncle's house. After transferring to a college that was ten miles from my parents' home, I was forced to live at home, which again devastated my mental health, especially during the quarantine, so I asked to move in with my uncle who had been kind to me when I was younger. I assumed he would be kind to me again as an adult, but I was wrong. My uncle also verbally and slightly physically abused me, and he, like my mother, did not believe in psychiatric medications, taking them away from me eventually, not allowing me to see a therapist either. When I tried to tell him that I felt depressed, he became angry and repeatedly told me that I was not depressed and that I was completely normal. My aunt also told me that if I believed I was not mentally ill, it would come true.
Unfortunately, this attitude toward mental health is all too common in immigrant families. I then told my father, who is actually somewhat progressive for an Indian parent, about my PTSD from my mother and how it worsened when I stayed in her house, but I had to take drastic measures for him to truly support me. I ran away from my uncle's house, staying with friends for a few weeks, and I planned on going to a shelter once I was evicted by their landlord. My father, thinking the shelter would be unsafe, agreed to pay for me to live on campus at the new college, but forced me to visit home most weekends, which was upsetting.
During my senior year of college, classes and events moved back to in-person and I tried hard to make as many friends and have as many good memories as I could to make up for the shitty time I had at my first college, although I still struggled with self-harm and mild substance abuse. I had also changed my major to communications when classes were online, thinking I was incapable of graduating with a harder major, and embarrassed to be the only one of my Indian friends and family who was pursuing a major that wasn't well respected by our strict parents.
It was at this point in my life that I decided to go by the nickname “Maylee” instead of my birth name “Mallika”. I wanted to reinvent myself, and “Maylee” was a nickname that my best friend had given me, a twist on “Malli”, the nickname my parents gave me. (I googled “Maylee name” and I found out it means “she who resembles a wildflower” in Hawaiian, which I fucking love! I have not gotten my name legally changed yet, but I plan to soon.) Graduating college boosted my confidence tenfold, as I had previously thought I was incapable of such a feat.
After I graduated, my father eventually agreed to pay my rent at another building after I had lost my job and could no longer pay my own rent. It had taken a couple years, but finally I had his full support, and once I was no longer forced to visit my mother's house, I finally felt healed. I felt I was capable of forgiving my father but not my mother as the vast majority of the violence was committed by her, my father being much gentler. Although he could be abusive at times, my biggest problem with him was that when I complained about my mother's violence, he was either too much of a coward to stand up to her, or just didn't care. He apologized for both his abuse and enabling my mother's abuse, saying he wished he could go back and take care of me better.
My mother refuses to take responsibility for her actions, and even if she did do that, I feel that her violence was too severe to forgive. Although I do not want my mother in my life, I do sympathize with her, knowing that she was also abused as a child and suspecting that she also suffers from mental illness, although she does not want to admit it or seek help. After trying to get revenge on my toxic friends at college, I realized firsthand how an abuse victim can be driven to become an abusive person themself, although, unlike my mother, I along with my father worked hard to eliminate our abusive behaviors. I am giving only my father a chance to be in my life now. It was my father’s idea to volunteer in India to build my resume before applying to graduate school.
I had a few different options I was considering for my graduate school program. I first considered environmental science and sociology, for various reasons. My best friend had previously told me that she thought I would be good at social work. I was hesitant to do social work at first, not wanting to be a cliché. I had heard of a lot of people going into social work due to shitty childhoods and wanting to help others who go through the same thing. But the more research I did on the program, the more it appealed to me and I thought, ”Maybe cliché isn’t a bad thing!” And that is where my story ends. I am starting graduate school next fall semester and am quite excited.
This post turned out much longer than I imagined it when I first started writing it, so kudos to you if you have read this far. As I said before, I am writing this post to give advice to anyone who can relate to me, whether Asian or not. The pieces of advice I would like to give are as follows:
Always root for the underdog. If you are the underdog, root for yourself.
Not all parents are capable of loving their children. It is okay to find other people to love you, and you can also love yourself even if no one else loves you.
It is possible to reconcile with an abusive parent, but it is up to you to decide what you are capable of forgiving and what cannot be forgiven.
You are not stupid if you choose a non-STEM major nor are you weak if you have mental health issues. Society needs humanities majors just as much as it needs STEM majors and mental strength is determined by perseverance and aspiration and actions toward self-improvement.
It is never too late to reinvent yourself, no matter how badly you’ve fucked up.
Thanks for reading! You can read more of my story in Mrinal Gokhale’s second nonfiction book, Taboo: South Asian Mental Health Stories, which will be published at the end of the month; my story is titled “Wildflower”.
Maylee Azad (any pronouns) is a current Master of Social Work student, former cross country runner, pineapple pizza enthusiast, and certified Social Justice Warrior™. Born a Gen 2 Indian immigrant to Michigan, they did not realize their passion in life until a late age, after graduating college with a degree in Media Arts and Studies, which was essentially chosen at random. They realized their passion in life was simply helping people, which is why they dream of becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer one day, along with being an author, as they loved children's literature growing up, being particularly inspired by the Riordanverse and Holes by Louis Sachar. They are honored to share their story with others who may relate and hope that their readers enjoy it and can learn from it!
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