RE: 🧽 Washing The Tuk-Tuk 🛺 & A Surprise Visit From Nutsara 👶
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Kindness is weakness here, and most of the time people will take advantage of someone's generosity, and this has left me with only a handful of longterm Khmer friends after living here for 15 years.
In Suriname there's a saying "yu eh gie wan finga, a s'ma wan a her hanu" (literally: give someone one finger, the person wants the whole hand), which means that some people will take advantage of generous people, without taking into account that the "giver" may not have a lot to give.
I'm from an Asian household myself and it was also hard for me to say "no" at certain times, but I learned that I couldn't give anymore than what I could've and had to put boundaries. Fortunately for me, my family respected those.
I know some versions of that expressions using nickel/dollar or branch/whole tree references, and I totally agree with it. It is frustrating having to be a non-authentic version of yourself just so that those around you will not take advantage of you. Unfortunately this is a reality in so many places beyond Suriname and Cambodia 🙁.
True that! And when others don't respect the boundaries, we need to remove ourselves from those situations. Unfortunately we can't always do that, but that's a story for another day.
Hope you are well.