Care Doesn’t Scale, and That’s Okay

Part 1: On ambition, caregiving, and the limits of growth in a finite world

I’ve spent my adult life shaped by two identities that don’t easily coexist. One is the career builder, MBA in hand, often an early hire at high-growth startups. I was there at the start of Web 1.0, and have been in rooms where scale was the strategy, growth was the goal, and the pitch to investors was about traction and speed to market.

My ambition started early on as a child. For me, the point wasn’t just to get ahead. It was about quelling the anxiety that came with the thought that at any moment you could lose everything. My parents did when they decided to hightail it out of post-WW2 China, with the Communist Revolution nipping at their heels.

My family ran a laundromat in 1980s Brooklyn, in a predominantly Italian neighborhood where we were treated as outsiders—or, at best, the outer ring that supported the inner circle of these peoples' daily lives. I witnessed firsthand customers talking down to my parents, mocking their accents, interacting with them in ways that signaled they thought my parents didn’t belong.

My father often got into arguments with customers over seemingly trivial matters. But now when I look back I wonder if it's because he could only take so many "Why don't you go back to China?" insults before he just had to say something. In addition, there was danger because well it was 1980s New York after all. My father was robbed at gunpoint at least twice while closing up shop, targeted for the rolls of bills and heavy buckets of quarters he carried to the car every night.

But the Brooklyn of these times was complicated in a different way than it is today. There were yet to be gentrifying forces and alongside the racial tensions, there was a real sense of community. Many customers tipped us nicely during the holidays, dropped off holiday cards and well wishes. The nonnas brought us homemade struffoli, honey-drenched balls of fried dough, at Christmas time. Regulars asked about me when I was away at school. It was a hodgepodge of experiences, because so much of immigrant life was living in the space between respect and disrespect, warmth and wariness. After 10 years of seven-days-a-week service, the rare holiday off, and no health insurance, my parents hung up the towel and retired. All that hard labor did pay off in the form of being able to send me to a nice, expensive college. It was worth it, they thought, if it meant I could be spared a life of relentless toil.

Being an academic overachiever was an insurance plan, a safety net for me. I declared my college major during freshman orientation, freaking out some of my classmates who came from easier circumstances. For me, those four years were a pitstop on the way to grad school. In my family, you didn’t stop at four years of college. You armed yourself with credentials in case the world threw you a curveball. Given what we’d gone through—wartime, diaspora, the strangeness of assimilation—curveballs seemed to be the defining feature of living.

Becoming a tech person wasn’t part of my master plan though. In the mid-90s, it just happened to be the industry that was growing. Like many of my peers, I fell into it (oooh look, shiny object!) and then stayed. I liked the novelty of it all, the contrast to staid, established industries. The Internet back then felt like mischief-making, an inside joke being perpetrated by a couple of young punks inspired by Matthew Broderick in War Games.

And because I was good at it, I kept moving up. Big tech and startups. Pitches and launches and board decks. I was building a career in environments defined by growth and acceleration and quirky personalities. Because I’m an impatient person by nature and fancied myself a bit of an iconoclast, it clicked. I liked the sense of being part of something new. I liked solving big, messy puzzles and making them work. At my peak, deep in the work zone, I imagined myself a strutting cartoon gunslinger. I slay! I slay! Pew pew! was what I would say to myself in my head.

But that feeling of alignment wouldn’t last. Not once caregiving obligations entered the picture. At 28, just out of business school, I got pulled into a crisis. My grandfather’s dementia had reached its apotheosis: three months in the hospital, his affairs in disarray, his care entrusted not to family but to near-strangers he had latched onto in his paranoia. My mother, who had always been the family’s caretaker, couldn’t face the emotional trauma of what his mind had turned into. He believed she was trying to kill him. After years of that kind of accusation, she couldn’t step in. So I, with the broken Chinese, took over.

While working 50 to 60 hour weeks at a management consulting startup, I filed for guardianship. I wrangled the social workers at the hospital—calling, following up, pushing for meetings—to ensure someone was steering his care instead of letting him languish. I researched and visited nursing homes across Brooklyn and Queens. I unraveled paperwork and conducted financial forensics to make a case of elder fraud for the DA's office. And through it all, I was trying to meet professional expectations and the personal ones that no one saw. Asking for grace from my manager seemed like a complete no-no as she was a hard-to-read, numbers-driven woman who was half my size in stature but loomed large as an intimidating presence.

So this all came to a head one day—a day the entire world will never forget. In the days and weeks preceding it, I fantasized about breaking a leg or getting into some sort of accident that wouldn't be irreversible. Just something that would grant me a legitimate reason to take a break from work. Such was my level of overwhelm that on the morning of September 11, 2001, I emerged from the subway to chaos and completely ignored it. Outside the New York Stock Exchange, crowds were gathering. I heard muttering about some planes hitting the towers and confirmed its truth when I heard the many sirens of arriving first responders.

In that moment, I didn’t fully register what was happening and was annoyed. I thought, shoot, this is going to mean my team is going to be late. I had a client call to prep for. I was already behind. So I just continued to walk straight down Broad Street and up to my office prepared to get out my laptop and just get on with my busy work day. It wasn't until just before the first tower collapsed that I decided to abandon the office and flee.

Looking back, it’s embarrassing to admit that was my instinct. But it tells you a lot about my state of mind that day. Completely work obsessed but I had asked the universe for a pause, some excuse to opt out for a little bit. But God no, not that kind of excuse! It was as if the universe heard me and was playing some cruel joke. You want a break lady? Here’s 9/11 for you!

Of course, that moment was far bigger than my own personal struggles. The universe wasn't orchestrating some cosmic lesson just for me. But it did offer me a glimmer about what it means to see the big picture vis-a-vis work and obligations and keeping myself alive and holding tight the people you care about.

When I begged my mother to stay home that day and not walk the 1+mile to visit my grandfather at the nursing home, she relented. But she went anyway. Such was the strength of her caregiving conviction that even on the one day in history we all were given a free pass to just do nothing, she couldn't bring herself to skip a visit.

This marked the start of my lifelong conflict between the pace of ambition and the weight of care. A tension that I’ve been struggling with ever since. One identity driven by workplace obligations, the other by human need, decline, and responsibilities that don’t fit neatly into any workflow.

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📍Part 2: A New Hope for Ambition: Reclaiming Our Humanity in a System That Won’t
In my next newsletter, I’ll talk about how becoming a mother and caring for my mother showed me just how much this kind of labor is undervalued and invisible. And what I've learned about making room for both care and ambition when the world expects you to choose.