Why am I obsessed with money

I am obsessed with money, and I am not ashamed of it. But it’s not what you think.

There once was a girl who worked double shifts six days a week at a Japanese restaurant while carrying a full course load every semester. She smelled like soysauce and green tea for six years straight. She wore a kimono and poured tea with two hands the way they taught her and smiled at customers who didn’t look at her face, and she clocked in, and she clocked in, and she clocked in.

On Saturdays, an older gentleman would come in. Buttoned up. Proper. A different younger woman on his arm every week. The women changed. His order never did. One evening, he heard me speak to a colleague in Chinese, and his eyes narrowed with recognition. He asked me in our dialect why I worked so hard.

Wèishéme yào nàme kǔ. Why make it so bitter for yourself. That’s what he asked me. In a dialect that made the question feel familial, almost tender, as if he were an uncle offering advice over dinner. But I heard what lived underneath it. The same thing that lives underneath every version of that question when it’s asked of a young woman by an older man with means. Why work this hard when there’s an easier door. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. The woman beside him was the sentence.

I am obsessed with making my own money. Not money. My own. There is a difference so wide you could build a life inside it. Money can be given. Money can be inherited. Money can arrive on the arm of someone who will remind you where it came from every time you forget to be grateful. My own money arrives because I clocked in. Because I studied. Because I passed the exam. Because I built the thing. It has no memory of someone else’s generosity and no strings that tighten when I try to walk away. My own money doesn’t change its mind. Doesn’t leave. Doesn’t ask me to be softer or quieter or more agreeable as a condition of its presence.

I set his tea down. I straightened the napkin. I told him, in the same dialect, that I wanted to marry for love. Eloquently enough to seem naive so as not to offend him, but subtle enough to show my intent.

I think about that girl a lot. I think about her standing in that kimono with her back straight, calculating whether she could pick up a Sunday shift without her grades slipping. I think about her not because she’s a version of me I’ve outgrown, but because she’s the version that built the floor I’m standing on, and I will not pretend she doesn’t live in every financial decision I make.

I am obsessed with money because my mother said save money the way other mothers said I love you. It was her prayer. Her only advice. The two words she could offer in place of the safety net she couldn’t provide. She said it when I left for school. She said it when I got my first paycheck. She said it when her second marriage ended, and her voice was the kind of steady that only comes from practice. Save money. As if the words themselves could build a wall between her daughter and the life she’d lived.

I am obsessed with money because my mother once couldn’t afford a birthday cake. I don’t remember how old I was turning. I remember her face. The way she apologized like it was a confession. The way her eyes did the thing they do when she’s doing math she doesn’t want me to see. She told me I was smiling and happy anyway. I meant it. I would have sat on the floor of an empty room with her and called it a celebration. But she cared. And watching your mother care about something she can’t fix is the kind of memory that doesn’t leave your body. It just moves into your hands and stays there, and every dollar you earn afterward is a small, quiet way of saying you will never have to make that face again.

I am obsessed with money because I watched my mother worry. Not occasionally. Not during emergencies. Constantly. A low hum beneath everything she did. She worried while she cooked. She worried while she laughed. She worried while she told me everything was fine in a voice that had learned to sound fine the way actors learn to sound happy. And I decided, somewhere between childhood and the restaurant and the kimono and the man with the rotating women, that I would make enough so that my mother could stop.

Not enough to be rich. Enough for her to breathe.

I may have lost myself to the grind. I know that. I know there were years I don’t fully remember because I was inside of them the way you’re inside a tunnel. Just forward. Just movement. Just the next shift, the next exam, the next paycheck, the next rung. I watched my mother grow older in the gaps between my ambition, and I felt it, and I kept going because the alternative was stopping, and stopping meant she’d start worrying again, and I could survive my own exhaustion easier than I could survive her worry.

That was the trade. My time for her peace. My twenties for her breath. My presence for her freedom from the math she’d been doing since before I was born.

People hear obsessed with money, and they picture greed. They picture accumulation. The car. The bag. The lifestyle content. They don’t picture a girl in a kimono telling a wealthy man she wants to marry for love. They don’t picture a mother apologizing for a birthday cake. They don’t picture a daughter working doubles so that one day, when her mother says save money, she can finally say you don’t have to anymore.

I have been given lavish things. I’m aware of that. I have been offered more. I am selective about what I accept. Not because I don’t appreciate generosity, but because I know what accepting can cost when the giver believes the gift was a transaction. I have watched women accept things that came with invisible invoices. I have watched the dynamic shift the moment the balance tilted. I refuse to be on the wrong side of that ledger. Some people call that pride. I call it the only form of self-respect I learned to trust.

But when the few men I have truly loved have given me something, I keep it. Not on my wrist. Not on display. In its original box. Stored away in a drawer, I open it sometimes when no one is watching. I don’t wear it because wearing it would make it ordinary. It would become an accessory. And it’s not an accessory. It’s evidence that someone once loved me enough to choose something with care, and I loved them enough to preserve it exactly as it arrived. Untouched. The way they handed it to me. Before anything between us got complicated.

I treat it as an investment. Not in the financial sense. In the sense that it holds its value because I refuse to let it depreciate through casual use. Some people spend love the moment they receive it. I keep mine in the original packaging. Maybe that’s excessive. Maybe it’s the same girl in the kimono, still protecting things she can’t afford to lose.