I remember little of my life at age 4, but I have one distinct memory: a shopping mall with a well-lit plaza. My parents would take me there for a reading class every Sunday, and then sit through the course with me. At that time we still lived in Beijing, where two-day weekends had not yet been adopted, so my parents sacrificed their one free day to accompany me to class.

When I was in high school, my mother would wake at 6 a.m. to make my breakfast, and sometimes remain at work until 6 p.m. so she could drive me home after I finished my extracurriculars.

My father, meanwhile, remained on call for my math questions and engineering projects. He spent weekends helping me build catapults for Science Olympiad, and driving me to and from science fairs around the state so I could present my research. While I spent the entirety of my primary education in free public schools, my parents had invested thousands of hours of labor in me before I was ever accepted to college.

In the summer of my junior year of high school in 2013, I attended MIT’s Research Science Institute, a summer program for the best scientists my age. The program’s acceptance rate was about 3 percent, lower than that of Yale, Harvard or Stanford. In our class of less than 90, two have already died. A documentary, “Looking for Luke,” was filmed about the life and suicide of one of my classmates, to raise awareness of depression, particularly in an Asian-American context.

In my experience, the pressure that Asian families exert on their children takes the form not of actively demanding high marks but of quiet sacrifice in support of our education. While my parents insist my health comes above all else, I would often miss a few meals for class, or lose a few nights of sleep for an assignment in college, because these losses seem small when I know all that they have given for my education.

I feel incredibly fortunate that my parents saved me the worry of how to finance graduate school, but in doing so they have replaced the stress of paying off debt with another sort of pressure. Debt feels different when I owe my parents instead of some faceless corporation. I notice how their hair has grayed, and they have grown old in the process of supporting me. Then, I am consumed by guilt.

Our homes are not only the settings for our most cherished memories, but also the products of years of care, labor and investment. I have watched my parents pour their lives into their farmhouse over the course of the last decade. I am driven to work by the knowledge that they are prepared to sell the house I grew up in to pay for my graduate school, and that if I failed to earn scholarships it would be the financial equivalent of burning down my parents’ home.

Jingjing Xiao is a freelance writer and senior at Yale.