Is it true that Asian-Americans cannot say “I love you?” The striking title of the writer Lac Su’s memoir is “I Love Yous Are for White People,” which explores the emotional devastation wreaked on one Vietnamese family by its refugee experiences. I share some of Lac Su’s background, and it has been a lifelong effort to learn how to say, without awkwardness, “I love you.” I can do this for my son, and it is heartfelt , but it comes with an effort born of the self-consciousness I still feel when I say it to my father or brother.

Thus, when the actress Sandra Oh won a Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama, “Killing Eve,” perhaps the most powerful part of her acceptance speech for many of us who are Asian-Americans was when she thanked her parents. Gazing at them in the audience, she said, in Korean, “I love you.” She was emotional, her parents were proud, and I could not help but project onto them one of the central dramas of Asian immigrant and refugee life: the silent sacrifice of the parents, the difficult gratitude of the children, revolving around the garbled expression of love.

So many of our Asian parents have struggled, suffered and endured in ways that are completely beyond the imaginations of their children born or raised in North American comfort. This struggle and sacrifice was how Asian parents say “I love you” without having to say it. And so many of us children are not expected to say it either, but instead are expected to express love through gratitude, which means obeying our parents and following their wishes for how we should live our lives.

Our parents, for the most part, told us to get a good education, get a good job and not speak up, things they had to do to survive. They have encouraged, or forced, many of us to become doctors, lawyers and engineers, and to feel ashamed if we do not. What these parents did not do was tell us we could become artists, actors or storytellers, people engaged in seemingly trivial, unsafe and unstable professions. This is why it has been so rare for me, as I give talks in different places around the country, to encounter Asian parents who embrace their children who do not become the “model minority.”