Growing up as an only child in China, I thought I knew exactly what parental love looked like. Around me, many parents seemed to carry an invisible ledger. Sacrifice was the moral currency of the day, invoked to justify good grades, prestigious careers and lifelong gratitude. Love and guilt often came as a package deal. “Do you know how much I’ve sacrificed for you?” was so ubiquitous that it became a suffocating childhood refrain. The self-sacrificing mother is by no means unique to China, or...