A lot of my clients who grew up between cultures describe the same bind, even when the specifics are different: there's a version of their life their parents sacrificed for, and a version they actually want, and it feels like choosing one means betraying the other. Honor your parents, or become yourself. Pick.
I don't think that's actually the choice, even though it feels that real in the moment. It's a false binary that guilt is very good at manufacturing, and once you're inside it, almost any decision — a career change, who you marry, how often you call, where you live — gets weighed against an impossible standard: does this prove I still love them enough.
Here's the distinction I keep coming back to with clients: honoring someone is about how you treat them — with respect, with care, with real effort to understand where they're coming from. It is not the same as organizing every decision in your life around their comfort. You can call your mother every week, show up for the holidays that matter to her, and still make a choice she doesn't like. Both things can be true in the same relationship.
Disappointing a parent in one specific decision is not the same as abandoning them, even though it can feel exactly that large in the moment, especially if you were raised to read their disappointment as a referendum on your character. Untangling those two things — this choice versus the whole relationship — is slow work, and it's rarely just intellectual. The guilt doesn't go away because you understood the argument; it loosens because you practiced tolerating it enough times to notice you survived.
If you're the one who translates — language, culture, expectations, between your parents and the world they didn't grow up in — there's often an extra layer: a sense that you owe them not just love, but interpretation, management, protection from disappointment itself. That's a heavy job to carry quietly, and it's one I see a lot in practice. You don't have to do it alone, and you don't have to get it perfectly figured out before you ask for help.