Eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son

“Eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son” is Rick’s compressed account of inherited responsibility: he understands himself as the latest link in a family line, expected to shoulder other people’s welfare and preserve the family name. The phrase explains both his fierce care for Jenna and the trap he recognizes in treating self-sacrifice as the only proof that he will not abandon her. Set beside Ever’s medical-career obligation to her parents, it makes family duty a force that shapes young adults’ choices—and one they must learn to renegotiate.

The Inherited Role

Rick describes himself as having cared for his mother and sister since he was fourteen. He opened a bank account before he could drive, and recalls his father’s final instruction when leaving the family: “You’ll have to be the man of the house now.” Rick hated his father for abandoning them when his mother’s rheumatoid arthritis became difficult to manage, but took the instruction to heart. The lineage in the expression therefore carries a specific history of care and abandonment, not merely an abstract expectation attached to being male or eldest.

The burden extends beyond practical support. Rick says that he is the only boy among twenty-two first cousins to carry the Woo surname, and that his relatives depend on him to pass the family name along. His family wants him to date, but not Jenna; his mother had even fasted for three days in an attempt to make him end the relationship. Rick’s account shows how family expectations can pull in contradictory directions: he is expected to marry and continue the line, while the person he loves is not accepted as the person with whom to do it.

Care and Its Cost

Rick’s responsibility toward Jenna grew from their shared past and her distress. She faced pressures from friends and school, had lonely stretches while her parents traveled for work, and, in junior year, lost fifteen pounds. She used to come to Rick’s house each night and fall asleep in his bed while he did homework. He was balancing school, football, and time with Sophie, who resented how much attention Jenna needed. Rick tried to encourage Jenna to develop interests of her own; she had volunteered at a children’s clinic but stopped, focusing instead on grades and him.

Rick describes having stayed through a difficult period until things improved and Jenna began volunteering at a horse camp. He came to think of them as a settled couple who had grown up together, and says he thought he would marry her. He also says they had never slept together, a boundary he later regards as perhaps the one thing he did right. His feeling that he could not be like his father, or do to Jenna what his father had done to the family, turns care into a moral test. The inherited role gives him a reason to remain, but also makes it hard for him to distinguish loyalty from taking sole responsibility for another person’s life.

Family Beyond Blood

The book sets Rick’s family obligations alongside the family Ever understands herself to owe. Ever’s mother points to her father’s years pushing an orderly cart at the Cleveland Clinic after the state licensure board would not recognize his Chinese medical degree without an unaffordable residency. Ever has grown up believing that, as the elder child, she must earn back the cost of her parents’ lives. Her mother’s black pearl necklace becomes a record of sacrifice: it was a gift from her father, brought back from a failed business trip to Hong Kong, and her mother later sold it to help send Ever to Taiwan. Ever also recalls her mother covering chores while she studied, and her father driving her to a clinic internship.

Ever’s father had tied her future to the career he could not pursue. When she was a child and gashed her knee, he stitched it and told her, “When you become a doctor, you’ll take care of it yourself.” He would come home from the Cleveland Clinic and tell her about operations and lives doctors had saved, while she understood that her becoming a doctor might make his own disappointment worthwhile. Ever’s sense of obligation is thus not identical to Rick’s, but it is built from a related mix of love, sacrifice, and an inherited future. Her wish to dance can feel to her like a betrayal of what her parents have endured.

The story also shows kinship being enacted beyond the nuclear family. Sophie calls her roommate family, and Rick asks Ever to watch out for Sophie because he would do the same for his little sister. At a family visit, Rick introduces Ever to Aunty Claire as his girlfriend, drawing her into his relatives’ household, even as the declaration leaves Sophie and Xavier stunned. These gestures contrast family as welcome and care with family as a role that constrains choice. Belonging can offer support, but it can also bring expectations that a person is not free to set down easily.

Responsibility Reconsidered

Ever eventually tells Rick how her parents’ hardship weighs on her decision about medicine and dance. She recalls her father’s childhood poverty, his admiration of American roads when he first arrived, and his habit of eating meat she had rejected rather than let protein go to waste. She connects those memories to her mother selling the necklace and to her fear that choosing dance would be like spitting in her parents’ faces. Rick listens while recognizing the weight she is describing; their conversation places his family role beside hers without making either burden disappear.

Rick’s understanding of himself also begins to shift. He speaks of guilt about being happy and of realizing that a relationship between two people should allow him to feel larger rather than confined to the smallest version of himself. The narration explicitly links that thought to his identity as the eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son: he has been carrying the happiness of others instead of attending to his own. The phrase therefore marks both the force of the role and the moment its logic becomes visible enough to question.

The ending offers a change in what family responsibility can mean. On August 24, Rick visits on his way to Yale, and Ever’s father announces that he will retire from the Cleveland Clinic and pursue his consulting business full-time, with a new contract in Taitung. He acknowledges the financial risk and the awkward timing of Ever’s decision not to go to medical school, but says he has considered the change for ten years and that Ever is happy. His choice does not erase the sacrifices that shaped Ever’s sense of debt; instead, it shows a parent revising his own path as his daughter revises hers. Against the expression’s inherited, seemingly fixed chain, the ending makes room for responsibility that does not require one person to carry everyone else’s future.