My employer love-bombed me, and then fired me

On confusing boundaries in school & work, and harmful media representation

A month out of college with two English degrees, I got my first full-time job in tech, without having any internships under my belt. Two months later, after offering me a promotion and a promise to sponsor my visa, my employer fired me.

re: writing as my coping mechanism

Before getting this job, I had applied to over a hundred others, interviewed for two, and didn’t get any. As an international student on OPT, I felt fucked. (My friend did kindly offer to marry me, if things didn’t work out.)

On a random, still unemployed day, I was catching up with another friend, who was telling me about the start-up he worked at. I looked up the slightly incomprehensible website and told him, “I could write this better”. And that was my pitch. Later that day, the CEO emailed me back for a 10-week internship.

We got in touch, scheduled an interview, which I took with shitty Wi-Fi in the freezing cold outside Blue Bottle (fix your Wi-Fi!!!!) I was nervous; the CEO was kind but her gaze flitted across the screen as I talked, and I worried that my responses were sub-par (Only later, did I realize that she’s doing about a million things at once).

After the interview, she asked me to send writing samples. I sent a Daily article, a short story about being unemployed and depressed at home, stuck with one’s father, and an academic essay on Chinese sci-fi. The day after, I was offered a position as a marketing intern. The entire process took less than a week.

My first day, the CEO took me to her office, and, after laying out the general projects that I would be helping her with (socials, GTM strategy, product marketing), she told me that the short story I had sent as my writing sample, had made her laugh, and then made her cry.

Even though she was a tech person, she said, she always loved reading fiction. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, as a recent example. She never understood business people who only read nonfiction. It’s fiction, creativity, that sustains her. She said I was a great writer, gave me advice about applying for the O-1.

Your story reminded me of my relationship with my parents, she told me in Chinese, which, in the small rented office space in Menlo Park, surrounded by other start-ups employees, felt oddly intimate. I was really surprised that someone this young can experience emotions like this.

I laughed and humbly explained that my parents are older, maybe of the same generation as hers.

That night, I called my parents, overjoyed. My boss loves me, I told them. She loves my story and thinks I’m a great writer. She’s also a Chinese immigrant.

The following two months and half passed like a blur. I learned about product, about developments in LLM, about marketing, writing, talking to people, about startup culture, about management. I also learned about isolation, making mistakes, and the slight self-hatred whenever I forced myself to laugh when a white co-worker repeatedly made jokes about ethnic foods, every time we ate Chinese or Mexican. And above all, I learned about my CEO. Her family in China, her mother, her experience as a Chinese woman in tech, et cetera, et cetera.

And then, one weekend, I didn’t check Slack, and she had sent me half a dozen messages about marketing research before an industry event. When I woke up on Monday, I had received an email about my unacceptable behavior, listing all of my wrongdoings over the weekend.

Beyond the expansive anxiety that I felt that entire day, I was also deeply confused about how her tone towards me, always kind, had suddenly became distant, cold, even hateful. Except for one solid mistake, I thought the rest of my wrongdoings were unfounded. I couldn’t understand the extent of her anger and the severity of her words. Only a week ago, she had offered me a promotion to full-time, telling me that the company has invested time and energy in me, that I should stay and shouldn’t go elsewhere, that they will work on helping sponsor my O-1 or H1B, offers that were too good in this economy to be waved off.

And the complete 180. The following week, my manager completely ignored all the messages I sent her over Slack (including a post-mortem that our lawyer suggested I write to rectify my mistake), and didn’t talk to me once during an in-person marketing event. The next Monday, our lawyer told me they were letting me go.

My apology message to my manager.

The whole thing feels like a blur. Her past constant verbal expression of how much she and the company liked me, what good work I was doing, how much of a fast learner I was. Young, funny, adaptable. We hope you stay with us for a long time.

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In my sophomore winter of college, I realized that I harbored a deep mistrust for adults in positions of authority who seemed to like me just a little too much. This moment of reflection was prompted by a comment my writing professor had said, in a workshop focusing on drugs, religion, and spirituality. We were talking about personality types, and, after I revealed that I was an INFJ, he responded: “That’s my wife’s type. No wonder I like you so much.”

My high school was a small boarding school in the middle of nowhere, Alabama. My first year, we had a new head of school, a kind, soft-spoken and educated white lady from the North. In my junior year, she was pressured into vacating her position after conducting investigations into the faculty’s inappropriate behavior with the students (at least, that’s what I had gathered at the time).

A few months before, arguably the school’s most beloved teacher, who taught the contemporary ensemble class, was fired and sent to jail for having sex with one of his students.

There were others: My favorite English teacher, a harmless-looking old lady who had invited me into her office and told me secrets about her past student, the famous John Green and the “true” story behind Looking for Alaska. She disappeared suddenly in the middle of November, and rumors came in the following weeks that she had left to take care of her ailing husband. Only after our head of school left, did the stories of her inviting female students to her house came out.

My French teacher, a sixty-year-old white man, who coincidentally also taught John Green, to physically demonstrate how to roll the French R, forced a fourteen-year-old girl open her mouth and proceeded to stick a tongue depressor down her throat.

And then there were relationships that were never explicitly inappropriate, that mirrored what indie movies portrayed what a student-teacher connection could be: intimate, parental, without the constraints of traditional boundaries.

As an international student living in Alabama, constantly anxious about upsetting my best-friend at the time, missing home and regretting ever coming to the States, I did find teachers to confide in and feel a genuine connection to.

I don’t remember the exact conversations, but I remember being a bit in love with one of my teachers who lived on campus. She was kind, had a sweet and soft voice, and, when I asked about the scar on her nose, told me that she had recently gotten surgery for her skin cancer. I didn’t interact with her as much as someone of my other teachers (she taught science while I took two to three English classes during a semester), but the distance and infrequent interaction simply fueled to my obsession with getting her approval and seeing her smile at me.

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Back to college, to the English teacher who had openly spoke about his depression and his relationship with psychedelics for our entire class, who had encouraged each of us to be open, honest, daring in our writing. It was a writing workshop like no other I’ve ever experienced. I got to know some of the worst and best times of my peers’ lives throughout their words.

I was not proud of the writing I produced in the course (this was still before I had let go of the pretense, front, and mystery that had plagued my fiction) but I still did desperately want the cool, hip teacher’s approval.

One day after class, my writing teacher asked me if everything was going alright. I had forgotten what I was stressed about, but remember that I didn’t want to confide in him in truth. He kept pushing and asking whether everything was alright, well-intentioned, fulfilling his role of the relatable English teacher who you could openly talk about sex and drugs and rock and roll (our class did have a collaborate drugs + rock and roll playlist).

In the end, I had told him that I was stressed about money, and about the inexplicable feeling that I wasn’t really alive, that everything that happened simply happened. He congratulated me on being astute. Most students in their 20s blunder through, not even realizing. He had said. I was lucky, that at least I was perceptive. I nodded, not really sure what he meant.

At the end of the quarter, he has a tradition of guessing each of his students’ astrology signs. Upon learning that I was a Cancer Sun after three wrong guesses (though one wrong guess was my rising), he said, “But I’ve never seen you cry!”

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The cool, caring English teacher prototype permeates indie, coming-of-age films. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Edge of Seventeen, Dead Poets Society. The ethos of finding an adult that truly understands you in a world of teenagers that don’t, of feeling special when your social life is unsatisfactory, of feeling somewhat, like a misunderstood martyr. It’s comforting, and a somewhat self-congratulatory defense mechanism. As a teenager, I was heavily influenced by these media portrayals, and looked to my teachers as alternative friends, as substitute parents.

perks of being a wallflower, funny relatable english teacher

At my boarding school, there were staff (some of whom were also teachers) called our “dorm parents”. They checked in on us every week night at 10 for lights out. They invited us to their houses to bake cookies and drink tea and pet their drooling dogs, in an effort of fostering a home away from home.

As is with every effort, it worked in part, and some times, we genuinely felt supported. But often these boundaries, that none of us knew how to define, were crossed. My evil ex-best friend and roommate, wanting to destroy the social relationships of my other best friend, went and cried to all the dorm parents and the teachers, victimizing herself and completely getting the adults’ allegiance towards her. The teachers were swayed. They picked sides. My other friend was left unsupported while my ex-roommate was offered all the undeserved sympathy in the world.

But, none of this is to force blame on my teachers and dorm parents where blame doesn’t belong. I’ve never been taken advantage of or harassed. I don’t want to prescribe evil onto some of these adults who, I never knew, not really.

But there were many times that I did feel deeply uncomfortable while interacting with them. I was fifteen. I’m now twenty-three and still think about that office, the fact that I was chosen to talk to her after class, the way my English teacher had called me special and made me feel so.

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I heavily debated using the word “love-bomb” to describe what was happening (even the phrase, “what was happening”, has the connotation that something out-of-the-ordinary was happening, which, because of my constant self-doubt, feel compelled to explain even now).

The first few times I tried to tell people about the vague discomfort I felt around my manager, I didn’t really have a narrative to tie all the dots together (conversations we’ve had, the way we work together, one semi-alarming sentence that I had read about her before I started work). It wasn’t until my current roommate used the word “love-bomb”, without me having to prescribe any narrative, did I feel validated and comforted. Yet, the metaphor in which one can’t not immediately think of romantic connotations makes me incredibly uneasy, even though the base conceit of early “love”/praise followed by later “distance”/extreme admonishment felt similar.

The day after offering me a promotion and telling me that they would sponsor my visa, my manager texted me on a Saturday morning. Long chunks of text telling me to celebrate my promotion with my friends, on her (and of course, to promote our product to them: guerrilla marketing, or a pyramid scheme, if you will). She texted that she will reach out to people who have O-1s and put me in contact. She texted that we should start preparing for my awards. I felt strange, guilty, uncomfortable, and didn’t text back.

For those two months, she had simultaneously felt like a relative that cared for me and a someone whose life experience that was so unreachable and different than mine. She had told me personal stories. She had asked about my parents. I felt towards her simultaneously a fear and reverence, desire to learn more and desire to run away.

Almost a week after this layoff, I start telling people that I’m glad it happened (even as I think about my insane rent price). That it taught me about boundaries, management, and corporate culture and bureaucracy. I reflected on all the pseudo-parental and uncomfortably semi-intimate relationships that I’ve had since coming to the States. I flinch every time people I don’t know tell me they love me (joke: even my parents don’t tell me that). I’m still trying to figure out how to have boundaries but still have genuine connection with people. But, just as I tell my parents that they’re not my friends, that my friends are my friends, a workplace, a school, a teacher, is not family.