I Spent My Whole Life Around Smokers — Here’s Why I Don’t Judge Them

Many of us have deeply salient relationships with cigarettes

When I was twelve years old, I was up around 10 p.m., past my allotted bedtime, watching George Lopez and laughing at various jokes in the comedy. My brother gave me a routine call. He just got out of class at the local commuter’s college, and it was late at night. The walk back home had no shoulder on the road, and he needed a ride. My mom wasn’t home, but my dad was. I knocked on my parents’ door to ask if they could give my brother a ride from school.

I knocked on the door, and there was no response. The light was on, so I barged in. I saw my father keeled over on the side of the bed. He said he couldn’t breathe. I was only twelve, but I could tell something was wrong. I asked if I should call 911, and he softly muttered that I should.

I did call 911, calmly and numbly saying my father couldn’t breathe. I have had very complicated feelings towards my father for my disagreements with his parenting style and what I perceived as marital mistakes over the years, but obviously, I did not want to see him die right in front of me when I was twelve years old. I said my father couldn’t breathe and he needed an ambulance.

The ambulance came about 15 minutes later and took him away on the stretcher. At some point, I called my brother back and said “yeah, you’re going to have to walk home today, dude.” He came back about 10 to 15 minutes after the ambulance came, and I told him what happened. “Oh,” he said. We didn’t say anything else about it, but we told our mother when she came home.

We later learned my dad had received medical attention for something that happened with his heart earlier in the day. He was a resident at another local hospital. He was cleared and allowed to go home. Only later in the day would the episode escalate to a heart attack.

To this day, this episode in my life gets spoken about a lot more than I had thought a year before. My parents referenced it at my wedding to my in-laws, talking about how I was very responsible, how I saved my father’s life, and how he wouldn’t have made it without my quick response. I get asked about it from my wife, particularly when she has students in grieving or in similar crisis-like situations of how I felt and how I handled it at the time. To be truthful, I felt nothing. I wasn’t particularly surprised and I knew what I had to do.

But it did make me more resentful towards what I saw as the cause of the heart attack: cigarettes.

I am not someone to judge people’s personal choices. I judge my father for a lot of things, but I never judged him for his nicotine habit. At that point in time, he was smoking up to two packs a day, much like his siblings and much like many of his friends.

But it genuinely wasn’t his fault. His uncle gave him his first cigarette when he was seven. At that point, I witnessed multiple attempts to stop with nicotine patches and gum that cost five times more than a pack of cigarettes did. My family is an immigrant family from China, so the culture around smoking tobacco is just different from the United States, much like it is different in Europe. As of 2020, 50% of Chinese men smoke. It was just what everyone did. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but what was I going to do? Resent everyone who smoked cigarettes? That would have meant resenting virtually every adult male relative I had. The men in my family who didn’t smoke didn’t do so out of choice — they had some health condition or cancer, which forced them to quit.

My whole life to that point, I was surrounded by second hand smoke. My dad smoked in the house, with no windows open. He smoked in the car. I was frequently with him when he smoked outside. At the time, in the mid to late 2000s, smoking wasn’t necessarily seen with the same stigma it is today, and I was just used to it. Yes, almost everyone is aware of the health benefits of second hand smoke — the CDC notes that second hand smoke can cause coronary heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer in adults who do not smoke and acute respiratory infections in young children.

The smoking I experienced in America was absolutely nothing compared to the smoking I experienced when I visited China to see my relatives. As opposed to just one person smoking inside within feet of me in an enclosed indoor space, there were two or three people smoking. There could be multiple people smoking in the car. Not only was I used to it, but everyone was used to it, and to publicly say it made you uncomfortable to be around that volume of smoke in China would have meant that not only would one person have to change their behavior just to placate your needs, but everyone would have to change their behavior — just for you. Anyone who said “I’m not comfortable being around cigarettes” in that environment would have been seen as soft, difficult, and overly needy.

When I tried out for my high school cross country team the same year my dad had his heart attack, I did not pass the physical, and actually had to see the cardiologist. The doctor who did my physical caught a heart murmur, and I almost did not get cleared to do the sport I have done for the past twelve years. When I went to see the cardiologist, he said the murmur was minor and I had nothing to worry about, and cleared me, but I did not fault the person who’d done the physical for wanting to stay on the safe side.

From a very young age, I disdained cigarettes. I did not hate people who smoked cigarettes, but I hated cigarettes. As early as four or five years old, I saw my father have flashes of anger and show his temper, then smoke. He may have said something nasty to my mom within a couple of minutes of when he smoked. Every time he tried to quit smoking, this would get a lot worse, and so I naturally associated tobacco with anger.

I didn’t know at the time that nicotine actually creates relaxation and immediate relief from stress and anxiety. I didn’t know that withdrawal from nicotine could manifest itself in irritability, which could explain my father’s increased anger every time he tried to quit. Frankly put, the temper and anger could have been much worse if he did not smoke. I didn’t know at the time that heart problems and diseases are genetic, so my heart murmur could have been the result of natural genetics instead of my lifelong inhalation of second hand smoke.

Because of what I saw smoking do to my father, I resolved to never smoke cigarettes. In my mind, I could become an alcoholic or be addicted to any other drug, and that would still be significantly better than the worst possible thing I could become: a smoker.

Recently, I went with a group of friends to Las Vegas on vacation. We went to have brunch at a popular brunch location, and we had to wait about 30 minutes outside because the location was too busy. In front of all of us, one person in the group started smoking and lighting his cigarette. I don’t think anything of it, but I did see another friend start coughing and walking away, noticeably bothered by the exposure to cigarette smoke only a couple feet of her.

Later, I privately heard complaints about the insensitivity of the friend for just lighting up the cigarette in front of everyone else without asking. The friend’s decision to smoke outside without asking anyone if it was okay was seen as impolite and unaware.

In my mind, however, where else was he supposed to smoke? Should he have walked 50 meters away and done it privately? What if he needed to smoke and was trying to quit? I rationalized that at least he wasn’t smoking his cigarette outside, but yes — he certainly could have asked if everyone else was okay with it. At the same time, however, the friend could have voiced not being okay with someone smoking around them. When in public places and social settings, it is customary to smoke in designated areas and ask for permission before smoking right in front of people.

We later went to casinos where it also seemed like everyone smoked cigarettes. Some people in our group were again uncomfortable around the smoke, and had to leave. Las Vegas did not seem like the best place to be uncomfortable with smoke, much like China is.

But I did think about everyone I know who smokes cigarettes now.

I thought about the extent to which we have pushed smokers to be out of sight, out of mind, and not bother people with their smoking in America. I see these people keeping their smoking habits as discrete as possible, mostly in designated smoking areas. The friend who lit his cigarette in front of everyone broke an unspoken code and the behavior was seen as a product of a bygone age.

I write this to plead nuance and respect for every single person’s individual sensitivities and needs.

I don’t have a personal opinion on who was right or wrong in this small interaction about the friend who lit his cigarette around us, but I am well aware of what direction public opinion in the country is going in. I had spent my whole life around cigarettes, and not everyone else did. I found an academic paper arguing that exposure of children to secondhand smoke is child abuse, which is crazy to me, and definitely a departure from my perceptions of smoking in my youth and when visiting China.

Despite this exposure to secondhand smoke throughout my childhood, I still became a marathoner and someone who could run a 2:39 marathon, and who still does have the aerobic capacity to improve. It’s not like I was exposed to cigarette smoke as a toddler or an infant, either, so I won’t sit here and say I was particularly damaged or hurt by cigarette smoke personally.

But as smoking etiquette drifts more and more towards “out of sight, out of mind,” I think something we have to still remember is that a lot of people smoke because they have an addiction. The CDC notes that in 2018, about 55.1% of adult cigarette smokers made an attempt to quit smoking. Only 7.5% of people who tried to quit succeeded.

I once asked a friend who smokes cigarettes whether he felt bad about himself for his nicotine habit. I said this in jest, aligned with my dry, sometimes dark humor. He responded, “yeah, it’s actually the thing I hate the most about myself.” Immediately, I felt like an asshole. I remembered everyone in my life who tried to quit, including my brother in his brief stint as a smoker, and my father’s various failed attempts. Almost everyone I know who smokes has told me they wish they never started.

I have a friend who is doing a graduate exchange program in Germany. Everyone was excited for him when he started — but now he hates it. He hates being surrounded by cigarette smoke all day every day, and he avoids many social events as a result. He can’t wait to finish and leave. I felt bad, but perhaps Germany is not the best place to live for an average American who is sensitive to cigarette smoke. And it made me, in some twisted logic, wonder if as a society, being more critical of smokers and more sensitive to cigarette smoke is making Americans less equipped for travel in places like Germany or China where cigarette smoking is less the exception and more of the norm than it is in the United States.

This is just another anecdotal indicator of the fact that America has been very unique in the success of its anti-smoking campaign. According to the World Health Organization, the United States is close to the bottom of smoking rates in developed countries, having a significantly lower proportion of smokers than European countries like Germany and the Netherlands and Asian countries like Japan and China. In 2005, 20.9% of Americans smoked. In 2021, that number decreased to 11.5% of Americans.

I thought, for a moment, that maybe, just maybe, shame is not the best tool in our society-wide push to raise awareness Yes, smoking is bad for the smoker, and yes, second hand smoke is bad. There’s a part of me that feels like maybe shaming is not the answer.

I have long had a complicated relationship with cigarettes. I never personally smoked them, and I have long learned that I scapegoated cigarettes for a lot of the problems my family had. But there’s still a part of me that absolutely hates cigarettes and has a visceral reaction, beyond not liking the smell or being sensitive to it. There is a part of me that will always ask, despite intellectually knowing exactly why someone might struggle, “why can’t you just quit?”

I think I am not alone, but I, too, struggle with the balance between compassion, judgment, and moving toward a healthier society for smokers and nonsmokers. Each person has their individual experiences and opinions, and perhaps not everyone has as complicated of a relationship as me.

But I do think we can hold two truths at once, being compassionate of those who smoke and may struggle to quit, while also considering and moving towards the public good. We all know a smoker. And a lot of us do have deeply salient relationships with the smokers in our lives and their relationship to smoking, and a lot of people who smoke themselves also have deeply salient relationships with cigarettes in how it makes them feel and how much they want to quit.

And those relationships are anything but easy.