I'm from a similar bicultural household as rayiner, though from comment history I'm guessing I come down more on the American side. I've got enough of a background in both cultures to parse out and explain the differences though.

It's not perceived as "wasting a life" or "not enjoying it" by the parent, and oftentimes not by the child either. Rather, it's different values, different time preferences, and different conceptions of self. Western cultures have a conception of self that is very rigid and individualistic. There's a hard boundary between your wants and everyone else's wants, and you're responsible only for your own desire. This is encoded in our structures of law, in contemporary business culture, in the concept of individual rights, in the goals of Western psychotherapy, and in the relationships between family members that we view as normal.

In most traditional Asian cultures, there is much more of a soft boundary between members of the same family. You are expected to consider the welfare of everyone in the family. And that leads to a sense of obligation between parent and child, and then between child and parent as they get older, and between sibling to sibling when it comes to dealing with the outside world. There is a comparatively stronger boundary between the family and the state, eg. many Asian cultures feel like it's okay to snub the rules of the wider society for the benefit of the family, while in American society this is considered grift, nepotism, and corruption.

Likewise, there is a difference in time perception. Americans have a hard boundary between the present and the future or past. This shows up in popular culture through lines like in Rent ("No day but today", "How do you feel today?
Then why choose fear?", "Forget regret, your life is yours to live") or through popular aphorisms to "Let go of the past", "Live for the present", "The future is yours to write", etc. Asian cultures often consider the past, present, and future as one: the past informs the present, which becomes the future, and the "you" of today will soon become the you of tomorrow. As a result, it is perfectly natural to preference "future you" over "present you". And that shows up through things like savings rates (where Asians are consistently higher than Americans), long-term investments, business continuity, and willingness to invest in family and raise the next generation. Denying present pleasures for future gains is not a lifestyle that they don't enjoy; it's simply being smart, and the enjoyment comes from the anticipation of the future payoff.

There's a good illustration of the difference in the two cultures from two movies that both came out in 2018/2019, Crazy Rich Asians vs. The Farewell. Crazy Rich Asians is foremost a Chinese-American film. When the grandmother (who is considered the villain in the film) smugly says "We know how to build things that last", she's exemplifying the values and time preferences of Old China. And the film's climax and resolution is all about choosing present happiness over an indeterminate future, basically a victory of American values over traditional Chinese ones. The Farewell, however, more closely depicts the web of obligations in a traditional Chinese family, and is comedic to American audiences simply because the farces that the family goes through to preserve the feelings of the matriarch make no sense to Americans. Sure enough, Crazy Rich Asians was a smash hit in the U.S. but an utter flop in China, while The Farewell was a sleeper hit in America but did very well with Chinese audiences.