Term for Gift that Turns out to be a Burden
What is the English term for when someone thinks they are doing something nice for you but it ends up making things worse. EX: Someone buys you an elephant -- nice gesture and cool! But now you have to take care of it, and it becomes a burden on you.
Solution 1:
In fact, the English expression for a burdensome gift is literally white elephant:
a thing that is useless and no longer needed, although it may have cost a lot of money [OALD]
So-called white elephants, or albino elephants, are found in many parts of South and Southeast Asia. In Buddhist countries they may be venerated as Queen Maya, mother of the Buddha, was said to have been visited in a dream by a white elephant holding a white lotus flower, and Siddharth Gautama entered his mother's womb in the form a white elephant. The white elephant is also associated with traits like mental strength and purity.
It became a royal symbol in Siam (Thailand); the king continues to keep white elephants. The story emerged that if a courtier displeased him, the king would make him a gift of a white elephant. The courtier could hardly decline a royal gift, and could hardly afford not to maintain a sacred animal, and could not put it to productive use, and so would be ruined by the cost of upkeep.
The earliest example of its use is from a 1721 essay in London Journal:
In short, Honour and Victory are generally no more than white Elephants; and for white Elephants the most destructive Wars have been often made.
A 2011 paper by Ross Bullen entitled “This Alarming Generosity”: White Elephants and the Logic of the Gift, in American Literature, covers the popularization of the term in the mid-19th century, presents an alternative account, that the story is a piece of orientalism and the white elephant rose as a literary trope.
Solution 2:
Poisoned Chalice
This is perhaps darker than the question envisages, but I add it for its literary pedigree*. The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus explains it as:
“Something that seems very good when it is first received, but in fact does great harm to the person who receives it”
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*According to Oxford Reference:
An assignment, award, or honour which is likely to prove a disadvantage or source of problems to the recipient; the phrase is found originally in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), in a speech in which Macbeth flinches from the prospective murder of Duncan.