[Archive] Unpacking a bit of Everything: Closure for the Asian diaspora
Reading time: 6 minutes - Feel free to drop it in a “Read Later” folder.
Topics: Arts and media, Asian representation
It’s been a while! But inevitably my thoughts again need a place to play. This is an appreciation of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once - it has big spoilers!
Unpacking a bit of Everything: Closure for the Asian diaspora
There’s been a rising wave of Asian representation1 in Western media and arts in the last few years, and Everything, Everywhere, All At Once is its first mainstream product that I feel finally qualifies an ambitious and accurate artistic triumph.
Our Western-world Asian diaspora is now seeing our resemblance playing protagonists rather than as exotic embellishments to someone else’s narrative. These stories are unpacking questions like: Why do our parents act the way they do? How do we hold space for both rejecting their outdated beliefs and respecting the way they have fought to survive? How do we receive love and care that gets lost in translation? What is the Asian-American[/Western] collective identity, anyway?
I walked into this movie with no context, expecting even to be a little bored about an overly sentimental tale about hardworking immigrants, regaled through American-dream-tinted-lenses. I was pleasantly surprised by its unbridled playfulness, playing up the mundanity of surviving with humour, self-awareness and open-heartedness - qualities which made its occasional awkwardness in tone and pacing easily forgivable.
There’s a lot to unwind here, which in the spirit of the movie is a massive success. It’s just so much: so, so Asian, and so, so American.
🕳 When verse-jumping, mind the gap
Though clever, this is a movie that really, really, really doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s rich with philosophy, but in a much less pretentious manner than I could ever dream of presenting to the world. Take our antagonist and her comically un-intimidating alias, ‘Jobu Tupaki’: she embodies an impoverished interpretation of Buddhist emptiness2 that worships meaninglessness as a call to despair and destruction a la her Zen Buddhist Enso bagel.
She has no grasp of nor respect for ‘objective truth’ (Jordan Peterson might accuse her of ‘postmodern neomarxism!’). She’s flamboyant, shapeshifting, omnipotent, and most menacing of all: she’s gay. She’s an encapsulation of everything our immigrant parents might fear.
I like to think that what makes her powerful and so full of potential is this visceral second-generation feeling of being at the collision of two diametrically opposed worlds. But crucially we see her emblematic struggle: when you can’t build a bridge between those worlds, then you free-fall through the gaping chasm. At the core of her internal narrative is the deceit of depression: “I have seen everything there is to see, and all of it is good for nothing.”
Our villain, formidable as she is, doesn’t really ask for much except for someone else to see things through her own eyes, and if anyone should be able to, it’s be her own mother. The ‘fight with love’ trope manages to overcome being cliche by being unapologetically rooted in old authentic wisdom. In Buddhist fashion, connectedness, compassion and understanding is the miracle salve that somehow makes our existential, world-swallowing woes small and manageable enough to make space for basic, ever-present joy.
💪 New heroes in old stories
There is so much to be said about the stylistic richness of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once3. Most of all, I love how this movie has the nerve to take the excessively cheesy superhero genre and out-cheese it so much that it just becomes heartfelt, by way of centring plum-puffer-vested Evelyn, the archetypal emotionally unavailable, tiger-lady, ‘problematic’ boomer Asian mum.
I’m reminded of being encouraged to write from lived experience in senior English class, and cringing: our majority-Asian class couldn’t conceive of anything less inspiring than our own experience and our parents - our taxi-driving / systems-analysing / grocery-store-owning, broken-English-speaking, Masters-educated parents. Most of us don’t appreciate what makes these stories special and worth documenting until well into our twenties, but we cynically comply in high school, because immigrant sob-stories get good grades.
We’re long spoon-fed super hero ambitions about saving the world, averting grand calamity and shaking hands with the president. Unattainable stories for anyone, but even more-so for immigrant families whose hunger for ill-defined success might never match the realities of inequity. In an endearingly literal fashion, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once drives an appreciation that for many immigrants, what really amounts to grand heroism is being able to look after your family in a foreign world, and that in a sense, we already hail from a legacy of heroes.4
I think of these competing definitions of ambition a lot: I try to explain to my own mum why I seek purposeful work, because I have my own delusions of Saving The World. But to my annoyance and her pragmatism, she’s more interested in my wellbeing than the theoretical suffering of The World. She wants to know whether my work feeds me, pays me and is regarded well. For her, surviving and being known in a strange and hostile land is the ultimate challenge. Our undertakings are both existential challenges in their own right.
👀 Viewing with others: I. Feel. Seen.
This movie feels like an offering to today’s young second-generation westernised Asians to make peace with things they know they won’t hear their own parents - at least in the right translation.
I took my mum along with me for my second watch. It’s always strange showing anyone art that in my mind feels so revealing. I know I’m not the only one moved in this way. At the same time, I knew that I wasn’t at all exposed, because she doesn’t process it the same way: her mind doesn’t eat up ideological universes the way my Instagram-addled brain does, nor does it travel back through time with gentle therapeutic coaching. Fundamentally, she doesn’t speak the same cultural language or lend to the same kind of millennial self-obsession that makes this movie rich with meaning to me.
When this completely silent and breathtakingly poignant scene5 came on the screen and my mum leans over to ask: “Anak bakit wala ka ang mask!? [Why aren’t you wearing your mask!?]” and, “Are you going to go home alone in the dark?” - loud enough for surrounding cinema-goers to be quietly irked, and pretty clearly not seeing that I’m occupied crying. I later ask her for her review of the movie, and she says “That was very absurd humour. It was nice.”, and doesn’t chew on it philosophically the way that I do.
It doesn’t faze or frustrate me this time that side-by-side, we seem to be watching totally different movies, experiencing separate realities. I’m content to be able to enjoy it together.
If you liked this, you might like:
Exploring more Asian-Australian/American media: Ate Lovia (showing for one more week), A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing (book); Past performances: White Pearl, Yellow Face.
Andrew’s Asian-Australian events/Slack community
By Asian, I feel this is mostly East-Asian and in parts South-East-Asian - it seems like South-Asian representation still awaits its time in the limelight, though I suspect there is some experiential overlap
Emptiness as articulated in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition by Mingyur Rinpoche: "Emptiness refers to the fact that things are not as solid and real as they seem. Something that we hold in our hands might appear completely solid and unchanging, but that's an illusion. Whatever it may be, it is changing all the time, and when we investigate, we find change and fluidity where before we assumed permanence and solidity. This does not make the phenomenal world nothing. … Empty minds, empty bodies, empty emotions, but not nothingness. The waves that surface in the form of emotions, desires, and aversions are also empty, and their force is also empty. Yet the empty force of the empty wave has the empty power to knock over a mind that is also essentially empty but does not know it, and is stuffed with ideas. But if we do not create a story around the wave, then we have empty water dissolving into the empty ocean, like water being poured into water. No problem. Emotions themselves are not the problem. It's how we relate to them.”
There’s an armchair psychologist in me which imagines that the multiverse storytelling mechanism is nothing more Evelyn’s escapist, dissociative way of coping with immense anxiety and the calamity of divorce, and none of the story is ‘real’ after all - because after all, the universal mantra of anxiety is “What if.. What if.. What if..?” ad nauseam. I have SO many fan theories about the meaning of all the multiverse mechanics.
Family has long been a central theme to Asian narrative, but my sense is that in the ‘East’, there is a greater sense of imperialism or legacy, whilst in the ‘West’ we resonate more with stories of the underdog family fighting to survive.
Some people online like to point out that the googly eyes are a visual inversion of the Enso-bagel. If this is the case, it also reminds me of the dynamic of yin-yang; not only do the shadow and light forces exist to counterbalance each other, the yin becomes the yang, and vice versa throughout the cycles of time. The family is a complementary unit, the way that Evelyn & Waymond’s warmth counteract and transform Joy’s despair, and speaking of cyclical time, I can’t help but wonder about the implication that Joy’s existence was what moved her parents through their struggle at an earlier time (why else do parents name their child Joy?)
This is such a powerfully resonant review, love your writing Marlene