“In an anti-patriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.” – bell hooks
I couldn’t tell you whether it was the fault of my father, his parents, or his principal — who called in second grade to tell them that good Americans only spoke English at home — that I was born into a family where no one speaks Korean, regularly cooks Korean food, or has even visited the country since our immigration in 1965. I’m not sure he could either.
I just knew I was angry. For a long time I blamed my father, and then when I learned more, the construct of whiteness, for what we lost. And that loss was significant. In a country where humanity is measured in proximity to whiteness, to perform race at any distance from this whiteness is to inhabit an unsustainable contradiction in which you will never be enough. With no positive construct of Asianness to hold onto through heritage, I found myself perpetually lacking, consigned to mourn a more authentic version of myself that could never be.
It’s understandable in these circumstances how one could become jaded or bitter. As a teenager, that pessimism, or even nihilism, is what I wanted from my father, because it’s all I could envision for myself. I had bought into the contradictions of white heteropatriarchy — I was not white, and thus not fully human, so in an attempt to supplement this unhumanity, I mimicked the silent, unemotional suffering of masculinity: a suffering characterized by brittleness and a defaulting to the paradigm of casual sexism. This is, of course, a trap leading only to the demise of ourselves and anyone we claim to love, but it’s one an increasing number of Asian men are falling into. The rising popularity of the Men’s Rights Asians (MRAzns) group, who believe reclaiming their identity amounts to abusing Asian women for dating men of other races or calling out misogyny and anti-Blackness within the Asian community, and of Asian pickup artists such as JT Tran, who want equal access to the power white men have to objectify and mistreat women, speaks to a deep pain inherent to our identity. It’s a pain that is rooted in understandable experiences (where can we find meaning when so much of it has been taken from us?) but is leading to unacceptable actions. Good role models can be hard to find.
Thus, it’s refreshing to see cinema, a medium which has historically failed to provide Asian American men with healthy, let alone any, representation, offering a window this year into the possibility of liberation from patriarchal norms. Father figures Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) from Everything Everywhere All at Once and Jin (Orion Lee) from Turning Red are not the focus of their respective films. Good. Both find themselves as supporting characters in stories that center on far more dynamic mother-daughter relationships adapting through the tumultuous years of adolescence and young adulthood, and mourning the generational losses suffered in immigrating to white colonizing countries. The hard-earned decency of both of these men, and their willingness to hold space for the women in their lives, creates an alternative path — one that restores meaning and reclaims our identity as one filled with the potential to love and create beauty.
It’s clear from the beginning of Everything Everywhere All At Once, that for as much as Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) suffers, she does so with dignity. Her laundromat is being audited, she suffers microaggressions from customers, and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is drifting apart from her due to her lack of acceptance of her relationship with her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel). But that suffering is written into the minutiae of Evelyn’s body language, part of a career best performance for the legendary Yeoh, and from the opening shot of our heroine presiding over the kingdom she’s chosen, one of disappointments, audit forms, and overdue bills, we can see the toll life has taken on her.
Her husband Waymond, by contrast, has the audacity to be happy. His grin, still steeped in the possibility of youth we can imagine wooing Evelyn, has never left his face, a phenomenon heightened by the reappearance of Quan in American cinema decades after starring in childhood classics such as The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It’s a miraculous performance, one that feels like it was frozen in time waiting for Daniels to uncover Quan’s deconstruction over the course of the film’s 140-minute runtime of the cinematic expectations for Asian men. My reaction to Waymond’s persistent optimism in the beginning of the film mirrored my feelings towards my father as a teenager — how dare you? After all you’ve been through, all the ways you’ve had to shrink yourself to exist in a world that never allowed you to be everything you could be, what is there to smile about?
As the film moves from intimate family drama to multiverse sci-fi epic, it starts to upend expectations, beginning with the appearance of Alpha Waymond. This version of Waymond, who serves as the Trinity-esque plot instigator, is defined at first by his quest across the multiverse to find every version of his wife. Alpha Evelyn is the scientist who first discovered the ability to “verse-jump” to transfer skills and visit versions of yourself in other universes, and since her death and the emergence of the villainous Jobu Topaki, Alpha Waymond has been looking for The One, a version of Evelyn who is, in another inversion of expectations, the least fulfilled, whose every life decision has led to the disappointment and lack of fulfillment we see in our opening impression of her.
When I realized how Everything Everywhere was casting its inter-universal drama, I giggled with glee. It’s a potent metaphor for the pressures of familial duty in an immigrant family: Jobu Topaki, the embodiment of Joy’s young adult nihilism, travels the multiverse willing to destroy everything in her pursuit of her mother’s validation of her paradigm; Alpha Gong Gong’s (James Hong) request for Evelyn to murder this instinct in Joy is treated as a matter of the preservation of their world; and Alpha Waymond looks up with reverence to every version of his wife, knowing her to be someone special.
This is something I suppose you could get mad about, if you wanted to. Devotion — or, God forbid, deference — to the loving women in our lives is a major no-no of white masculinity, one that has been seized upon by the aforementioned MRAzns and their ilk. But let the film unfold and you’ll see the ways it portrays Waymond as someone free from the expectations of being anyone other than himself. When she meets movie star Evelyn, primary Evelyn delights in the glamor of her life away from Waymond. But we eventually find out Waymond was just as successful in this universe without her, transforming into an archetypal Tony Leung-esque sex symbol complete with slicked-back hair and alleyway cigarette smoke. It turns out primary Waymond has been just as much of a success. In the climax of their relationship, this movie star Waymond provides validity for all of the decisions primary Waymond has made throughout his humble life, literalizing one of the film’s theses: “In another life, I would be happy just doing laundry and taxes with you.” This interaction leads to Evelyn’s reassessment, and ultimate appreciation, for Waymond in the film’s final subversion of expectations for his character: Waymond is not valuable for all the things he could have been; his hard-won optimism and quiet devotion make him a superhero in this lifetime.
Turning Red is a very different movie than Everything Everywhere, but it tackles similar themes through the template of Pixar crowd-pleasers. One of the most pleasant motifs in the film is the use of heightened superhero and espionage cinematic iconography to imbue these characters’ lives with the drama they deserve: a slo-mo splash page shot of our auntie Avengers assembling to shepherd their niece into womanhood; swift, stealthy camera pans as our teen girl gang pulls off an illicit scheme to raise money for the 4Town concert, a mission with stakes higher than any threat to national security. But one of the film’s biggest heroes may also be its most humble.
When we meet Jin, he’s mid-flight. Or at least, his vegetables are. Suspended, diced in perfect symmetry (in the most beautiful sequence of animated food preparation I’ve ever seen), these fruits of domestic labor are our introduction to Turning Red’s patriarchal figure, and already we know he’s different from the typical, bumbling Pixar dad. Hyper-competent and unwavering in his support of both his wife Ming (Sandra Oh) and daughter Meilin (Rosalie Chiang), we meet him at a moment when the two women are at odds over how much Meilin should be allowed to dictate the terms of her own life. Mei has begun her transformation into a red panda on occasions where she feels heightened emotions, a process generations of Lee women have experienced. Her mother seeks to suppress the panda during a traditional full moon ceremony, the kind of act people who the world deems too much have undertaken to shrink themselves for so long that they’ve forgotten what they do in the name of love is violent and unnatural.
Jin’s primary function in this struggle is to listen. In fact, for most of the film, our understanding of his thoughts is relegated to his memeable facial expressions. But we later learn the support he provided for Ming as she faced pressure from her family growing into adulthood — her panda was the largest in the family’s history, and we see in her attempts to control Mei the trauma it caused her to reject this part of herself. Her husband was there for her through it all, and similarly supports his daughter with the quiet affirmation that he loves her exactly as she is. The moment that justifies his character’s passivity comes after he sees a video of Mei and her friends goofing around with the panda: he goes into her bedroom to convey, to a teenage girl facing so many versions of herself she is expected to live up to, that to be her authentic self and to be happy is to be enough. “People have all kinds of sides to them, Mei, and some of them are messy,” he tells his daughter. This moment, full of warmth and gentleness, lets us know that Jin’s decisions at other times to take a backseat to the women in his life are born not of a lack of insight, but of a loving instinct to accept that what his family needs, far more than his input, is his support.
Strength, in the context of masculinity, is so often defined as power, but both of these characters exhibit immense strength in their support of loved ones without pursuing this power. Waymond’s unbreakable spirit is never at risk of succumbing to Joy’s bagel of nihilism, and Jin’s cautious wielding of his certitude about Meilin’s ability to find her own way in life allows him to validate her in a way her mother isn’t yet capable of. Not subjected to the same pressures of misogyny and heightened parental expectations as their wives, they respond to the ugliness they have experienced by doing what they have always done: continuing to live life on their terms.
A narrow reading of screenwriting principles would find it a flaw that both these characters are in some ways static, without significant growth or an emotional arc. But it is to both movies’ benefit that the arc that unfolds is, instead, in the audience’s understanding of these men, of their positions in their respective families, and in the reasons why they choose to wield their strength the way they do. They listen without judgment, they are impeccable with their word, and they sublimate the toxic pressures of our white patriarchy to wake up every day and love their families, to the best of their abilities, with honorable stability. They, as both their families and the films’ audiences discover, never needed to change at all. And if we feel these fathers’ responses of gentle acceptance and kindness, in a world that has been so unkind to them, make them in some way weak or unmasculine, then perhaps we are the only ones who need to do any changing.
By we, I of course mean me, and by these fathers, I of course mean my father. I know he will read this, because he’s read everything I’ve ever written; ultimately supported every important choice I’ve made. As a teenager, obsessed with the justification of my anger, I was unable to thank him, to recognize the value and knowingness of his decency. He, like Jin and Waymond, loves with openness and prioritizes kindness over correctness not because it is easy to do so, but because it is hard. Luckily I’ve grown, and through these movies and these characters I’ve felt an understanding of the decisions he made in prioritizing his values, and instilling them in me. Although we don’t live in a multiverse, the lessons of Everything Everywhere All at Once and Turning Red still hold immense weight in a world where, as we grow up, there are a million different versions of ourselves who have a chance to be better. And I’m glad the reality I occupy now allows me to say to my father, who has been through so much yet still loves so deeply and holds so much faith in people through their cruelty and imperfection, that in a universe where you could have been anything, could have found meaning in any calling, I’m grateful you choose to love me.
