or: Crossing to another world, I have left the riverbank behind, but I am frozen in the middle, and I am so very afraid I might be washed away.
Spoiler warnings for the following works: Halloween (1978), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen.
I enjoy consuming things. Who doesn’t? Since Nüwa molded five senses into our clay bodies, why should we not indulge of these gifts and drink in the world around us? So I gulp crisp mountain air into my lungs, get fat off of rice and meat and stews, lose myself to the vibrations of music at the push of a button, run my hands along my skin in those rare occasions I feel myself.
And I read, and I watch. Used to do it more, really (and even then I didn’t do it as much as my peers, I’ve found. I am woefully Spongebobless and bereft of Disney Channels) but I’m relearning how to love consuming the works of the talented minds of humans everywhere. I’m coming out of a “content torpor,” one that started in my busy, school-filled teens and has only just begun to fall from my eyes like scales.
Etymologically, “inspiration” comes from Latin’s “breathe into” (in- and spirare), and just as we share the atmosphere on this planet together, I breathe in these pieces of art, and they are absorbed into my very veins, and I am never the same again. It’s quite terrifying to me when I think about it too long. What if your art has microplastics in it? What if, in everything I go to create, you’re there too?
I recently watched Halloween (1978) for the first time. It’s nice to finally see the originator of so many slasher tropes, and to also watch a horror movie at all; I am, all things considered, kind of a wuss. My particular poison when it comes to horror is existential, slow, dreadful floods of molasses that overwhelm and are unstoppable. So Mr. Myers running around suburban Illinois with a penchant for stabbing horny teens wasn’t my first pick of film. I still enjoyed it though!
My incredibly media-literate partner pointed out to me (and much of this following musing is practically parroting her eloquent points, so forgive me for any misinterpretation or ill-formed arguments. Those almost certainly come from me) that a highly specific blend of USAmerican suburban paranoia had to exist for this movie to emerge. With the suburbanization of the country following the economic boom in the latter half of the 20th century (largely due to the swelling middle class and the golden lie of the “American Dream” being more attainable*), everyone and their mother wanted to move to a little two-story home with a yard and a white picket fence. Escape the city, become the master of your own world. The isolation is a feature, not a bug! Keep those noisy upstairs neighbors 1500 sq. feet away, like they should be.
*For white people. As is often the case.
Not that there wasn’t ever pressure to conform, but when you live in a box in a row of identical boxes, all of a sudden you start to worry that your lawngrass (ugh) is an inch too tall compared to Susan’s. Your kids aren’t going to the right schools. When there is an obvious goal, when you aim to blend in with the crowd, people are going to strive for it. Safety in numbers, especially the well-off ones! And then your goalposts move. Suddenly things that would have been quite average become deviant. The safety of the home extends only to the porch. Out there, in the dark, there are serial killers, monsters, inhuman things. God help us, what if a mentally ill person escapes the asylum?
Halloween (1978) capitalizes on that fear, or perhaps is merely a product of it. I can’t say whether or not it’s making a satire of what this capital S Suburbia is, or if it’s simply just exaggerating the real fears that suburbanites have. You could also, as my partner also pointed out, make the same ambiguous case about how feminist the film is. Is it rebellious for being unafraid of showing women as taking the initiative, being sexually active (scandalous!) and yet still undeserving of the fate that is dealt out to them? Is Laurie, an ur-“final girl” (a term coined by professor Carol J. Clover in 1987, nine years after Halloween came out) heroine, or is she a repressive message, telling girls “Stay chaste and you’ll survive. Fuck, and you die?” So, does Halloween make fun of suburbanites’ fear of the outside world, or is it echoing their message back to them? “Out there, the world is monstrous.”
It’s hard to say for certain, especially given that I am displaced so far from the world Halloween depicts and was written in, both temporally and circumstantially: a five-decade old film is whispering to me through time, and on top of the regular distortion my interpretation inflicts upon it, the fact I was born long after its time is a further corruption of the signal. On top of that… I am not a white girl. I have never babysat. I will, if I am lucky, never get chased into a closet by a scary man in a mask. (Knock on wood.) But I do know that the subject at hand, the legacy of that conformist time, still lasts today. I don’t even know if it ever faded enough to call it a “legacy;” perhaps the term “continuation” would be more appropriate. I applaud every counterculture that crops up each generation for fighting against it, especially because although many have made the grievous mistake of buying into the “there’s a right way to be” crowd, I see it in myself the most starkly, and I am ashamed.
I struggle a lot with how “ethnic” I am. But not in the same way that many of my other Asian peers did, where they daydreamed about getting white names like Juliet instead of Li San. My older sister bore the brunt of that in my family, being my parents’ first experiment in assimilation. I, second-born, was christened with a Biblical name and sent off to preschool and learned English in tandem with my Mandarin. I never felt ostracized for being Asian, even though I was subconsciously aware my white friends and I looked different. Save for a few moments*, my difference was not remarked upon enough for me to feel it.
*In preschool, my mother led an activity for all the kids on how to make red paper lanterns for Lunar New Year. Once, in elementary school, my friend came up to me and asked “how do you say dumplings in Chinese? Ching chong?” In retrospect not exactly kosher, but at the time I thought to myself “wow, this guy doesn’t know this basic fact! That’s so sad!” and I told him how to say jiaozi (饺子). In high school, my (white) camp counselor told me (a fat Chinese kid) that their spirit animal was probably a panda. In college, my hallmate approached me, skipped past the hellos and good evenings, and asked me if I was Vietnamese. At work, when there’s a problem with Mandarin or Cantonese translations, people instinctively look to me.
There was an insult we slung around carelessly, when we were younger. Amidst the highs of the “Swagapinos” and Ryan Higa’s dominance of YouTube (the world a big green ball in his hand), I distinctly remember the accusations of being a “banana” soaring around. It may be the only food fight-adjacent experience I ever have. But it’s a good insult. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Am I a banana? If you peeled away my skin, what would you find inside?
I had conformed, whether I’d done intentionally or not. And now I wonder if I whitewashed myself for them, or if it was something done to me. By the conditions of my birth, has my Americanness developed to outweigh my Asianness? When I falter talking to my relatives, when I say I don’t eat beef intestine or chicken feet… I am briefly reminded of that gap that I have yet to bridge. It is yawning, in those moments, even when these individual instances are small. The gulf is always there. I’ve just papered over it, like cheap wallpaper in the kitchen of a single-family home.
Indulge me, if you will, as I revisit names again. They’re a powerful thing, you know. It’s why there are superstitions around invoking the names of demons. The wizards of prehistory were skalds, poets, orators; they captured the disappearing world around us in song and story and spoke them back to life. Soothsayers, prophets, the very words themselves are etymologically tied to the act of speaking. And the first spell anyone learns? You can be summoned with your name. Called home for dinner, yelled at for breaking a bowl…
I’m lucky! I have two names, English and Chinese. If you count my online handles, infinitely many more. But does that mean I have just as many vulnerabilities, just as many ways for people to hold sway over me?
…Not really, because nobody can get it right. God help the average USAmerican trying to rawdog my Mandarin name. You might as well ask them to swallow a live fish. Hence you might understand why Li San might yearn for a Juliet. And utter some prayers for the humble Dongs and Wangs of the world while you’re at it.
Squid Game. One of Netflix’s cash cows, and a bloody commentary on how rich people pit poor people against one another in the pursuit of wealth, if a bit on the nose. What really stands out to me, though, is how the English speaking fandom primarily referred to characters by their player numbers, especially when after season two (which I largely felt was a rehash of the same themes as before but bigger, for more money, and therefore ultimately less compelling). You know, the game mechanic that reduces each living, breathing human into a few digits to turn off when they get gruesomely killed for VIP entertainment. Yeah, let’s really buy into that; that’s a great practice to take away from the show! Although admittedly when flashy deaths are on the screen it does seem like people’s media literacy tanks a bit. It’s the quintessential “torment nexus” show, where Jimmy Beast watches it and goes “wow, what if this was real? So cool!” But I digress.
Now I will grant that with an expanded cast comes difficulty in learning everyone’s names. If you asked me to name every One Direction boy band member or every mobile suit in Gundam, I’d wither on the spot. But when the central message of the show you are watching is tied inextricably to Gi-hun’s defiance of the Hobbesian “humans by nature are bad” idea, and hinges on the humanity of every single character, regardless of how beastly they act, maybe, just maybe, you should rise above the most shallow impressions of what you’re given, and give each character the due decency of knowing their name. And I cannot help but feel like part of the English fandom’s willingness to default to numbers on a jacket is due in part to the fact that all of the players are Korean and have, shockingly, non-English names!
I’d thought, perhaps mistakenly, that people had grown beyond “I don’t know how to pronounce this so I’m not even going to try” type thinking. No fucking wonder people with nonwhite names are willing to accept even the barest nod towards attempting pronouncing their names correctly. I know Asian women who are regularly confused with each other, even though they are of different heritages and work in different fields. Their names can be completely different. Some white people confuse their invited guests with their staff members who’ve been working under them for years. You rank so low in my thoughts that I have no way to distinguish you from someone who happened to have blood in the same general region of the world. I cannot even be bothered to look at your email to see how to spell your name. Your identity means nothing to me.
Some people would rather give you a number than a name.
I think partially why I am so venomous towards this is because I am guilty of the sin too. I don’t participate in the casually cruel erasure of my peers, no, but I shamefully have never learnt the names of my relatives. My grandparents are just 奶奶、姥姥、爷爷、老爷 (the equivalent of only knowing them by their familial address), and as they pass, I learn achingly that I never bothered to learn their full names. If I were to go back and try to look up their grave, I would pass over them, unseeing, because I would not know how to read it, and even if I did, I would not know that they were once my family. When my uncle passes, who will go see my elders on Tomb-Sweeping Day? I could not take up that mantle even if I wanted to. Not only am I an ocean away, linguistically I am even farther. I know them not as people, but as nodes along a family tree. When I visit China (and we still call it a “return”, huiguo (回国), despite by many metrics not being of China anymore), I start from a baseline of “our relative from America.” Chinese people can tell I do not belong, and I cannot figure out why I am marked, but the evidence is ample that I am, and even the way I interact with family leaves me in the same position I fear I am held in by the unmarked, default person of USAmerica.
I am a split branch carried away, meant to be graft onto another tree.
This all must sound pretty sorry to you, just harping on and on about how alienated I am, poor little old me. Real Chinese people don’t have this issue. Real Americans don’t have this issue. Will you just relax?
The problem is made double-hard by the fact that I cannot relate this information to my parents properly. Sure, rationally, they can understand the difficulty of losing your connection to a mythic homeland. If anything they should feel its loss more acutely than I; they left behind the world they knew for distant shores after they had already grown up and become accustomed to the motherland. But the experiential gap between diaspora and Chinese has always been very clear to me.
If I am to find commiseration, I have to find it in my siblings, in my peer group. Diaspora worry about appropriation. “Real” Chinese don’t care if that white girl wears a qipao to her high school prom (sorry for the Buzzfeed link). Diaspora feel the need to prove how Chinese they are. “Real” Chinese wear clothes with English on it to feel cool and stylish. Diaspora are stuck listening to songs of the last decade. “Real” Chinese sing Hamilton songs in school.
Not that my parents’ approval should mean much to my self-realization and identity. But nonetheless it remains that they are one of the few connections to my heritage that I have always relied upon. That’s why two of the most impactful pieces of media I’ve ever consumed have targeted this weakness of mine like a shark smelling blood: My favorite movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022); and my favorite book, Trung Le Nguyen’s The Magic Fish.
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) is one of those movies I could rewatch over and over. In fact, I have; the first time I hung out with some of my friends and crashed at their place I got them to put this movie on. (I cried like a baby into their throw pillow. Embarrassing first impression, but I don’t even mind it, because it’s such a damn good film.) Please do watch it.
I could go on at length about the stellar cast and the pensive soundtrack (and the great action scenes! and the silly gags! and Stephanie Hsu!!!), but for our purposes here, I just need to emphasize the tragedy and turmoil of each of the Wang family members. They swirl around each other in chaotic eddies, always talking past each other; Waymond always reaching out to try and repair his fractured family, Evelyn overwhelmed by the world she lives in and tempted by versions that could have passed but never did, and Joy faced with the impossibility of getting her mother to understand her.
The fact that she can be openly lesbian to her mother is already fantasy enough for me, so the happy ending at the end where Evelyn does accept Joy (even if it takes an incredible nihilistic breakdown that kills literal worlds) feels like it’s a universe away. The additional sci-fi elements are not any more unbelievable than a strict culturally Chinese mom embracing her gay daughter and telling her she’ll be there for her. Everything bagel? Alphaverse? Sausage fingers? Sure, whatever, move aside for the real bombshell. But the setup, the context of this wild story, is something so familiar to me; I know it like I could trace the contours of it like the stretch marks on my body.
From the bigger communication issues between my mother and me and feeling like we’ll never understand each other, down to the mess of documents my mother is seemingly constantly working on cluttering the dinner table… It is fitting that, in Joy’s final cry for help, she hunted down her mom through the multiverse. And asked her to see the world for what it had become to her, an endless ocean of meaninglessness. As I now brace myself against the battering waves of nihilism — the degree I earned has placed me in a job that does not value me and overworks me; the independence I gained in college has all but evaporated upon moving back in with my parents; the country in which I live, and many others, are rapidly swinging towards fascism — I can understand why Joy does this. I want to cry for my mother too. Even the stern woman who pushed me to my limits in my youth still did it out of a love for me. Come back for your child. They do not know what they are doing, and the world doesn’t care to catch them.
At the same time, I worry for my mother. Does she, too, mourn the many lives she could have led? Would she have rather stayed in her homeland? Continued working her job instead of quitting to be a stay-at-home mother? How much grief did I cause her by being born? Is it such a wonder I am so guilty all the time, when the crimes I have committed are uncountably many, across infinitely many universes?
But a direct conversation is never in the cards for us. Just as Evelyn is far too busy to entertain silly things like divorce and lesbianism, I find that my family (and perhaps, extensible to Chinese culture at large) is not one to broach such sensitive subjects. The one time it happened, a conversation so direct, so transgressive as to inquire about my identity, my dad asked me (somewhat accusatorily, I might add) if I was gay. He said “When I go to heaven, God will judge me for where I might have gone wrong in raising you before you were grown. But everything you do now is your responsibility now.” And I wept.
I can count on one hand the times my father and I have exchanged “I love you.” As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve hugged my mother even less. It is only in recent years, after a fright with a car accident, have I summoned the bravery it takes to hug my parents more, and even then it is only before I leave for the airport, in the quiet understanding that we might not see each other again, as unlikely as it may be. Isn’t it sad? It takes the whispered threat of a forever-parting for that barrier to be crossed, if only momentarily. In this way, I understand Joy. Were I so powerful as her, I could be a Jobu Tupaki as well. If it takes an existential crisis for us to come together… I could accept that.
I have time and time again asked my mother to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once with me, in the vain hopes that she will sit down and see the widening gap between us, and find it in her to reach back across it to my own outstretched hand, as weak as an attempt as it is.
She would rather watch Criminal Minds.
Now for The Magic Fish… I heartily recommend reading it yourself — check your local library or bookstore! — it’s a gorgeous graphic novel that tells multiple stories: a boy trying to find the words to come out to his mother, a daughter learning how to grieve the loss of her mother and her homeland, and the fairy tales those two characters rely on to find each other.
I originally retold the bulk of the story here, but 1) it doesn’t really do it justice and 2) you should really, and I insist, get the book and read it. And appreciate all the art; Trung Le Nguyen manages to make even the mundane feel as fantastical as the fairy tales he illustrates; a scrappy surprise marriage with scrounged rings is just as romantic and moving as the heroine’s kiss with the prince in all her starry-gowned glory. The mundanity of detention is just as vivid as a girl curling up in her furs at the edge of the ocean.
Anyways, here is an incredibly abbreviated synopsis instead.
The story centrally features an immigrant mother’s (Hiền) grief from losing her homeland and her mother after working for eight years to save up enough to return home and gain citizenship, as well as the difficulty her son (Tiến) faces in trying to communicate his queerness to his mom, never feeling like it’s the right time or important enough and moreover not even having the vocabulary to talk about it to his mother in Vietnamese. The two of them connect over reading fairy tales together, and three different variations on Cinderella are told throughout the story, interwoven with real-world occurrences and flashbacks to when Hiền fled Vietnam. You can, I hope, see where the parallels with the fairy tales come through: in these Cinderella tales, the protagonist is ultimately unmasked and accepted for who she is, and the cruel circumstances in which she comes from are left behind. In the end, although Tiến’s teacher tries to intervene and subject him to a kind of conversion therapy in which a priest compares coming out to a death in the family (perfectly timed so as to silence Tiến, given that his grandmother passes in the middle of the story, and he sees the suffering it inflicts on his mom), Hiền chooses to move forward from the grief and take care of her son by showing him that she accepts him by rewriting the ending of a Little Mermaid-like tale, where the mermaid girl fails to secure the affections of her prince, but instead falls in love with his love interest, and the two women fulfill the prophecy she needs to regain her voice.
It’s a touching piece about how stories bring people together and a poignant reflection on the things we can’t communicate, on the experiences that shape us and yet feel impossibly alien when they come to the surface.
The long and short of it is, I found in that book the same, aching, seemingly impassable ocean between my mother and me. I only know what I feel, in my inability to reach out to her; what personal aches does she harbor, then, that I can never know? She must feel the loss of her homeland. I know she grieves it. But never in front of her kids. But never something I could understand. How would I even begin to ask? It is illustrated so starkly here, like someone has taken a charcoal rubbing of the intangible sorrow that weighs heavy between my mother and I, and it resonates in my hollow, hollow heart.
“The space between two shores is the ocean… and being caught in between feels like drowning. And really, what is the point of tears among so much saltwater?” (p. 117)
But the book offers something to look forward to, too. The ending of a living story is never written in stone. You can change it to be whatever you want it to be. And sometimes that “crossing” between worlds is just that; you don’t know how to ford the river yet, but it will not take forever, and you will not drown. You just need to be okay existing in that transitive state; in motion, you will find a foothold eventually, even if your socks and shoes fill up with water, and the shock of it freezes the air from your lungs.
If you get to know me for long enough, it is inevitable that you will hear me talk about the concept of mestiza consciousness, first introduced to me in Chicana philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Towards a New Consciousness.” The term comes from the word for “mixed woman” in Spanish, and in this particular case, also informed by Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’ conceptualization of la raza cósmica, the cosmic race, in stark contrast to the racial purity ideologies of white USAmerica and Europe; instead, it has this positive perspective on “mixing,” wherein by combining peoples of all different (genes*, really, but in our case we’re concerned about) cultures.
I don’t know much about his later conservative swing, and admittedly even my understanding of this idea of la raza cósmica is shoddy at best, but it seems a bit icky to be focusing so much on breeding an “ideal” or “superior” human…
Anzaldúa’s argument is that the mestiza has to walk multiple worlds and hold seemingly contradictory positions in her head, and in doing so is forced to undertake a synthesis and production of a new culture, a third, kneaded one, in which the many must coexist. You belong to no world; when you attempt to exist in one, you are seen as the other. So learn to hold both alienations as true, and adjust. Admittedly? It’s a painful process. The mestiza is “plagued by psychic restlessness” (p. 100) as a result. But if we can survive this morphogenesis, then we become uniquely suited to serve as a bridge between peoples.
I have held a fractured world in my mind for years. I can then accept a new one; why not? Would it be any harder?
It is the same, I feel, as things are with language. The first second language is always the hardest. But once you gain that flexibility, the subsequent languages come easier. I am blessed, in some ways, to be straddling two sides of this river. It sucks a lot of the time, sure. But I have a view no one else has, and that is a power, in some ways.
I’ve lived a lot of very stupid years in my life at this point (and here’s to many more!), but if you were to ask me what the best thing I’ve ever done is, it would be the time I stepped into a river to help someone across, nearly a decade ago now. No award or salary has really beat the pure altruism of that one act I did. And it’s embarrassing that that’s it, that of all the donations to causes I believe in or volunteerism, it’s the time I made sure someone’s sneakers stayed dry. Occupying that space in the water, serving as a bridge. I hope I can return there.
this one is really long, and i wrote it in a sort of half-fugue state over the course of some days. i had to capture the words and the creativity before it left me. if there are any areas that need touching up, i ask for understanding and any edits/typo corrections if you spot any!
It’s excellent, I’ll re read it sometime when I’m not throwing a party !