Tag Archives: asian

Mother of Mercilessness: Everything Everywhere All at Once

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Everything Everywhere All at Once is a film that defies tidy categorization. It’s both ostensibly and fundamentally the story of a Chinese family struggling to keep things together, and it adds a hearty helping of what feels like every genre under the sun and moon that nevertheless achieves a bizarre harmonious blend of flavors. There’s a lot worth discussing about EEAO, but where I want to focus is its exploration of a familiar topic: intergenerational trauma. Particularly, I find that centering the story on the mother, Evelyn Wang (played by Michell Yeoh), brings a powerful and challenging perspective to the subject.

When it comes to stories about the Asian diaspora, intergenerational trauma seems to be big on Asian creators’ minds. Turning Red is an animated feature about the pressure a Chinese-Canadian girl feels towards her mother’s expectations. Himawari House is a comic about different Asian women moving to Japan to find themselves. Crazy Rich Asians shows how the decisions of one’s ancestors can ripple forward in time, affecting individual descendants in disparate ways. Messy Roots is about growing up Wuhanese in a predominantly white American environment. These works tend to describe families that come into conflict over the frustrating combination of expressing familial love through familial structure and obligation, but in every case, it’s the sons and daughters who are the main characters. 

Michelle Yeoh also plays a mom of one of the main characters in the Crazy Rich Asians movie. There, she’s a Singaporean mom trying to prevent her son from marrying a Chinese-American girl who comes from outside the vast-yet-insulated world of the ultra wealthy. Like so many of these stories, she as a parent is not necessarily a “villain,” but she and those of her generation are at least a source of stress for their kids as they try to carve out their identities.

EEAO flips the script, with Evelyn being both the figurative and literal hero. On the one hand, she’s a mother struggling with her non-serious husband, her teenage lesbian daughter, her judgmental elderly father, and a tax audit on the family’s laundry business. On the other hand, her endless string of failures apparently have made her the perfect candidate to stop the destruction of the multiverse. To say that it’s rare for a character like Evelyn to be this kind of protagonist is to make the queen of understatements. 

Through the metaphor of the multiverse, I find that EEAO explores so many facets of that Asian intergenerational experience. It’s stated that Evelyn made sacrifices to move to the US from China, and that she has a tendency to leave a lot of goals unfinished, giving a sense that she’s, well, trying to be everything everywhere all at once. Similarly, the pressure she puts on her daughter to be better than her through a combination of shame and criticism—well-intended but nevertheless painful—is one of the major sources of conflict in the film. 

By having all of this told primarily from the perspective of Evelyn, however, the Asian mom ceases to be a close-yet-distant figure in the story to eventually understand, and becomes the primary conduit through which these conflicting emotions are experienced. And it all comes down to trying to figure out how to deal with the expectations of others while trying to raise a child to exceed all expectations.

There’s actually a lot more I’d like to discuss about Everything Everywhere All at Once, especially the daughter and the husband Waymond, and how they each add to the wonderfully complex milieu that the film provides. But Evelyn is the main character and star, and the stalwart yet wobbly pillar around which the story is built. It’s an uncommon but welcome sight, and it has me wondering if I need to view my own mother a little differently—even if that doesn’t come easily.

Navigating Your Cultures: Himawari House

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The cover of "Himawari House" by Harmony Becker, showing the three Asian girls Nao, Hyejung, and Tina by the window. Next to them are a bottle and glass of tea, as well as some sunflowers.

There are stories I can appreciate and enjoy, and to which I can emotionally connect. Then there are the stories that I can feel right down to my bones, as if they extracted a part of me and converted that piece to an artistic medium. The Wind Rises was one, Encanto is another, and now the graphic novel Himawari House by Harmony Becker joins that list.

Himawari House is the story of three Asian girls who come to live together in Japan as exchange students. Nao is Japanese and White, originally from Japan but having grown up in the US. Meanwhile, Hyejung is South Korean and Tina is Singaporean. Though their circumstances are different and they come from different countries, they form a friendship amidst struggles with notions of identity and belonging.

In reading this, I’m reminded of my experience with the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy. I naturally couldn’t relate to the ultra wealthy or the old-money families, but could see many elements of the Asian culture I grew up both in and around, transcending class and manifesting in that story in specific ways. With Himawari House, however, I found myself relating to all three characters throughout because I would see in them pieces of my own personal struggles as a part of the Asian diaspora. 

I was born and raised in the US, so I understand a young Nao’s desire to integrate into American society surrounding her at the expense of her roots. I studied abroad in Japan at around the same age as them, so I also know what it’s like to experience Japan as a foreigner with some Japanese skills who nevertheless can pass looks-wise before it becomes clear that I’m not from there. I have limited connections with the lands of my parents and those who came before them—I’ve visited literally only twice in my entire life, once when I was very young and once when I was well into adulthood. Like Nao, those trips are still a part of me. Lingering memories of the former combine with resolve from the latter to hold onto some of it, while knowing the language in an imperfect manner leads to feeling caught between worlds. 

Himawari House’s portrayals of the Hyejung and Tina’s relationships with their parents also hit home. It’s all there: the looks of concern and disappointment from Hye’s parents and Tina’s description of her mom as some whirlwind of concern, love, guilt, and motherly affection. Much like Encanto, it’s like getting walloped over and over, except instead of punches to the gut it feels akin to elbows to the ribs. Which is to say, different but just as painful in its own right.

The comic does wonderful things with language in order to depict the experience of being ostensibly multilingual while also being exposed to new languages and getting reminded that maybe you don’t know your parents’ tongue as well as you maybe should. The dialogue is written with the caveat that this book is primarily for an English-literate market, but often Japanese and Korean are added as well to express what is being spoken in the original language—and to show the moments when the characters’ language comprehension fails. All the characters are also given noticeable accents in their speech, which add to the sense that they all come from different places. In English, Hyejung struggles with “f” sounds due to the lack of it in Korean while Tina speaks Singlish—a patois of English, Cantonese, Hokkien, and more—that she purposely dials back when talking to non-Singaporeans. 

There’s a note in the back of the book by Becker discussing her decision to incorporate accents into the book despite their historical use as racist mockery. In essence, she’s aiming to reclaim accents as a point of pride—a natural product of learning new languages—and I can really get behind that idea. It’s a tough tightrope to walk, but I think Himawari House pulls it off with aplomb.

Based on conversations I’ve had, this book is more than capable of finding readers beyond Asian peoples and communities. That being said, I feel that it speaks to Asians on a whole other level, and that’s okay. The joys and travails of Nao, Hyejung, and Tina are universal on some levels yet deeply personalized on others, and I find myself reflecting on my own sense of self within the cultures that are a part of me.

Dead or Alive 5 and the Portrayal of Women

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When Tecmo’s Dead or Alive 5 was first announced, the developers express the desire to portray their female characters better than they had in the past, with Team Ninja’s head developer Hayashi Yosuke even mentioning in an interview that “we’re trying to focus on the real women that surround us; the voice of a female, the mannerisms. We are being realistic about it.”

The DOA franchise has always been known for its sex appeal, from the first game’s available option to set level of breast jiggling to the Xtreme Beach Volleyball series where the girls trade their fighting uniforms for bikinis, so the promise of increased realism and improved depictions of women led to a some questions. Just what did they mean by real women, and could this fall flat on its face? Thus, although the guest appearance of Virtua Fighter protagonist Akira Yuki was the main headline, the new promotional trailer for Dead or Alive 5 is significant in that it gives us our first glimpse at just what the developers were aiming for.

Kasumi, main heroine, in DOA4 (left) and DOA5 (right)

Given the comparison image above and the statements from Hayashi, I think it’s clear that the changes to Kasumi’s look are not caused solely by improvements in graphics technology in the 7-year time span between the games. While Kasumi is still meant to be obviously attractive, there has been a bit of a reduction in her breast size and her face is substantially different, coming across as indeed “more realistic.” In fact, given the track record of the series, where greater realism could have meant shapelier breasts, Team Ninja has done a better job than probably anyone expected.


Ayane, Kasumi’s sister and rival, in DOA4 (left) and DOA5 (right)

Another feature that’s not really obvious without another character for comparison purposes is that DOA5 looks to be making more of an effort to give each character a more distinguishing face. When you look at any of the girls in previous titles, there isn’t much difference in their facial structure, andhen you look at the DOA4 versions of Kasumi and Ayane especially, they’re not that different from one another. With DOA5 however, their faces have substantial differences. They’re still designed to be attractive, and they still have similarly idealized bodies, but there seems to be an effort to vary the characters by more than their costumes and three sizes.

One element of Kasumi and Ayane’s newfound realism is that she seems to come across as “more Asian” than their previous iterations. Even though I haven’t actually seen this point discussed, I feel like this could potentially lead back to an argument concerning the appearance of anime characters where Japanese characters supposedly look “white” or distinctively “non-Japanese,” and that there may be some underlying psychological and historical reasons for making Japanese not look Japanese. The counter-argument to this has been that to assume the wide eyes of anime characters somehow equals “whiteness” is a cultural assumption in and of itself, but in the face of these revised looks, how does this hold up?

When I look at DOA4 Kasumi, even though her face comes across as “less Asian,” I still find that it comes across as more Asian than anything else, especially when compared to the non-Asian characters. And actually, Asianness and Whiteness as a binary is probably the most important mistake to avoid. Instead, the key difference is in another type of realism. In previous versions the characters come across across as more plastic and doll-like, especially in the eyes, with Kasumi’s own doe-like gaze, for example, acting more like an element of innocent seductiveness than anything else. In somewhat of a contrast, Kasumi in DOA5‘s eyes aren’t more realistic just because they’re closer to an Asian’s eyes in the real world, but because there is a sign of personality behind them.

I think the change in not just the way the characters’ eyes are, but the way in which they stare speaks towards what Hayashi meant when he referred to “the real women around us.” To some extent, this is aided by the improvement in technology, but it still requires the desire to move in that direction. Even as Kasumi continues to act as the sexy poster girl for the franchise, and while it can also be argued that her (and everyone else’s) bodies are ridiculous, I think that from what we’ve seen, Team Ninja actually seems quite serious about making the changes to the franchise that they promised.