Adding nuance to Asian ‘mom-olith’
FROM‘TURNING RED’ TO ‘UMMA’ AND ‘EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE,’ FILMS BRING NEW COMPLEXITY TO TIRED ‘TIGER MOM’ STEREOTYPE
A R L Y O N in the Pixar animated fantasy “Turning Red,” 13-year-old Mei Lee is subjected to a ghastly public humiliation when her mother, Ming (superbly voiced by Sandra Oh), goes leafing through her notebook and finds lusty drawings of Devon, the cute older boy Mei’s been crushing on. Convinced that this “degenerate” must have taken advantage of her daughter in some way, Ming furiously confronts the poor, unsuspecting Devon at the convenience store where he works, demanding, in full view of her mortified daughter and several giggling onlookers: “What have you done to my Mei-Mei?” ¶ Being embarrassed by one’s parents is a rite of passage for nearly every coming-of-age comedy protagonist. And the title of this one warns you that you’re in for a story about chronic shame and embarrassment: “Turning Red” may be a cheeky menstrual reference (an impressive first for a Pixar movie), but it also describes the basic act of blushing. And this particular humiliation cuts deep,
especially if you look at Ming and Mei, a Chinese Canadian motherdaughter duo, and discern more than an echo of your own experience as a parent, a child or both.
An echo, it’s worth noting, is not a mirror. Speaking in my Mei-adjacent capacity as the Chinese American son of a Chinese American mom, my ready identification with that particular scene from “Turning Red” comes with its own hesitations and qualifications. Even allowing for the comically exaggerated register in which most family-friendly studio animation operates, surely Ming overreacts to a slightly insane degree. Wouldn’t any mother properly interrogate the hell out of her child before jumping to conclusions? (Or maybe she underreacts: Depending on what she thinks “take advantage” means, wouldn’t it make sense to get the authorities involved?)
Then again, some might argue that it’s precisely Ming’s overreaction that qualifies her as such a recognizable, persuasive model of Asian motherhood. Certainly I can attest to that. Watching Ming rifle through Mei’s personal notebook, I was reminded of the time my mom snatched away a letter I’d gotten from a friend (this was pre-internet). Because I was still just a teenager, privacy was a nonexistent concept in our house. My mail was her mail. Curiously, the sight of Ming storming into that convenience store brought me back to the time my mom picked me up from elementary school and (rightly, admirably) reprimanded a bully in front of everyone, because the teachers clearly weren’t doing a thing and, hell, somebody had to.
Maybe you too were raised by an Asian American (or Asian Canadian) mom with some resemblance to Ming, a mom who only ever wanted the best for you and never let you forget it. And if you will allow me to generalize further, in hopes of getting more specific: Maybe she wanted you to enjoy the material benefits of a Western upbringing while still upholding the strict cultural traditions of an Eastern one — and to that end, she rigorously policed your academics, your extracurricular activities and your sorry
excuse for a social life. Maybe she skimped on verbal and physical affection, favoring a love language that expressed itself in steamers full of dumplings or plates of sliced fruit.
Maybe she didn’t mind embarrassing you in public since your family, being of Asian descent and therefore of perpetual outsider status, didn’t really belong to that public in any meaningful sense. And maybe she’d blanch if anyone dared call her a “tiger mom,” a term popularized by Amy Chua’s 2011 memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” and disavowed by many as offensive. Then again, if she’s anything like my mom, maybe she embraces the “tiger mother” label and wears it proudly. (Full disclosure: I asked my mom’s permission to mention her in this piece, promising I wouldn’t disclose anything too embarrassing. She replied, “Anything you write would embarrass you more than it embarrasses me.”)
There are limits, of course, to how effectively we can rely on personal experience as a yardstick, even when it sometimes feels like the only yardstick we have. The fewer cultural representations we have of a particular character, the closer and more harshly we tend to scrutinize the few representations we’re fortunate enough to get — which partly explains and even complicates my own mixed appreciation of “Turning Red.” Is Ming’s behavior plausible or implausible? Is she an authentic, edifying figure or the latest version of an overused, under-examined stereotype? Yes, no, neither, both. Even to ask these questions is to place the character in a box as limiting, in its own way, as years of Hollywood indifference.
Asian American moms, in other words, are not a mom-olith. And it’s been gratifying to see so many recent mainstream movies arrive at that conclusion, several of them by way of richly imaginative premises that happily dispense with realism in favor of fantasy, science fiction and even horror. And why not? (Whose Asian American childhood wasn’t, at some point, a horror movie?) In “Umma,” Iris K. Shim’s muddled but intriguing ghost story, Oh plays Amanda, a quietly anxious
Korean American mother whose lengthy estrangement from her emotionally abusive mother has sinister implications for her relationship with her own teenage daughter. Shim’s attempt to meld parental trauma and boogey-mom shivers isn’t entirely successful, but Oh’s performance sounds a resonant echo of her very different work in “Turning Red”: In both movies, a cycle of generational pain can be broken only when a controlled and controlling mother learns to relinquish her tight hold on her own kid — and, ultimately, herself.
DO M E E S H I , the director and co-writer of “Turning Red,” has a gift for exploring deep cross-cultural, crossgenerational dynamics via outlandish fantasy conceits — something she already demonstrated in her Oscar-winning Pixar short, “Bao.” At the end of “Turning Red” (spoiler alert), Ming, enraged at Mei’s disobedience, inflicts a Godzilla-sized red-panda avatar on a packed stadium, in a spectacular action climax that plays like a PG-rated riff on “Carrie.” But there’s one crucial, culturally revealing difference: In this “Carrie,” it’s the domineering Asian mother, not her teenage offspring, who gives voice to a destructive, all-consuming rage. Another difference: It somehow ends happily, not with a vengeful hand reaching up from the grave but with an affirming mother-daughter embrace.
An even more out-there kind of intergenerational reconciliation takes place in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The protagonist of this multiverse-hopping action-comedy extravaganza is Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), an emotionally and financially taxed Chinese American woman for whom marriage and motherhood have long since stopped paying meaningful dividends. And while this Evelyn turns out to be just one of many Evelyns, she grants Yeoh a rare opportunity to play frustrated and frazzled, to embrace a rougher, messier version of the sedate, ultracomposed mothers and mentor figures populating her filmography.
Before “Everything Everywhere,” Yeoh’s most famous mom movie was the glossy romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians,” in which she plays Eleanor Young, a member of Singapore’s ultra-wealthy Chinese elite bent on ensuring her highly eligible son doesn’t marry a mere commoner. (The commoner in question is played by Constance Wu, whose work on the ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat” was itself a sly, knowing riff on tiger-mom tropes.) On paper, Eleanor is pretty one-note, but Yeoh is terrifically nuanced: Showing us the motivation behind every pursed lip and dagger-like glare, she roots Eleanor’s intense judgment, persuasively and tragically, in a lifetime of being continually judged herself.
Eleanor has it all together; Evelyn, gloriously, does not. Kwan and Scheinert aren’t afraid to milk her for screwball laughs, poking fun at her anxiety, her grumpiness and her creative bungling of the English language. (My mom — there I go again — would never confuse “Ratatouille” for “Raccacoonie,” but she has her own inimitable way with a malapropism.) But Evelyn is also a figure of tremendous pathos. Like the hopeless yin to Ming’s overachieving yang, she’s full of hopes and aspirations but unable to fulfill any of them. She runs a failing business, barely occupies one half of a foundering marriage and is forever at odds with her teenage daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). (Rebellious teenage daughters are the indispensable foils of this season’s many Asian American movie moms.)
Evelyn is, in her own estimation, a catastrophic failure at life, the worst possible version of herself. And when she gets a chance to behold all the other possible versions of herself, she experiences profound regret — at having left her home country to move to a place where she barely spoke the language; at having run off to marry a man who never earned her family’s approval; at having given up dreams and opportunities for a life that doesn’t, in the end, seem to have been worth the sacrifice.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that while Evelyn’s fate may ultimately be too eccentric to be described as universal (or multiversal), her regret is nonetheless achingly recognizable. I’ve heard those regrets articulated within my own circle of family and friends, and I’ve seen them, albeit less often, in the faces of movie characters. I’m thinking of my friend Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari,” specifically Yeri Han’s piercing performance as a Korean immigrant woman far from home, carrying her family through a trying time. I’m thinking, too, of Alice Wu’s 2004 indie charmer “Saving Face,” which, like “Everything Everywhere” — a movie it doesn’t otherwise much resemble — follows a super-stressed Chinese American mom in denial about, among other things, her daughter’s sexuality.
You can see the ghosts of these films and a few others — including Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell” and Wayne Wang’s “The Joy Luck Club,” still the grandmother of all Asian American mother-daughter movies — continually refracted through “Everything Everywhere’s” labyrinth of meta-mirrors. And maybe you’ll see echoes of your own mother too; I certainly see mine, even if they are incomplete, imperfect echoes. Frankly, I’m glad they’re imperfect. The trouble with saying you feel seen by a work of art — to my mind the laziest, least insightful formulation in our current cultural discourse — is that it winds up reducing your experience and the work of art in the same stroke. It eliminates nuances, simplifies contradictions and makes an unfortunate fetish of relatability.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” understands this. It etches a singularly vivid portrait of a woman we seldom encounter in American movies — a Chinese immigrant who is also a mother, a daughter, a businesswoman, a fighter, a chef, a singer, an actor, a genius and a screw-up — and suggests, scene by scene and transformation by transformation, that she is far more than a set of tropes or a one-joke thumbnail. As the title suggests, she contains emotional, spiritual and experiential multitudes; she’s infinity incarnate, and she’s also just the beginning. The peculiar triumph of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” isn’t that it makes anyone feel seen. It suggests, on the contrary, that we haven’t seen anything yet.
A T H E R I N E H E R R I D G E , senior investigative correspondent for CBS News, was working at Fox News when she gave birth to her youngest son, Peter, in December 2005. Within weeks he was diagnosed with biliary atresia, a blockage in the ducts that carry bile from the liver to the gallbladder, a rare form of liver disease only seen in infants. Peter’s only chance of survival was an organ transplant. ¶ When Herridge went to her boss, the late Roger Ailes, who was chief executive of Fox News at the time, to inform him of the situation, his first question was: “Where can I buy a liver?” ¶ “I told him it just doesn’t work that way,” Herridge recalled during a recent interview from her CBS News office in Washington. She explained she was waiting for the Memorial Day holiday weekend, when organs become more available due to the typically high number of motor vehicle crash victims.
Nothing turned up, however, and in June 2006, Herridge became a donor herself. She gave 20% of her liver to Peter when he was 6 months old. It took two years for her to feel like herself again following the operation when she returned to covering intelligence and homeland security.
Now 16, Peter has grown to 5 feet 10 and gained a keen interest in skateboarding and girls. He has his first part-time job, bagging groceries at an Army base supermarket in Maryland.
Still, Peter requires rigorous medical management and monitoring of his medications as he enters adulthood. He needs monthly bloodwork and occasional biopsies. He makes annual visits to UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where the surgery was performed.
The vigilance required in raising a child who is immunosuppressed has permeated Herridge’s work and intensified her
commitment to holding the U.S. military accountable in her national security reporting. Two of her investigative stories revealed the plight of military veterans denied medical benefits from the government and delivered policy-changing results in 2021.
“After coming through the transplant and COVID,” Herridge said, “there is not a person or an institution that I would not take on for Peter, and that has carried over into my reporting.”
Herridge and her husband, retired Lt. Col. John Hayes, are determined to let Peter have an active life, even though any infectious illness poses a potentially fatal threat. “Since the transplant, we all take off our shoes when we walk in the door and wash our hands,” she said. “I know it sounds crazy, but it does more to cut down on infection than almost anything else. My job is to keep him as healthy as
possible for as long as possible because he’s probably going to need a second transplant at some point.”
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, her anxiety intensified. “After Peter nearly died as a baby and had a transplant, we made a decision that we were going to let him live freely,” Herridge said. “He was not going to be put into some bubble. And that was really tested by COVID.”
Herridge’s toughest decision was allowing Peter to return to public school in Washington, D.C., last September at a time when his immunosuppression level was at its highest since the transplant.
“I wrestled with it,” Herridge said. “I lay in bed at night thinking, ‘God, is this going to be the thing that takes him out?’ ”
Peter contracted the virus within three weeks of returning to the classroom. He suffered mild symptoms and recovered.
For a relieved Herridge, every triumph is followed by reflection.
“When you walk with death with someone that you love and you come through it, you see a sweetness in life afterwards that you would never appreciate,” Herridge said. “And you see a clarity of purpose that you would never have realized.”
Born and raised in Toronto, Herridge, 57, started her career at ABC News in London after graduating from Harvard and Columbia Journalism School. She spent nearly 22 years at Fox News, where she was a respected correspondent delivering straight-ahead accounts and investigative stories in a confident, no-nonsense style from the Pentagon, the Department of Justice and war zones in the Middle East and Europe. While at the network, she won the Tex McCrary Award for Journalism presented by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
As Fox News leaned more into right-leaning opinion in prime time, where Herridge often appeared, she believed her work was no longer having the kind of impact she wanted. Her frustration led to her joining CBS in October 2019, where she is now a fixture on “CBS Mornings” and “CBS Evening News With Norah O’Donnell.”
“We did a lot of great reporting at Fox News,” said Herridge. “But you want to be known as someone who is a newsmaker, not a fact-checker. The news space was getting smaller and smaller, and I was getting exhausted by it.”
Herridge’s decision to make a career move while in her mid-50s, an age when on-air opportunities for women in TV diminish, felt like a risk.
Those concerns fell away when Herridge met with Susan Zirinsky, then president of CBS News, who recognized her decades of experience as a plus, especially when covering the Pentagon. Correspondents on the beat include CNN’s Barbara Starr and CBS’ David Martin, both in their 70s, while ABC’s Martha Raddatz is 69. All have had lengthy tenures.
“In the national security space, it really can take at least a decade to build a reputation and start to make contacts,” Herridge said. “You have to build relationships of trust.”
HERRIDGE acknowledged how she also had to win the trust of some of her colleagues at CBS News, who were wary of having a Fox News veteran in their ranks. “I think you were always fighting the prejudice against Fox as a news organization,” said Herridge.
Any questions about Herridge’s objectivity likely faded when her questions irritated thenPresident Trump in an interview conducted during the 2020 presidential campaign. CBS News insiders now say they watch her with the anticipation of seeing a report that could make a difference in the lives of those she is covering.
“She has a brain that bores on the flawed details in something that everyone accepts and drives by,” said Zirinsky, who currently oversees a documentary production unit at CBS News. “It’s something not everybody possesses, but she’s like a female AWAC plane,” referring to the airborne warning and control system. “She’s a great synthesizer of facts and she has a heart.”
After arriving at CBS, Herridge put a spotlight on a growing number of U.S. military troops who suffered serious ailments linked to a toxic base in Uzbekistan where they served between 2001 and 2005. Her reporting is credited for bringing attention to the issue and led to an executive order from Trump during his last day in office that provided previously denied medical care for the affected troops.
When Herridge learned of the order, she placed a call to one of the veterans once stationed at the Karshi-Khanabad base, known as K2, who served as a source for the story.
“He said, ‘I have to pull over to the side of the road because I’m crying so hard I can’t see what I’m doing,’ ” Herridge recalled. “And I cried with him.”
Herridge also uncovered the extent of the injuries suffered by U.S. troops from Iran’s January 2020 ballistic missile strike on the Al Asad Airbase in Iraq, in retaliation for the killing of Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian military official. The U.S. government played down the severity of the attack’s impact so tensions with Iran did not escalate. Trump described the injuries as “headaches.”
But as a result, troops who suffered brain injuries were denied Purple Hearts and the medical benefits that come with them. Herridge’s reports prompted the Army’s Human Resources Command to approve the awards in December 2021.
“I think we were very close to a conflict with Iran than the public ever recognized,” Herridge said. “But that should have never prevented the last administration from recognizing the injuries of these soldiers. It should not have gone on for two years.”
Back at home, Herridge is getting Peter ready for special education instruction to make up for the school time lost during the pandemic. It has provided a perspective on what many parents coped with during the pandemic.
“COVID was crushing for these children,” she said. “And Peter needs more help today than he did two years ago. My exposure to the public school system, special education, the bureaucracy — pretty soon I’m going to want to turn my investigative lens on that.”
Herridge’s sons Peter and James, a 17-year-old high school junior, have heard it before. As she put it, “My kids always say, ‘Don’t make mama mad — she’ll investigate you.’ ”