anything, anywhere, at some point in time

if a rock falls of a cliff and nobody hears it, did the family dysfunction really happen?

Unsurprisingly, I have watched Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and I have been thinking about it. As both a Chinese daughter and a long-time slanderer of Malaysia's top cultural export Michelle Yeoh (yes, that one from the Anlene commercials), I have much to say!

First being: If you haven’t watched the movie yet, I don’t think any of what I am going to say will make much sense to you. It’s also impossible to summarize, so…. I don’t know. U can just come along for the ride? I guess??

Second being: It was a mistake to make my parents to watch it in hopes that they would reflect on the way that so many Chinese families are organised around a foundation of self-erasure by the women who belong to them. It was foolish of me to think that a movie would liberate me from the constraints of my flesh body (that is, the crushing expectations that Malaysian-Chinese people forcefully impose on each other in the name of "loving your family"). It was a mistake, not because of anything in particular that they did, but because they did not even realise that there was something for them to do. Tangentially, my parents understood that there was something "to get." There was something about an evil crying daughter, and a Raccaccoonie, and Michelle Yeoh flying through the air, but this did not complete the line to generational trauma, to the endless void of depression, and the millions of lives that have atrophied and fallen onto the cutting room floor in a world that does not care about the dreams of women.

Tell me why my father is so excited to watch the latest installment of the Mouse Corporation's franchise starring Benihana Cucumber about the "Multiverse of Madness," but was shocked when I asked him what he thought about Michelle Yeoh's alternate lives. "Hah, just now got multiverse meh?"

Tell me why!! My mother!!! Did not understand that when Evelyn told Alpha Gong Gong to fuck off, it was breaking the cycle of generational abuse and asserting her own personhood for the sake of her daughter!!! Tell me why!!!!

There was a Tiktok about how "you shouldn't bring your Asian mom to watch Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, because she will not get it. Somehow it will hurt more than if she did." I wish I had seen this Tiktok before spending money on those tickets, but I guess even Tiktok has its flaws. Even Tiktok cannot be the all-knowing Jobu Tupaki; even Tiktok cannot save me from my own desperation to try to get my parents to understand me.

There is a trauma that nearly all Chinese children know: the bone-deep insecurity that your parents do not truly love you as you are, only as they want you to be. It is in the look that Joy gives Evelyn in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, when her mother tells her that she is getting fat. Stephanie Hsu plays it perfectly, cutting into the deepest parts of being a Chinese daughter who is always aware that their mother will always have something cruel and biting to say about them. It is a look that I have known every day of my life, and brings this sentence to my mind: "...there is a way in which I find immigrant mothers, ... , are so casually violent in the way they talk to their daughters." The author, Imani, was writing specifically about how her Jamaican mother spoke about the author's body, but women police each other's bodies in the same ways across different cultures, I suppose. And it is violent - not in the way that entails physical harm, but in the way that Joy tells Becky, her half-Mexican white girlfriend, that her mother shames her as "her way of showing love." It is not, and Joy knows that it is not, because love should not hurt you so deeply, but it is the script that we tell ourselves so that we don't have to live with the knowledge that our mothers are, as Imani writes, "our first haters."

It is this casual violence that I have known always, in a thousand different variations. It has been a lifetime of my mother telling me that I am too fat, of my father shouting at me that I am too deranged, of my aunts telling me that I am too sensitive, and my uncles telling me that I am too loud, and a lifetime of being compared against my twenty cousin and the child of every single acquaintance’s aunt's cousin, and always failing, in some way, to be what would be the easiest to present to a legion of people who I am tangentially related to by blood, but who do not *really* care in the way that one human being does for another.

Something has always irked me about Mother's Day is the way that it is always a celebration of domesticity. I only figured this out recently, last week when all these food writers on Instagram were posting about how much of their love for food comes from their mother. It is one of those things that we say, no? That your mother's food is the best. "My mother put all her love into making this food," as people say. "I can taste her love."

Which is all very fine and well. My mother cooked, and taught me to cook, which is why you would be lucky to come for a meal cooked by me, because I'm really quite good at it. But there is something else about how cooking was always a chore that my mother did not particularly want to do. She is not one of those noble mothers of legend that extracts joy from slaving over the stove for hours on end, and neither was her mother before her. My grandmother had been the ward of a rich family who married a poor man, and was forced to learn to fire a wood stove and harvest fruit after a lifetime of gentle, perfumed hands. As a resentful flower blooms in a drought, cooking was a skill she acquired to appease a hungry husband, demanding children, but never something that came naturally, or with any emotional attachment. It is this domestic, matrilineal weight that she passed to my mother, who, eventually, passed it on to me.

Jenny Slate has this unbearable line in her memoir that goes: "Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?" It is so tender that it makes me forget that my mother has never wanted me to be hungry for her. In so many indirect ways, I have learned that she sees my hunger as a curse - a thin mother cursed with a chubby daughter, who finds that she unfairly bears the brunt of her daughter's sins when relatives ask, "Why is your daughter so fat? Why have you not controlled her? Why have you not shamed her sufficiently? 你会不会做妈妈? (Don't you know how to be a mother?)"? She has spent every day trying to trick me out of my own hunger, trying to convince me that I have never been hungry, only ever greedy. How can she give me less rice without me noticing today? Tomorrow she must figure out how give my brother more meat. The day after that, she will pour the jar of milk tea I made down the drain, so that I would have to consume less calories. Yesterday, she threw away the salted egg fish skin chips that my friend brought me from Singapore so that I couldn't eat them.

One of my mother's favourite sayings is that she eats only to stay alive, the taste of food does not matter. If she had it her way, she would eat only organic green vegetables cooked with the induction cooker she bought from the MLM that all her friends are a part of. Cursed doctrine, to be sure. A saying that has shown me that food is not always prepared with love, but with efficiency devoid from emotion. Parenthood and mothering as the work, not of love, but of forcefully molding your children into something *you* need.

This reminder is why I am unsettled whenever I see these gushing testaments to how much a mother's food represents their love. What do you do if your mother's food tastes like nothing?

Unhappy adults generally come from unhappy children. Still grappling with the stressors from their own upbringing, these unhappy once-children stumble their way into raising more unhappy children, because they are so afraid of confronting their own emotions that they will do anything to cling to a fragile facade of social respectability. This facade includes having offspring that they may not want nor be able to care for, for the fear that they do not want something. The cycle continues when those unhappy children grow up, and are trapped in the same unimaginative area, going on to raise more unhappy people. This is the logic of familial dysfunction in a nutshell.

It is about food, and flesh bodies, but it is also not. A child has a million other things that they need. A child could be so many other things that do not align with what their parents is prepared to provide. A female child could refuse to wash her brother's underwear. She could want to be liberated from the constraints of domesticity. A child could be queer. They could be allergic to peanuts. A child could be way, way, way, too into K-pop. A child could drop out of college. They could choose not to go to college at all. They could just want to sit on the floor and whittle wooden figures for days on end. A child might not want to have children of their own. A child could play way too much DOTA. They could (shudder!!!) be an English major.

A child contains within themselves these infinite potentials, which is terrifying. A child is all consuming, like an everything bagel at the center of the multiverse waiting to destroy you.

I sometimes wonder what other peoples' childhoods were like, if you, too have spent your childhood learning to understand the many ways in which people can resent each other in the name of love.

Given my general sunny disposition (if you knew me in real life you would know I am being sarcastic, because I am generally very Moody!), you may have deduced that I was a Weird Child. To get a full understanding of what this entails, you can refer to Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, a film about children who are considered misfits in a highly-regulated social landscape. One thinks of the perfect, flat symmetry of Anderson's mise en scenes, and the way the cameras pan so very smoothly, controlled, over his characters, who move with an almost manic clockwork precision. Within these exacting confines, we find the film's female protagonist: Suzy Bishop, a preteen girl prone to fits of uncontrollable rage and book-stealing. I have been Suzy, literary thievery and all (It was a dark day when I stole my cousin's copy of Secret Seven).

Like Suzy, I was a Troubled Child who had to be "dealt with" by parents who themselves were raised in homes bursting to the seams with too many children, devoid of emotional maturity. Troubled Children are messy and unhappy, frequently asked, "Why can't you be obedient like all the other children?," with overactive imaginations that need to be controlled. They are always angry about everything, leading to wild outbursts that turn them into red pandas, which must be locked away into jade jewelry forever (watch Turning Red if you have not already!).

Troubled Children act the way that they do because they are aware that something has gone terribly wrong in their family at that unhappy pre-teen age when they are hypersensitive to farce, but do not know enough to make sense of any of it. This was true of Suzy in Moonlight Kingdom, and it was true in my own family when I was her age. I was unstable, too obsessed with K-pop and too preoccupied with huge books about white people riding dragons and walking through closets. I never did a lick of homework and fought with my cousins, shouted at my parents from the inside of the burning house of their troubled marriage, and was prone to fits of uncontrollable rage and running away from home.

To be a Troubled Child is to be a problem that requires minimization, either through canings or months of silence, anything to get you to shut up about the problems in your family. To be a Jobu Tupaki is to remind your parents that the choice to raise a child is an emotionally taxing experience that they are neither able or willing to deal with.

I have only ever been greedy: when my mother cooks for me, I am a burden. It is a chore, duty, curse. There is something ghostly about the way that she moves in the kitchen that reminds me, always, that it is I - I, who came into this world a dependent, needing her for food, needing her for life, needing her for love - It is my existence that has caged her into this life of unending domestic labour, my gravity like a black hole dragging her further and further away from her individual personhood. A need becomes a greed becomes an unending anxiety that I will carry with me for all my life, that my mother's love is conditional upon how closely I align with the ideal daughter that she was promised by the doctor during the ultrasound 25 years ago. Sometimes I wonder if I was worth it - If I, in all these failings that I have carried into her life, was worth her giving up the infinite lives she could have had.

I know that I should just shut up and be grateful, but as I told a random woman who shamed me into buying ginger tea for my mother, "我很不孝的哦。(I am unfilial.)" I breed my own resentment. Some days, I am encompassed with a bitter rage so strong that it chokes me. I know that it is unfair of me to have this feeling. It is unfeminist of me to place this blame upon my mother who has tried her best to love me, when I know that it is the fault of the patriarchy. I know this. I know this as deeply as I know my mother will never love me the same way she loves my brother, who she made Milo for every day until he turned 19, even though she made sure I could stand at a stove at the age of four with the understanding that I would “spend my life cooking for a man.”

I hate it, I hate it so much. It is so, so difficult to accept that I, alone, have been shouldered with this knowledge of my mother's personhood while my brother swans around freely asking for dry chicken breast for dinner. It is easier to love your mother when you do not think of her as a full person with a seething mass of repressed trauma below the surface. Loving is easy, as the song goes, when you know only love. But loving someone who you know is capable of infinite cruelty is agony.

When Joy says that she wanted to see what would happen if she puts *everything* on a bagel, it is both about the multiverse, but also the theater of situations that so many people raised as Asian women are forced to perform for everyone in their lives to meet the needs of everyone around them. There is a reason that the most emotionally resonant English-language movies about Asian women in my life have been about them developing fractured identities (Mulan, Turning Red, EEAAO, sorry I don't care about the rest, if I want to see Asian women in turmoil I just watch TVB Cantonese dramas).

There are bills to pay and husbands to babysit and children to feed and parents to cook for and friends to impress and distant relatives to make mindless small talk with mothers-in-law to shame you and fathers to take to the hospital and brothers-in-law with cancer and snide remarks from your sisters-in-law and children bullying each other and your son and daughter trying to kill each other and laundry to do and dishes to wash and dinner to make and taxes to manage and work to do and daughters to shame and sons to coddle and houses to clean and you must be everything, everywhere, all at once.

It is about the moment where you realize that your mother has a million different faces: The soulless smile she wears as your aunts abuse her, the blankness of her eyes when you tell her that she has hurt you, and the uncontrollable rage that erupts when you do something that reminds her a little too much of all the things that she has given up for you. There is a smooth frictionless-ness to your mother that only you will ever know. It will beckon at you with a terrifying familiarity, because how could it not, when It is what you have known all your life?

The thing about Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, is that it is probably not going to help your mother understand you. It is also probably not even going to help your mother understand herself. But you will. Maybe you will have to understand enough for the both of you, and maybe you will have to live with the fact that this the closest you will ever get.

It doesn't make it any easier to stop hoping, though, that a rock might throw itself of a cliff for you some day. I am desperately hoping still. For anything, anywhere, at some point in time.