It Could Happen Here - Everything Everywhere All At Once and the Asian American Family

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Mia talks with film maker Tiffany Yang the politics of the Asian American family and queerness in media.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami?

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that I and Mia Wong occasionally hijack to talk about Asian American stuff. And, you know, some pretty interesting Asian American stuff happened, which is that, yeah, there was a sort of massive sweeping cultural victory question mark for the asian american community tm when everything ever all at once did okay i'm getting conflicting sources about exactly the record that i said at the oscars but it won seven oscars did very well everyone is very happy um yeah so i decided that i was going to use this to talk about some other stuff that is related to it. And with me to talk about many things, including sort of the family and patriarchy and Asian American culture and media is Tiffany Yang, a filmmaker from New York. Tiffany, welcome to the show. Hi, Mia. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for being on. So we were trying to figure out how precisely we want to sort of start this because, you know, there's a lot of sort of angles you can take.

I think the thing that I want to start with is, well, like, A, okay, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a very good movie in a lot of ways. And I think it's sort of, it's kind of the apotheosis of a structure of Asian American media that I've talked about a bit before that that i think about a lot is the way in which asian american media has been it it it has a basically a structural form it has there's a very specific story or set of story structures into which anything you're trying to tell has to be fit and and that that series of things is okay so you have a small business you have you have a bunch of immigrants they come to the u.s or they're well usually they're already in the u.s and they're trying to run a small business and they're having these issues sort of integrating into into sort of like white american society and there's some kind of conflict in the family and the tv show or the movie is is about like resolving this sort of conflict um yeah and i think everything ever all at once is like the best version of this that we've ever

gotten in a lot of ways but you know and this is something i talked about in the sort of new year's episode is that there there's something about i guess asian american like the the way our sort of political culture works that makes it so that this is the only story that we tell and you know i mean you can look at a lot of the sort of like sorry i've been rambling for a lot but i want to get this out of the way before we go further but you know like there's a lot of movies that are like it's like like you know shows like fresh off the boat like iron fist is also sort of like almost literally this right um like turning red is a sort of like an emblematic example of sort of thing that is exactly this like fresh off the boat is basically this right i think part of the sort of there's a kind of ideological shell game

happening here that's about the family everything ever all at once has a lot of similarities with crazy rich asians in ways that are kind of not immediately apparent i have finally reached the point tm which is that both everything everywhere all at once in crazy rich asians ends in exactly the same way right which is the the the like the the the sort of family tension that has had been sort of building up and playing out throughout the entire movie like is resolved and everyone sort of goes back to being a family and this is interesting specifically for crazy rich asians because in in the original like in the book version of this story the family shatters so the plot of that movie is this this asian american girl is dating

like this guy who's from singapore who has not told her that he's from like an unbelievably rich like singaporean family and the story is by him going to, is about them going to Singapore and realizing that this guy is unbelievably rich and that his family are just assholes who suck. And in the book, like the, the family like mistreats both of them really badly. And so they just leave and they book it and they cut, they cut off the rich family.

But in the movie, they, some weird thing happens where like the, the main character plays Mahjong with the guy's mom and like a miracle occurs and the family works out and everything, everyone wants has, has a very similar sort of thing where like the, the way this movie ends.

And I have to say, it was like, I do, I do like this movie a lot, but the way that it ends is Evelyn, who is joy's mom walks up to her and says, you're fat and I don't like that you got a tattoo, but also the family is good and like we should work it out. And then they do like a miracle occurs. And there's this sort of running ideology in this, which is that like the, the, the family is sort of, is sort of too big to

fail. Like you're, you're not allowed to have a movie that's about something that's not about the family or be a movie where, you know, like the end of it is the people walk away from their family because it's hurt them a lot. Right. And I will also say that sort of Asian American cultural production that doesn't center the family, it actually just doesn't get read as being Asian American, right? documentary called minding the gap and it's about like his trauma and his like sort of youth growing up in a broken home and hanging out with skateboarding friends um some of whom are like black and that just never gets talked about as an asian american film even though it's made by an asian american filmmaker and his experience as like someone who actually migrated from China is such a big part of his story like because it's not about this sort of family conflict and reconciliation

it actually doesn't get read as an Asian American film a lot of the time um which to me is interesting um and yeah I just wanted to second your point that like in both of these films everything everywhere all at once and crazy rich asians like nothing actually changes you know there's the reconciliation within the family but nothing about the family structure changes like i think evelyn her the sort of like conciliatory gesture she gives is like oh i'm your mom and i would always choose to be with you in any universe i forget like the exact phrasing it's been a while since i've seen this film but it's something like that it's like you know i would still want to be with you because i'm your mom and it's like

this very um the family is it is its own explanation yeah and i i i think it points to sort of this is the movie that i think hit the exact limit of this kind of of this kind of sort of asian family politics because in in in its in in the sort of like moment where it needs to justify itself, it can't, it doesn't have anything. The moments it's sort of, it's, it's, it's empty of an actual, like it's,

it's empty of, of any sort of like ideological message about why this should be redemptive. Right. Like just, you know, and I, I think this is something that like we don't think about enough, which is that if your mother hurts you a lot, them being your mother is not a redemptive thing. transness and and you know and in the ways that like trans people like i mean literally get killed by their families in the ways that they get you know kicked out from their families and and the

ways that sort of this this this sort of self-justification of it's good because it is right that like the relationship yeah this is sort of what you were saying right it's like it justifies itself by just like well i am your mother it's like well that's not an argument right yeah right and it's not enough like i think joy spends the whole film like fighting to be seen by her mom and in end, her mom doesn't really give any reason why she loves Joy. Like, there's nothing like specific to Joy herself as a person. It's just like, you're my daughter. I'm your mother. Of course, I love you. And, you know, like, why should that be something a queer child settles for like just this very basic baseline of acceptance rather than anything that like actually celebrates who they are as an

individual yeah and and that's something that i also wanted to talk about with this is like is and this is this is not just like the specific you know we're talking a lot about the specific movie because this is like the most recent one that's come out and and we're not sort of saying this to like like there is a lot of like good stuff in this movie like this is the movie like like joy is probably the character who is like closest to me who i have ever seen in anything like at any point right and like there was something you know sort of incredibly emotional like i cried a lot during this movie that was like incredibly emotional about sort of you know like seeing yourself in a like yeah yeah but there's something about the way that asian americans like especially sort of like cisset asian americans think about queerness that that i think is is is you see in

this movie which is that okay so this movie has two queer relationships in it right unless you're gonna count like the guy and the raccoon which i it's funny but i i didn't i don't know about that one um but right but you know the the actual like the the actual two sort of like queer relationships are between joy and her girlfriend and then between evelyn and the tax lady and there's two things that are interesting about that one is that both of the both of the characters they're in relationships with are white and very and this this is a bit like something that's very very specifically like pointed out about joy's girlfriend and you know as you know there's the joke it's like well she's

half mexican but she's played throughout the entire thing as like an outsider who like doesn't understand what's happening in in the sort of scenes like doesn't understand the family dynamic doesn't doesn't understand his knees and you know and you see this again with okay so who like you know they're able to imagine a world in which like evelyn the main character who has like just been homophobic this entire movie is in a queer relationship and like yeah like i good for her but if you look at who it's with right it's it's the character in the movie who is this tax lady who her thing is that she is like like she she she is like,

like she, she, she, she is like the human representation of the sort of white supremacist, like capitalist bureaucracy that is, you know, attacking this family and is sort of like driving these people into the ground.

And then she's sort of redeemed by, by like love and queerness, but there's this way that queerness gets positioned as outside of Asian-ness by the way that like the, by the other way that the only possible queer relationship that they can imagine is with a white person as an, you know, as someone who's explicitly marked as an outsider.

Right. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. Like queerness, queerness is like attached to these anxieties over assimilation. Yeah. um which is just a very it's it's very strange to me that this is the thing that keeps coming up in like asian american narratives and discourses because obviously like asian america like asian queer cinema in asia is like such a powerful cultural force and the film makes all these

references and i feel like Wong Kar Wai has made one of the greatest works of queer cinema happy together of recent decades and so it's just it's so strange how queerness is being positioned as an external threat

and I mean like you know you could take a sort of like if you want to do the lib analysis of this, like China has had queer rulers, like has the West produced one? Like, maybe, possibly at some point, maybe. But like, you know, like it's kind of like it's ideologically frustrating, right? Like, you know, you can fall back on the like, we know that like we have records of queer people in china for like 5 000 fucking years right like it's you know but like i i think i i think what's really interesting about this is that this is something that's seen as so natural that people writing like even like like asian american like writers writing about

the film don't even notice it. Like they just, they just sort of passively reproduce it. Yeah. And I don't know. I, I think it's like, I mean, it's deeply frustrating like being an Asian queer person,

because this is something that like, you know, the, the, the kinds of right-wing nationalism that like there's different kinds of Chinese nationalism that will make this – explicitly make the same argument that gay people are like a sort of – I mean I guess they would have said it was bourgeois, but now it's a sort of decosition onto the, like onto the world of Asia. But it's like, like, no,

but then, but then, but you know, you, you get these like, sort of like very well credentialed, like progressive, like Asian American writers who are just either implicitly or almost explicitly making exactly the same argument.

Yeah. Yes. And it's also what the American right wing think right like they look to china as like if you know china represents this like sexual threat of having like the society where everyone is in their place you know like they imagine that the sort of like traditional gender roles are much more adhered to in China, which is why it's like we're on the decline, like China's rising. So it's, yeah, it is a very weird idea that nationalists on both sides are attached to. And it's disappointing that Asian Americans who think of themselves as progressive or even radical kind of reproduce this unthinkingly.

Yeah, I mean, one of my like recent black pill moments was, I don't know if people remember this, but there was someone on Twitter who very kind of famously got like just like obliterated for saying that people shouldn't like saying that like people people shouldn't like cancel their subscription to the new york times uh after they like did the whole thing this they did this whole bullshit and people don't know what the sort of scandal was so the uh a bunch of people who'd written for the new york times sent them a a very very mild letter saying like hey can you guys like fix some obvious like not even saying fix like can you report on trans issues better here are some like glaring certain

mistakes that you made in new york times through a hissy fit and got really mad at them and and you know this this person's reaction was like oh well you can't you like don't cancel your subscription like you have to support the news and it was this like sort of moment and she is one of the hosts of like one of the big progressive asian american podcasts and it was like it was this you know for me it was this really sort of like black pilling moment of like oh this is like this is like what like like you know like like three like three three seventy five a month is what these people think my life is worth like yeah i don't know i think this kind of ideological stuff is very deeply tied into the way that asian americans have been representing and thinking about the family instead of recent years and but but but before before we go into that uh do you know

when the family is trying to sell you it is it is the products and services that support this podcast we have to take an ad break we will be right back welcome I'm Danny Thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by Dendrel, won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Mia, just out of curiosity, since I don't have the pleasure of listening to the ads while we're recording, like what is going to play during that? Oh, I have no idea. Like it could be anything. I don't know. It could be a gold ad it could be the f well we haven't had the fbi tried to do it yet we've had we've had we've had law enforcement agencies we've had people selling gold ronald reagan coins i we've had i don't think i've seen that like since i was a child i think they used to have like television commercials. Yeah. They, they, they, they,

they do it on podcast. Now, apparently a thing that I discovered when people sent me the clip. So who knows? Like, like maybe, maybe, maybe,

maybe, maybe they'll do a Thatcher one and you, you too can own the, the, the immortal words. There is no such thing as society. There is only individuals in the family. Yeah. Wow. Well, thing as society there is only individuals in the family yeah wow well whatever it takes to keep the podcast running yeah so all right um something i wanted to sort of circle back to is

you know i i think one of the one of the sort of one of the things about this kind of Asian American media, you know, you have this sort of ambivalence of like what the sort of queer child is supposed to be. is supposed to be and you know like i would say this like it is a pretty common experience if you are like a queer child of an asian family that your family does fucked up shit to you um like that's a thing um and this is i wanted to ask you about something that you've been talking about that i'm sort of interested in which is one of the things that that i don't know when you try to talk about this stuff there's this way in which the way we sort of collectively think about when i say we this is like i guess like a kind of specific asian american thing the way we think about trauma gets involved very quickly yeah and i was wondering

if you could talk about that some more yeah i i feel like there's this there are these sort of like unspoken discursive rules where when you talk about trauma within an asian immigrant family there are like first of all it's always intergenerational trauma right like you can't talk about like a queer child experiencing trauma without then like getting into the fact that oh like the parents have um experienced traumatic things like through the process of immigration or like war um the refugee experience etc etc and so there's this sort of like economy of trauma where some members within the family get their trauma treated as more legitimate and others don't i think it's like really common to hear this um refrain which is like oh um second generation

immigrants are like the you know people like us asian immigrant children who were born in the west um can't possibly know the like the real trauma that our parents or grandparents went through um because they were the ones who like fled their countries or um experienced war firsthand or grew up in poverty um but then it's also just like when we talk about intergenerational trauma, there's this sort of like obfuscation of who is enacting that trauma within the family, right? Like if the intergenerational trauma exists like who is passing it down and so i don't i don't know if i'm articulating myself well on this but um yeah i guess the the essential idea is that i think there's this like mechanism which kind of immediately delegitimizes any talk of abuse

or trauma from the perspective of Asian youth or from the perspective of like the child in the family I think that's a kind of I don't know there's just really baffling deep

unwillingness in a lot of ways to think about and i think this is a sort of broader like cultural thing too but there's just deep unwillingness to think about the family as a side of violence and as a side of sort of profound violence it's like you know like it's the place where the the violence that shapes you comes from in a lot of cases. And I mean, like, I know a lot of people, this has happened to you, this has happened to me to some extent. And there's this real kind of, you know, this is what I actually really liked about Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's like, it, like, goes into that in a lot of ways.

Like, it is a movie for about 99 tenths of the movie it is a movie about how like the people around like how the people in your family can hurt you repeatedly and about the sort of like the the ways that they think about it the way but you know there's there's but but but but i think this is where the sort of perspective thing comes into it where like yeah we're i think like we don't really have a language to sort of talk about this stuff and the the way the film deals with it is sort of like you know is is is this kind of like very specific kind of nihilism, which is, like, definitely a thing that you could fall into, right? Like, you know, like, that is definitely

a reaction to being traumatized, but it's seen as, like, illegitimate and world-destroying, I think, in a lot of ways, because it causes you to sort of, like, if that's your experience with the family, like, you're going to leave,

or you're going to, or you're only going to stay in by force. And so, you know, the movie sort of rejects it. But, you know, there's this way that it's very difficult to talk about this stuff and about the sort of like long arc of how people have thought about the family before us. Right. What's an example of what you mean by like how people have thought about the family before us? in chinese history in the last you know if you like last sort of hundred years you look at sort of what's going on in 1925 if you look at what happens immediately like after the chinese revolution like the there is a real period of like questioning questioning patriarchal authority of questioning like what is the family for like why why are we doing this and you know i think i think

the answers they came to were ultimately unsatisfying, which is that, like, well, we need the family around because, like, our economy does not function without uncompensated labor. So the Maoist sort of, like, attempt to grapple with this fails. But I don't, like, as with many things that Maoism attempted to grapple with, I don't think they were wrong to look at it. I think their solutions were all terrible. But I think there's this kind of – I mean, there's this reaction. that has an enormous amount of potential to sort of inflict violence on you and sort of destabilize your life and cut you off from resources and information sort of i mean i i was struck by someone else making this comment um about how like in everything everywhere all at once you know they can imagine like this sort of infinite um number of universes but

in every single one the family unit remains the same um you know like the the social arrangement never changes across all of these different universes um yeah i thought that was a really good point um there's just like the sense in which a lot of the recent Asian American culture can't imagine the family as like something that can be transformed. It just kind of takes it for granted as this like static, eternal structure, which can't be challenged. And people, if they find reconciliation or happiness it needs to be somehow within that same arrangement yeah and i think a lot of that has to do with like the thing that we've decided about elders collectively which is another one of those things that like

is like the the the legitimacy of the authority of elders is something that in in chinese revolutionary history is something that's very much up for debate and almost everyone who decided to like take up arms against the state like almost all of those people were like this is messed up and then you know i i think i think partially as a result of how badly sort of the maos project goes and then also i think as as as a kind of like explicit part of state policy there's this way in which that kind of authority gets re-inscribed and any sort of questioning of it gets gets looked at as like oh we're like a return to sort of like maoist egalitarianism or whatever which is the thing that i i see a lot in the ways that like not really asian americans but like in the in in in i don't know you see this in chinese discourse like a decent amount i mean you see this in kind of um messed up ways and some

of the asian american discourse from people whose families never participated directly in the maoist project you know they might have like a lot of people who immigrated here to the U.S. weren't like they were connected to the KMT they were on the nationalist side these are people who ideologically were never aligned with um any sort of socialist project and you know they'll they'll invoke things like well you know this is exactly what my ancestors were fleeing from china yeah and it's like okay like you guys like i i i have really bad news for you about like what the kmt's ideology was and like what i feel like this is like sort of these are like the egg monopoly people, right?

Yeah. But I think like this has two effects, right? Which is like on the one hand, those people – like that like specific kind of very weird Chinese anti-communist is sort of incredibly privileged in the way that like that stuff's thought about but then you know like there are a lot of people who are in like from like from china who are in the u.s like specifically because of the failure of this project and this is something else he talked about in the atlanta episodes but like several of the people like who were killed in atlanta like were there because like liberalization drove them to a point where like they you know where they had to work to support their families and you know and and the the other thing that sort of comes hand in hand with liberalization

is that that is and i i i don't know. This is something that like people really don't want to think about, which is that economic and to some extent political liberalization in China came hand in hand with this massive entrenchment of the patriarchal project, which is the one child policy just sort of slamming down like a hammer of being of the state just being like we are going to just directly like we are going to directly control your reproductive autonomy we are going to you know we are going to forcibly sterilize people we are going to like we'd literally just limit the amount of kids you can have we are going to make this sort of like giant i don't know like this enormous state intervention into like social reproduction and the people who were the victims of that like you don't really hear from them much i mean like one of the stories i'm sorry i'm still just haunted by is that one of the people who died in atlanta like her family refused to bury her like refused to take her remains to bury her because like their village was like,

no, you, you, you never married. You can't be like buried in the village. And wow. Yeah. And so,

you know, like her, like she had a funeral in the U S that was attended by no one who knew her because none of her friends could show up because they get arrested by the cops. And, you know, there,

there were these, like, there were these kinds of like transnational linkages of like the violence of people's families that just disappears from this sort of like narrative of like like asian-american-ness like is the family is this unit is this relation right and on that note did we also want to talk about how the sort of like focus on the small business slash family or the family as a small business obscures some of the

class conflicts within the asian american community like these very massage workers you're talking about i remember in the wake of that Atlanta shootings, a lot of people started there. They kind of use the massage workers as like an emblem of the Asian American community more broadly. One, in fact, like a lot of the sort of like more professional class Asian Americans or

like the Asian Americans who get platforms in the media, they aren't like, they aren't from the same class as like the massage workers are. We heard from like a lot of small business owners, but those are the same people who like own massage parlors and hire these exploited workers who have undocumented status and who can thus be put into much more precarious positions than U.S. citizens. And so, yeah, did you want to talk a bit more about that? Yeah. Did you want to talk a bit more about that? Yeah. I mean, I think the small business owner is a really sort of interesting and powerful character, like especially in the US because it's like – it's possible to be a small business owner, be really poor, but also not be propertyless. Yeah. also not be propertyless yeah and and i think that like the like the specifically like the core of the american dream is just to own property and you know so here is this class

you could point out as like oh well we're really poor but you don't actually you never have to look at labor relations at all right and that that like frees you from having to actually think about what capitalism is, and it also lets you – it lets really the actual sort of like the real sort of Asian-American ruling class, right? Like the actual billionaires, right? There are Asian-American billionaires. There's a good number of them. There's also just a bunch of just Asian billionaires because there is a there's just an asian ruling class it lets those people especially in the u.s hide behind the image of the sort of small business owner right and they can you know and they can use it to launder their sort of reputation because

like it's in the u.s like being anti-small business is like the hardest position you can possibly take it is like like it is you you like i don't know if people remember this um a friend of mine vicky osterwald wrote this book called in defense of looting oh yeah that's a great book yeah great book everyone should read it uh like they were like sitting u.s senators were like like yelling about the book like like a huge swath of the left left got like unbelievably mad about it like a all like a huge swath of the left left got like unbelievably mad about it like a lot of you will probably also get mad about it but like like one of the things that always comes up with with with looting is like i you know it's like well

are you gonna loot small businesses and it's like well actually yeah like like insofar as people looting small businesses a lot of times it's the people who work there and it sucks because working for small businesses is fucking terrible and right yeah or people in the community where those like small businesses are and like are discriminatory towards yeah and vicky makes this point about this there's this kind of populism that gets invoked where you know one of the police statements about i think it was about ferguson um was they're talking about like they burned down our walmart and it's like well what do you mean our walmart like we don't fucking own the walmart like we don't get shit from it like everyone who works in the walmart gets fucked everyone has to buy from the walmart but it's it's this really hollow like populism like it's

this thing that like you you assemble a community based around a corporation. And I think that's kind of what's been happening. I think this is the reason why Asian American culture is like this. Because there's this very hollow, multinational populism has been assembled around like the figure of the small business owner, but it's ultimately like, it doesn't really have ideas other than you should let us, like you should let us make money without being racist.

And also the fat, like the, the, the, it has that idea. And then it has the idea of what the family is good because it is. And that's kind of it. Yeah. the idea that the family is good because it is and that's kind of it yeah yeah I don't

I don't know I think there's a lot about well okay I will say this like the the day people are okay with looting small businesses is the day the US canS. can actually fall. At any moment until before then, it will survive because that's always the sort of last defense of capitalism is like, what about small businesses?

And you will get people who call themselves communists who will be like, no, no, no, actually, these are fine. It's like, I'm Danny Thrill Won't you join me at the fire And dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows Presented by I Heart and Sonora An anthology

Of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters. To bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming

and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Okay, so I wanted to kind of pivot back around a bit to talk about elders a bit more because i

feel like i kind of sidetracked us off of that and i yeah i think there's this really i don't know there's been this kind of like rehabilitation of the elder in a way that like was something that was deeply questioned in in periods where it was kind of like it was more obvious and less and more socially acceptable to sort of look at the power these people have and how much it can suck well yeah i think i noticed this picking up during you know the the sort of like first spate of anti-Asian attacks during COVID, I think that's when like a lot of progressive Asians started invoking the figure of the elder, right? Like our elders are being attacked, like an attack on our elders is an attack on our community like that sort of thing um where

the elder is kind of like used as a sort of emblem of the innocence of the asian american community or what do you like what work do you think the elder is doing there in this discourse like why does it have to be an elder like what if you were just saying asian people are being attacked or like what if it was asian youths being attacked like what why does it have to be the asian elder because i think we were talking about this earlier empirically it's not exactly true right it wasn't mostly old people who are victims of these attacks yeah and i mean i think this is one of the areas where like the murky like you know it's really really hard to get good data on who's being attacked because i mean police reports are

obviously incredibly unreliable right and then you know like there's self-collected data but the self-collected data is not all encompassing it you know it's sort of skewed in its own ways but yeah i i think i think there's this way in which like i don't know like i think there's almost this way in which elders almost are like they're also like like personally infantilized by it whereas like they're picked as this sort of like like part of like they use this as a sort of symbol of like people who can't defend themselves which partially isn't true. There were actually examples of Asian elders defending themselves, but it does this kind of like – And also the rates of gun purchases went up with it.

I mean, I know just anecdotally in the Chinese-American community, I knew so many elderly Chinese people chinese people who are like i'm gonna go out and buy a gun now yeah yeah i think like the the way that that thing it was invoked has a lot of sort of like i don't know it was it was like there was this way in which they, like, they became framed as like, this is sort of like, this is the apotheosis of like everything that it is to like be Asian American. And that like that, like the fact that that was under attack was this sort of incredible crisis.

Right. And I think like, I think there's like, that obscures a lot of what was happening, which I think like, I think there's like that up gears a lot about what was happening, which is that like, if there was one clear trend in the data, it was that women were being attacked at like a way higher rate than anyone else. And,

you know, and this has been a thing that has sort of continued, which is like, I don't know, like there's been more attacks in the last few months. It's been a lot of. Young Asian women. Getting pushed in front of trains.

And people have just. Really stopped caring. Yeah. To the extent where. It's like literally a meme. That you can watch the cycle. Of the stop A stop api hate like signs coming up and down right and i don't know i i i i think i think the the elder part of it kind of like it obscured a lot of what was actually happening yeah i i feel like the last incident that really made a splash in the media was the murder of Christina Yuna.

I forget what her last name is, but Christina Yuna Lee getting murdered in Chinatown. And this was already a year ago. a town and this was already a year ago um and i haven't really heard anything since like i see things in the local news um that where i live in queens recently had a a couple of attacks um just a week ago i think but it didn't make the national news or anything yeah and i i i think the way that the kind of like hierarchy of victimhood i guess affected that like has it had i mean i'm not sure it's the biggest like single reason why everyone has sort of stopped caring but like i like i think the sort of stop aapi hate like that moment kind of only happened because there was this sort of

backlash against like there's this backlash against black lives matter and against the insurrection and people needed another people needed a kind of like ideologically safe like thing like way of demonstrating like how good their politics were or whatever but i think it definitely contributed to sort of why like stuff has been abandoned and i also wanted to ask do you see this this thing this fixation on elders um it's happening at the same time that ancestors get invoked a lot in like asian american literature especially queer literature um i'm thinking of authors like ocean wong like how did ancestors become

such a thing yeah it's really i don't know i really don't understand how that happens like a lot of my ancestors fucking sucked like i don't know like i like i i don't know how to sort of like i i don't know i i i have this sort of i don't know i i i have this sort of weird sense of the kind of politics at work here which is like there there's a lot of kinds of politics that i think can work and for example in indigenous contexts that are very very powerful that don't really work in the asian american context where like like our ancestors like if you're chinese right your ancestors did some fucked up shit like your ancestors did a lot of genocides like you you like you know and i i think this is something that's actually at the core of of the kind of like right-wing chinese nationalism which is that like right-wing chinese nationalism is basically about the anger that china was like ceased to be able to be an empire

because like if you look at the sort of colonization process right like the the the the qing are this very very expansionist like like sort of militarist imperial state right like they're they're they're like they they're like, they, they conquered, like, they, they, they, they, if they fight a bunch of wars around Tibet, they conquer Xinjiang and they do a genocide there, like immediately they're pushing South, they're pushing, like they're, they're basically pushing like in every direction they could possibly push. And then they kind of like, you know, they, they, they, they, they hit

like a pretty impressive territorial boundaries and then their ability to do imperialism gets kind of halted because suddenly there's other imperial powers like in the region and you know it's the sort of end of this is like they they they lose all these wars and you have the start of like this you have the start of the century of humiliation and all of the sort of stuff that happens there but it's like like the actual thing that they're like the actual thing that the century of humiliation people are humiliated about – well, I mean the fact that it's called the century of humiliation and not like – I don't know – I think it's like 1840 to 1940. There's this sort of nationalist term around understanding this period in which China is undergoing like – opium but basically a period from the opium wars until you know sort of through the various japanese conquests and then sort of ending essentially with the revolution but yeah i don't know like i think it's interesting that it's

understood in the in terms of national humiliation in terms of sort of like the loss of this ability to do like i mean to do imperialism and instead of in sort of terms of like the just unfathomable human suffering that went on and i i i think this all of this sort of comes back to this weird kind of intensification of of nationalism kind of among everyone in in the last like especially since 2020 you know i mean there's been there's been in like a kind of among everyone in in the last like especially since 2020 you know i mean there's been there's been in like a kind of like explicit like chinese nationalist turn some parts of left but i think i think it's really kind of like hit everyone in ways that like hasn't really been examined there's been this kind of difficulty in in having a kind of like theoretical and cultural language to speak about asian-american-ness partially because well because

like the you know i've talked about this before right but like the the the the term asian-american was created by like worldists, right? Many of them are Maoists. Some of them are certain Marxist-Leninists. But that whole language just died. I mean you can still find Baba Vankian or whatever. But the sort of language is like understanding yourself as part of the third world and as like a like as as like a liberal national liberation movement like that's over national liberation is basically dead as a politics like any anyone who tried it

after a certain point like just got called secessionists and now just get murdered horribly um and like you know and there's obviously also the sort of like china vietnam cambodia fighting each other thing that that has this massive impact on that kind of politics. And it gets replaced with this kind of politics that's based – it gets sort of replaced by like the Asian civil rights movement stuff. But like there's no – the thing is the Asian civil rights movement doesn't have politics. Like its politics are completely incoherent. the agency of resume is it doesn't have politics like its politics are completely incoherent like you have like you literally have these marches where you have like like old school like kmt death squad guys like marching next to maoists and it's like why because it's supposed to be a

sort of like pan-ideological thing and over time like all the all the ideologies are supposed to compose it die and but that meant that like there's there's no like there's no actual language to sort of talk about the experience because the the two sets of vocabulary is that like or like wait like frames of understanding the struggle are just have both kind of like either basically collapsed or been discredited and and i think that leaves this hole and people are trying to fill the hole by like adopting other people's politics but like it doesn't work for us i don't think like i i don't know like i like i i think people will disagree with me about the potential of of sort of ancestor politics and a politics of elders but like i don't think it

does that much for us yeah i think the last thing that that i do want to say is you know if we've reached the limits of a lot of the politics that we've been seeing here um what what what kinds of politics and what kind you know also sort of what kind of media do you do you see as stuff that we can use to go beyond this because i think there is a lot of like like there are a lot of like people creating good like queer stuff that are not like yeah actually i think i mentioned this to you um i recently watched this film called return to soul um it's by a director called davy choo and it's about a french korean adoptee so she was adopted from korea as a baby i mean yeah as a baby by French parents and grew up in France. And

the film is like kind of a journey of her going back to Korea and meeting her birth family. But it's like, it's not, it doesn't fall into the family and of even like this idea that um i guess what the sort of like wayward queer stray asian child child needs in order to heal from trauma. She doesn't really have reconciliations with either family, either her French family that she comes from. They're very much sidelined in this film. They just don't play that big of a role and then she and then when she goes to korea you know she has these very like awkward encounters meeting her birth family because they're like immediately like oh you know we're so sorry we gave you away now you're back you could come live with us and she's just like hold on like i don't even know if i consider you my family. And so it seemed to me to really depart from this script

that we've become so accustomed to in Asian diasporic film in a really interesting way, I thought. And it's also a lot about music. It's a very moody, music-driven film. It doesn't feel that identitarian. Yeah, I would recommend everyone to watch it

everything I've read all at once is we have now told the best version of that story and I think we can find you know I would just like this is a really broad recommendation but like go watch this is the most film nerd I'm ever

going to get that doesn't involve I why am i suddenly blanking on the name of the thing sorry daniel uh the most film nerd i'm ever gonna get that doesn't involve la commune de paris 1871 is go watch one car why like they're they're i don't know i i think i think there is something to be gained by looking at you know i mean they mean, like looking at Hong Kong cinema, looking at, I don't know, like good, good. Americans have finally realized that Korean cinema is really good, which is wonderful. I'm glad I'm glad we're, you know, getting to the place where people realize that it's that like there's a lot of great stuff going on there but we know it is possible to for asians to tell different stories because all across the world they already are right like we we are already telling stories that are different and more interesting than this and i think well then and i'm not specifically

saying like then everything everywhere all at once but then that then the specific structure that that these that the asian american movies fall into and yeah people should go discover them because they're great and yeah we can find new and better kinds of queer joy and yeah yeah tiffany thank you so much for joining us and being i don't know why i'm saying us as if there's more than me here but yeah thank you thank you for being on the show yeah anytime thank you for having me on and it's been a really stimulating conversation yeah yeah this this has been it could happen here you can find us at happened here pod on twitter and instagram you can find cool zone media at cool zone media I hope it's cool zone media I'm actually not 100% sure if that's,

I should know this by now. I simply have not learned. Yeah, go into the world, be gay, do crime. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez

was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.