‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ and the search for motherly acceptance

Commentary

Editor’s note: This essay contains spoilers for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

Oscars favorite “Everything Everywhere All at Once” opens with a mirror reflecting a Chinese American family of three. 

When I watched the film with my Chinese immigrant mother, I saw my own family staring back. The 139-minute movie, which examines the communication divide between a mother and daughter across the multiverse, is nominated for 11 Academy Awards this weekend, including for best picture.

If Michelle Yeoh wins, she would become the first Asian to take home the Academy’s prize for best actress in a leading role. “Everything Everywhere” already made history at the Feb. 26 Screen Actors Guild awards when Yeoh became the ceremony’s first Asian best actress in a leading film role and co-star Ke Huy Quan its first Asian best male actor in a supporting role.

“Everything Everywhere” follows Evelyn (Yeoh) and her husband Waymond Wang (Quan), who are Chinese immigrants and small business owners whose family’s California laundromat is being audited by IRS agent Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). Meanwhile, Evelyn’s daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) asks her mom to acknowledge her girlfriend (Tallie Medel) at her grandfather’s (James Hong) birthday party. Across different timelines and universes, Joy desperately wants her mother to validate her experiences and accept her. 

I saw a version of my mother and myself in Evelyn and Joy.

Like Evelyn and Waymond, my parents are small business owners and immigrants; they ran Chinese restaurants while the Wang family owned a West Coast laundromat. Growing up, I also watched my mother sort through receipts, juggling a business with child and parent care. 

I saw my mother in Evelyn when she stopped Joy from driving away. “I have something to say to you,” Evelyn said. “You have to try and eat healthier. You are getting fat.” It’s a scene seemingly ripped from my own life: My mother calling me fat then demanding I eat all the food she spent all day cooking. 

Like Evelyn, my mother is a superhero — to me, at least — sacrificing the life she knew to start over in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. It’s a life in which she has to ask her daughter to play translator. Where she could only find work in labor intensive food service or cleaning jobs. Where she pushed her children to do and be better, even if it broke them. I wonder if my mom’s happy in this universe, cooking and doing taxes, when she could have lived an entirely different and easier life back in China. Would there have been less of a barrier between us, if another version of me even existed in that alternate universe?  

When asked what “Everything Everywhere” is about, my mother said in Cantonese: “A girl and her mother have a disagreement. They don’t understand each other. Like us, I grew up with Chinese culture. You grew up with American culture. There’s a lot of difference. If we both continue in our own ways, we can’t solve the problem. Do you understand?”

She switches back to English for my benefit, occasionally mixing up a word or pronoun: “We want to talk something common, but we don’t. We have difficult time because both living is different. Our thought is different. We think this way is better, but you think other way is better. So we need to learn things American style and you need to learn thing Chinese style and so we have a little thing close.”

Like the film’s antihero Jobu Tupaki, the villainous alter ego to Evelyn’s daughter Joy, I wanted to bridge our gap: I wanted my mother to understand me. Craving connection, I made my mother sit through an exhaustingly long movie (she asked if it was over yet multiple times) she didn’t like (it had too much fighting) — and twice at that; once in English and another with Chinese subtitles. Evelyn and Joy were able to find common ground after experiencing all the world’s universes simultaneously. I wanted that closeness to happen to us, too.

I wanted my mom to tell me that out of everything, everywhere, that my mom would choose me over and over again. That she, like Evelyn, would choose this universe in America. That she didn’t regret her enormous, unpayable sacrifices of immigrating to another country where she fought and struggled so hard to learn the language. 

That I would learn more about her traumas and that she would learn more about mine. 

I wanted her to tell me, “I love you.” But those exact words don’t come all at once. 

For my mom and me, “Everything Everywhere” ignited a conversation about kindness, culture and the meaning of life. We don’t talk about intergenerational trauma, pain or depression. I cried. She didn’t.  

“If we didn’t have you, we might have had another kid and we might have grown with them,” my mom told me in English. “More important is that the person is nice. We’re so lucky to have you and Kevin [my brother and her son]. So you are a gift.” 

She paused to look up the English translation for “kind,” the word Evelyn’s husband Waymond used to try to stop the fighting. “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind,” he said. “Please be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on.” 

“You and Kevin have this kindness,” my mom told me. “Not everyone has kindness. You both have kindness.” 

My mom went back to transforming pork and chive filling and dough circles into intricately pleated dumplings and asked what I wanted to eat. It’s her way of saying “I love you.”

We have a lifetime to talk. We have Google Translate.