In one heartwarming Crazy Rich Asians scene, Singaporean heartthrob Nicholas Young teaches his visiting Chinese American girlfriend Rachel Chu how to fold a dumpling.
“First you put the baby in the bed,” he says, centering a ball of raw seasoned meat on a circle of flattened dough. “Then you tuck, tuck, tuck.”
“Then,” Rachel says cheekily, “you eat the baby.”
Her joke brings to mind a scene in another film recently heralded for its representation of Asian characters.
In Bao, an 8-minute short film that aired before Pixar’s Incredibles 2 earlier this summer, a Chinese Canadian mother fearful of change devours a steamed bun personified as her son to prevent him from moving out of the family home.
The climax in Bao is shocking — heavy with emotion and nothing like the lighthearted moment at the Crazy Rich Asians dinner table. But minutes after Rachel makes her joke with the Young family, she is confronted by Nick’s mother Eleanor who tells Rachel she will never be enough for her son. In insulting her son’s girlfriend, Eleanor is widening her mouth before she later attempts to swallow her baby whole and keep Nick away from Rachel, a woman who isn’t Eleanor’s “kind of people.” It’s smothering as mothering, and while the parenting philosophy is not unique to Asians, it certainly plays a prominent role in recent stories starring Asian characters.
In Crazy Rich Asians and Bao, no matter how strained their relationship becomes, the bond between these two sons and their mothers is strong — so strong, in fact, that while their fathers are acknowledged, they are absent from these stories.
The same can be said about The Joy Luck Club, the 1993 film that preceded Crazy Rich Asians as one of the last theatrical releases starring an Asian American cast. Although the main characters’ fathers are present, Chinese mothers, and their relationships with their American-born daughters, reign supreme.
What is it about Asian stories that focus so intensely on the relationship between mothers and their children?
Filial piety, the east Asian philosophy of honoring one’s parents has traditionally been described as a son’s relationship to his father. But if pop culture is any reflection of our lived experiences, it’s the relationship with one’s mother that must be revered.
When I first saw Crazy Rich Asians in theaters, I thought of my paternal grandmother. She was born in an unknown village in China’s Heshan county to a poor family who did not give her a name. Known only as “Number Two Daughter,” she was an illiterate domestic worker in a rich family’s home until my paternal grandfather, the favored son of a privileged family, noticed her, fell in love and proposed marriage.
When I asked my father if my grandfather’s family ever objected to his marriage to a poor girl, my father dismissed any suggestion that they ever mistreated my grandmother or judged my grandfather for “marrying down.” Even though my father has no way of knowing how she was first viewed by her in-laws, he says that despite her lack of schooling, my grandmother was so well-regarded for her grace and intelligence that her rich husband’s family did not get in the way of their engagement like Eleanor Young does in Crazy Rich Asians.
Although he is quick to point out my grandfather’s faults, my father only ever describes my grandmother as the pinnacle of class and character. More than four decades after her death, no one in my family has ever said a critical word about our family matriarch.
As much as I love my grandmother, who I never met but am named for, my lack of understanding of her quirks and flaws means she is more of a legend to aspire to than a person I feel like I know.
Despite our reverence of them, mothers –Asian and otherwise– are not perfect. In Bao, the mother literally swallows her son to keep him from leaving her. In Crazy Rich Asians, Eleanor hires a private investigator and unearths a deeply painful secret to keep Rachel from Nick.
Perhaps it’s our mother’s imperfection that draws us close to them. For when mothers err, their mistakes are often depicted as acts of love. For Asians like me, although we may spend our lives chasing the attention of our fathers, who are portrayed in real life and on screen as distant, it’s our mothers, who consume us with their love –sometimes at the sake of our own happiness– who steer our hearts.
