[And in [Everything Everywhere All At Once], your daughter, who is played by Stephanie Hsu, is looking for a mother that she can connect with in every universe, and your character, Evelyn, doesn’t really want to repeat the alienation she felt from her parents growing up, but even so, she’s doing that. There’s the scene where your daughter is leaving the laundromat, and you want to give her one piece of parting advice. Can you describe to us what you were saying to her and ultimately how she interpreted it?]
YEOH: You know, I think a lot of immigrant parents, first-generation, when they come here, they have to make a conscious choice for the next generation. It’s like, do we hold on very firmly to all our cultural- our language and everything, and we stick to a group of immigrants as well? Or do we make them, or help them, blend in, so that they will be able to fit in better?
So I think it’s a very very hard choice, and I think it’s not just the first-generation immigrants. I think parents, even today, from different cultures face the same thing. You know, if we want them to fit in better, maybe they should just speak English. But then it’s a shame if they don’t speak their own language, which is what you find with Joy in Everything Everywhere All At Once, it’s like she has morphed into a true American—ABC, American Born Chinese—in that sense, so she doesn’t really speak the language.
And the worst thing is we find that a lot of Asian parents, especially the older generation, they don’t really give- they are more critical in the sense that the feeling is, if I tell you you are great in everything, then you will walk away thinking you don’t need to learn any more, because I’m already so great. So they always say, like in this scene that you’re describing, she wants to talk to her daughter. She wants her to understand that she accepts the fact that she is gay, she has a white girlfriend. But it’s impossible to communicate that to her father from a previous generation, because in his eyes, Evelyn would have been a total failure—as she is a failure as a daughter, now she is a failure as a mother, because she can’t even teach her daughter to be proper.
So there is so much confusion and emotional contradiction that Evelyn is facing, the first words that come out from her mouth is like, “You are getting fat.” It’s another criticism, you know, but it’s a very common thing that we say to our children. Instead of, “Oh, you’re looking so beautiful today,” they’ll say, “Oh, I think you need a haircut.” Or, you know, “Maybe you need to go to the gym, you need to drop some pounds.” But the first thing they always give them is food, because that is the way they show how much they love them, how much they care for them. The best food is always reserved for them.
So what it shows here very clearly is how the misunderstandings occur. And the worse they don’t know how to communicate, that chasm gets bigger and bigger, until to the point where everything that comes out from the mouth seems to be hurtful. It’s like a dig. It’s almost like Joy feels, “I’m hurting so much. When I say things to you, I want you to feel that hurt, so I’m going to reply with a very hurtful answer.” And that, for her, is one of the easiest solutions, which is not a solution at all.
Michelle Yeoh on NPR’s Fresh Air (April 25, 2022)
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