I Saw “Everything Everywhere All At Once” With My Immigrant Mom

My mother and I are undergoing a kind of transformation in how we talk about our pain. The older she gets, the more she tells me — with great, agonizing detail — about what hurts her, how it hurts her, and what kind of vengeance she plans to inflict upon her enemies. I haven’t ever known my mother as intimately as I do now, though not for a lack of trying; it just seemed like we were ships in the night for most of my 20s, and only in my 30s does she really make sense to me. She often tells me that she’s not good with words, that she can’t appropriately explain herself, especially in English. But I don’t think our barriers were ever about language; they always seemed to be more about intent. I always viewed my mom as someone who was fighting with me, not someone who was fighting for me.

We still struggle to connect on the definition of trauma. I can see, very clearly, the injuries passed on from my grandparents to my mother, and now to me. I see how we’re inadvertently cultivating it in my niece, who is still the most well adjusted of all of us, though that’s a low bar to clear.

“I wouldn’t say I have any trauma,” my mom told me after she watched the movie. “I define trauma [as] where you are homeless, you have nothing to eat, there are tragedies in the family, kids going on drugs. Those things are trauma. Routine life has its ups and downs.” She liked Everything Everywhere plenty; it made her cry almost as much as it made me cry. But she metabolized the movie in a completely different way. For her, it was about queerness, and not much else. “I liked that she finally accepted the relationship,” she said about Evelyn. “The mother was, like we all are, old-fashioned. We have a hard time to reconcile with those situations.”

Was there anything else? I asked her. Was there any other message in the movie? Anything about inheriting pain from our mothers or how trauma has to be healed before we can move forward with the people in our lives? “There was a lot of things going on at the same time,” my mom said. “They were just shoving everything under the rug and carrying on. I think that was the only issue. Was there any other issue?”

Once again, we were not communicating that well. I wanted her to see something important — that she had been owed better treatment from the adults in her life when she was young, and that maybe, in turn, she owed me something better too. The movie was immediately relatable to me, but she couldn’t see herself in it at all, which astonished me. To her, it was pure fiction.

I asked my mother if she thought I had any intergenerational trauma, if there was anything I might have inherited. She frowned gently and shook her head — I was born in Canada, and brought up there, so what kind of difficulty could I be talking about? I prodded her: Maybe the grand theme of the movie was how our immigrant mothers ignored our first-generation struggles. She huffed. “Why couldn’t you send me to some plain simple movie where I didn’t have to think about it?”

She started to cry, which I took some perverse pleasure in. We talked about my recent separation, about the deaths of my grandparents, about how different my niece is now from when she was just a baby. We talked about everything that hurts us, without calling it trauma, without suggesting it could be inherited, without recognizing that what hurts me hurts her, and vice versa, because our veins are fused. Her heart still pumps blood for me, even at my big, old age.

But my mom also recognized the need to be more accommodating with her children, a little less reactive. “I would say, before you conclude to anything, you should find out what are the reasons, what is the background of that situation, before you get woo-woo,” she said, acknowledging the ways she could have gotten to know me better. I tried to ask another question, but she broke off to yell at my dad, who was convinced he would be a better interview. “Yeah,” she called back. “You’re Mister Perfect.”

Daughters are fixated on their mothers for good reason. They’re oracles for us, a peek into the future but also a vision of the past. For the children of immigrants, that connection is even more electric. When our parents move to a new country, we lose grip on our histories; our mothers are the only blueprint we have left. No wonder we’re so desperate for them to understand us, and to finally, eventually, one day, apologize.

In Everything Everywhere, Evelyn finally recognizes the harm she’s done to Joy by not seeing her for who she is, and she gives an imperfect but comprehensive speech, taking accountability for it all. It’s wish fulfillment for Asian daughters everywhere — imagine your mom ever apologizing for anything, ever. I will probably never get that kind of emotional reckoning; the only apology I’ve received from my mom was a bowl of cut-up watermelon and a suggestion that maybe we go to the mall later.

I have spent and will likely continue to spend my entire life trying to get my mother to understand me, to recognize what hurts and why it hurts, to be witness to what I need and to respond to it. She will fail, to no fault of her own. But isn’t her effort what matters? Maybe it’s enough that she said, Sure, I’ll see this exhausting movie for you. Maybe it’s enough that she’ll even talk to me about complicated experiences at all. An inflection point is perhaps all I ever needed.