B4 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 2022revive her kick-ass “Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon” martial skills, the trope of kung fu
fighting in this movie (including a silly nod to
“Kung Fu Panda’s” Wuxi fingerhold) carries its
own internal critique. In the face of chaos and
utter nihilism, the final epiphany in the film,
and for Evelyn, proposes that aggression is not
the answer to the assault of social forces,
whether they come in the guise of the Internal
Revenue Service or intergalactic persecutors.
Evelyn is able to pull Joy back from the
brink not by killing all who stand in her way
but by reminding herself and her daughter of
what it means to stand up for yourself without
reciprocal violence (I answer your hate with
my hate). This is a rather extraordinary claim:
In our ever-fracturing and divided world,
where antagonism breeds even more tren-
chant hostility, here is this movie about Asian
American pessimism telling us that to give in
to hate and vengeance is to give in to the
seduction of believing that nothing matters.
At the same time, the film is not touting
some facile hope, either. Near the end, in an
alternative universe, we see the mother and
daughter as two sentient rocks telepathically
speaking to one another. After the Joy-rock
flings herself off a cliff, the Evelyn-rock fol-
lows, an act of self-erasure and a testament to
fidelity. But in the “alpha” world of the first
Evelyn, the mother manages to pull back the
daughter from the edge of self-destruction,
not by some grand declaration but by showing
her what it means to possess precious tendrils
of familial and loving connections in a world
of inevitable grievances and disappointments.
Some viewers will undoubtedly want Eve-
lyn to go through a greater conversion, to
transform from tiger mother to cool American
mom. But she does not. What she learns
instead is to be able to say to her daughter, Yes,
the world can be crushing, and I, too, have been
judgmental of you, but I have spoken someitself. And the figure who most clearly embod-
ies this persistent pessimism is Evelyn’s angry
teenage daughter, ironically named Joy
(Stephanie Hsu). In the plot, Joy possesses and
is possessed by a furious soul named Jobu
Tupaki, a universe-hopping villain who wants
to track down and destroy Evelyn. Jobu
Tupaki embodies the alien and the alienated.
In one scene Jobu-as-Joy coyly asks a police
officer trying to corral her, “Am I not supposed
to be here, or is it that I cannot be here?” One
cannot help but hear the question as a
reverberating statement about Asian exclu-
sion.
Joy/Joba brings with her the “everything
bagel,” a consuming black ring and hole that
that threatens to suck up everything and
everyone into its void. It sums up the key
insight of Asian-pessimism: that “nothing
matters” in the face of pain and exclusion. The
everything bagel is piled not with American
riches and plenitude but with all the negativi-
ties of what it means to be, in Ronald Takaki’s
phrase, a “perpetual stranger” in the world
and to your own family.
Evelyn finds that to rescue her daughter
and pull the world she knows back from the
abyss, she has to battle her own disappoint-
ments. (In this, I hear Maxine Hong Kingston’s
voice in “The Woman Warrior” when the
young narrator tells us, after chapters of
mythopoetic meditations on ancient Chinese
legends, “My American life has been such a
disappointment.”) All the emotional clashes in
the film become skirmishes in which Evelyn
has to access her kung-fu-multiverse self to
fight off, literally, the law and the outlaws of all
the universes hunting her down.
Yet the conclusion of “Everything Every-
where” suggests that the solution to Asian-
pessimism is neither reactive violence nor
exactly hope, but something in between. De-
spite the delicious pleasure of watching Yeohwoman put all the family possessions — all of
them — up for auction. Craig spent $100,000
for a silver calendar of the Cuban missile
crisis, a gift from Jacqueline Kennedy. But the
real stunner was the chairs — the chairs
McNamara used in Cabinet meetings, a gift
from Kennedy and Johnson. They were
bought by a gallery owner and then donated
to a Vietnamese artist named Danh Vo. Danh
“dismantled the chairs, pulling out the horse-
hair-and-cotton stuffing.” The various disag-
gregated pieces of chair were mounted and
displayed. “Seeing Danh’s work had freed me
from the burden of the chairs,” Craig writes.
And so a final metaphor: We can tear apart the
past, study its entrails, gain a certain under-
standing of it, but we can’t put it back in
proper order. The atrocity can’t be undone.ca, saved his life. He married, had three
children and bought a walnut farm in North-
ern California. “My dirty hands became more
heavily calloused and my work boots quickly
wore out,” he writes. “I was more exhausted
than I had ever been and I was happy.” But
there was a catch: His father provided the
money to buy the farm; they became business
partners. And Robert McNamara was an
exacting partner. He called Craig most morn-
ings at 4:45 but was interested in only one
metric: how many walnuts were being har-
vested. The walnut body count. It was Viet-
nam all over again. There was no escape.
Robert McNamara rarely visited his son’s
farm. He made no effort to know his grand-
children. Indeed, after Craig’s mother’s death
from cancer in 1981, his father became even
more distant and launched a vigorous social
life with a series of women. He eventually
remarried someone whom Craig will not even
name. When Robert McNamara died, thiscan’t remember his reaction. He wanted to ask
his sisters, “How are we going to live, knowing
what our dad has done?,” but he never did. The
McNamaras were a Potemkin village of family
bliss. His wife called the family attitude the
“chipper gene.” There were elaborate ski and
hiking and pack trips. Both Craig and his mom
rubbed the old man’s sore back while he drove.
His mother was a better athlete and lost to his
father on purpose when playing tennis; after
she died, Craig took over — and lost on
purpose to his father. Apart from the years
Craig spent in South America, the relation-
ship never changed. They continued to go on
ski trips together. “We had perfected the
paradox of our relationship,” Craig writes.
“Whenever we spoke and I asked him about
Vietnam, he always deflected. There was
never a big confrontation between us.”
The most lyrical passages in “Because Our
Fathers Lied” are about farming. The love of
the soil, which Craig learned in South Ameri-lousy student. He suffered from dyslexia. He
suffered from ulcers (as his mother did). A
liberal friend decided to have a “teach-in”
about the war in Vietnam. Craig wanted to
support his father’s position. He called and
asked his dad for information and leaflets.
“Sure, Craigie. I’ll have my secretary get on it.”
An uneasy silence ensued. “I remember his
voice fading off.... I wonder what he was
thinking during that silence. Was he envision-
ing his most recent trip to Saigon, punctuated
by talk of body counts and defoliating napalm
bombings? Was he wondering how to explain
it all to his only son? Or was he holding his
breath, waiting for the moment to pass?” Of
course, no information or leaflets ever ar-
rived.
Well before this memoir was written, Rob-
ert McNamara emerged as perhaps the most
tortured figure of the Vietnam era. He had
come to the Kennedy administration from the
Ford Motor Company. He was notoriously
brilliant and surrounded himself with a team
of “Whiz Kids” at the Defense Department. He
stayed on as Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of
defense after John F. Kennedy was assassinat-
ed. He supervised the transformation of the
Vietnam conflict from a small holding action
against a communist rebellion into a full-scale
war. When Richard Nixon was elected presi-
dent in 1968, McNamara left government and
became president of the World Bank. Years
later, he allowed himself to be interviewed at
length for Errol Morris’s extraordinary docu-
mentary “The Fog of War.” He admitted he was
wrong. He was, clearly, tortured by his role in
that unthinkable American massacre. He
suffered from depression by then.
Morris told Craig that he considered his
father “a decent and magnificent man, a
person he deeply respected and learned a lot
from. He liked him.... [And] he said that he
considered Dad a war criminal.”
There is an awkward, halting quality to
Craig McNamara’s prose, which gives it credi-
bility and power. Craig seemed to live much of
his life in a state of shock. Terrible things
happened to him, and, over and over again, heMCNAMARA FROM B1A son in shock over hisfather’s role in VietnamBECAUSE OUR
FATHERS LIED
A Memoir of
Truth and
Family, From
Vietnam to
Today
By Craig
McNamara
Little, Brown.
269 pp. $29WALLY MCNAMEE/THE WASHINGTON POSTR obert McNamara,
left, pictured in
1968, served as
secretary of defense
in the Kennedy and
Johnson
administrations
and had a
significant hand in
the escalation of the
Vietnam War.His son, Craig
McNamara, writes,
“Whenever we
spoke and I asked
him about Vietnam,
he always
deflected.”
Joe Klein is the author of seven books, including
“Primary Colors” and, most recently, “Charlie
Mike.”MALIKA LEWIStruths to you as well, as only mothers can. And
for all the pains and heartbreaks of this world,
“I choose to be with you.” What she learns is
that the angry soul inside her daughter, a
demon who chased her all over the film’s many
worlds, was driven by both murderous rage
and an equally desperate desire for reconnec-
tion. The hunt is also the search, and the hurt
is also the love.
“Everything Everywhere” is about trying to
figure out a response to an onslaught of hate,
vengeance, resentment and persecution. It
takes a kind of plasticity: to recognize that
humanity is at once goofy and transcendent,
that there can be beauty in a dysfunctional
world, that clumsy hot-dog-fingered people
can play an exquisite “Clair de Lune” on the
piano with their toes. There’s a kind of hot-dog
philosophy here, an insistence on quirkiness
as a stay against the claustrophobia of pessi-
mism. Evelyn begins the film confined by
code-switching: balancing her commitments
to a teenage daughter she can’t understand, a
husband asking for a divorce just so he can get
a little attention, a struggling business and a
traditional Chinese father whom she is always
placating. By the end she embraces these
manifold states of being, which echo and
intensify what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double
consciousness,” as a strategy for moving for-
ward. All the zany, distasteful, irreverent and
at times scatological excursions dramatize the
multiplicity and fragility of Evelyn’s daily life.
Being able to parse and command all these
worlds and modes seems a basic requirement
for Asian American survival. It is both despite
and because all of this that we are able to say to
our loved ones and to our country: I still prefer
to be here with you.
Twitter: @anneachengAnne Anlin Cheng is a cultural theorist and
professor of English at Princeton University.T
o be an immigrant is to live in a
fractured multiverse, one riven with
geographic, temporal and psychical dis-
sonances.
This is the central conceit of the new film
“Everything Everywhere All at Once,” written
and directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Schein-
ert, professionally known as the Daniels.
Many have discussed the conundrums of its
“multiverse” setup, or the more recognizable
family drama (the bittersweet mother-daugh-
ter relationship, the inevitable alienation be-
tween husband and wife), or the bizarre
imagination at work (such as an alternative
universe where humans have thick, floppy hot
dogs for fingers). Yet few have addressed just
what a specifically and deeply Asian American
film this is — let alone why it is useful to think
about Asian Americanness through these
lenses.
This raucous romp of a movie offers a
surprisingly profound meditation on what we
might, at a time when our nation is facing
various forms of racial reckoning, call Asian-
pessimism. Here, I’m playing off the school of
thought known as Afro-pessimism, which
holds that Black lives are endlessly inflected
and informed by anti-Black animosity and
experiences of pain and loss. These questions
play out differently for Asian Americans, of
course, but it’s important that we think
through them, given the explicit and often
virulent anti-Asian hate and violence in the
last few years.
Asian American concerns operate as more
than an ethnic detail in “Everything Every-
where”; they are the engines for the wild
energies in the film. The Daniels draw from a
long history of Asians in America and notable
Asian American issues, from the Wang fam-
ily’s laundromat (recalling the long, exclusion-
ary history of Chinese immigrant labor) to the
Western romance with kung fu mysticism to
the “model minority” myth to the figure of the
tiger mother. The film invokes, individualizes,
multiplies, takes apart and then wackily reas-
sembles these enduring tropes. The protago-
nist, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), pushes
back with a vengeance against the narrative
paucity of the same old stories we tell about
Asian American lives. Evelyn gets cast and
recast, insisting on the connections among
multiple personas: the engrossed business-
woman, the kung fu master, the exhausted
wife, the chanteuse, the tiger mom, the filial-
and-failed daughter, the gifted mind-traveler
and more. As a result, instead of locking down
its subjects, as stereotypes are wont to do, the
film uses its multiversal divagations to imag-
ine alternative lives and versions of them. It’s
as if the wild ride is meant to shake us free
from habits of thought, to nudge us to, in the
scholar Kandice Chuh’s phrase, “imagine oth-
erwise.”
It’s not only that the multiverse acts as a
metaphor for the immigrant Asian American
experience, or a convenient parable for the
dislocations and personality splits suffered by
hyphenated (that is, “Asian-American”) citi-
zens. It also becomes a rather heady vehicle for
confronting and negotiating Asian-pessi-
mism. And let’s face it, Asian Americans have a
lot to feel pessimistic about: 300-plus years of
virulent yet largely unacknowledged discrimi-
nation and marginalization that have culmi-
nated today in explicit acts of murderous
violence. Asian Americans have been saying
for decades, to the few who would listen, Hey,
we’ve always faced damaging racism even as
we are constantly accused of being “White-ad-
jacent.”
In this film, Evelyn experiences an interga-
lactic version of what it means to have a target
on your back, as she is pursued not only by
social forces but also by Asian-pessimism‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ is a deeply Asian American filmALLYSON RIGGS/A24/ASSOCIATED PRESSIts zaniness
encourages us
to reflect on
nihilism and
belonging,
explains
cultural theorist
Anne Anlin
ChengFrom left,
Stephanie Hsu,
Michelle Yeoh and
Ke Huy Quan in a
scene from
“Everything
Everywhere All at
Once.” The movie
explores the many
sides of Yeoh’s
character, Evelyn —
as well as multiple
Asian American
tropes — by sending
her on a journey
through the
multiverse.