The love story of Always Be My Maybe made my heart melt, but it was the way it showed Asian parents that made me cry.
When Searching, Crazy Rich Asians, and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before came out in the same month last year, I was thrilled. Indeed, “Asian August,” as it came to be nicknamed on the internet was a combination of a breath of fresh air, a sigh of relief, and a loud shout of joy.
After years of either not seeing someone who looked like me and had my experiences represented onscreen, and then only seeing myself presented as a joke, sidekick or fodder for a noble death, I was finally able to see myself as the lead character in the story. And not just one type of story, but a variety — a romantic comedy, a high school drama, an action-filled thriller.
It’s been such a joy to see Asian-American actors, writers and directors both step out into the spotlight and back behind the camera, and to be able to watch movies that — while running over the same well-worn paths of their respective genre — feel new, exciting, and relatable because of the Asian-American faces that occupy their lead roles.
So when I heard that Ali Wong, whose two stand-up specials on Netflix rank among my favorites, was going to make a rom com with Randall Park, who is one of my favorite parts of Fresh of the Boat, and that it was going to be the Asian-American When Harry Met Sally, my all-time favorite rom com, I already knew I was going to like it. In fact, I fully expected to cherish it, love it and want to watch it over and over again.
And Always Be My Maybe absolutely fulfilled those expectations.
But one thing I wasn’t prepared for was how much it was going to make me cry when it came to the Asian parents and their depiction throughout the movie.
Though having fulfilling, fully realized Asian-American lead roles are few and far between, the paucity of nuanced Asian parents to those roles is even worse.
Asian parents — if they’re ever a part of their onscreen children’s lives at all — have often been depicted as either distant and cold, or demanding and unyielding (or some combination of those traits). They have no internal life, no or very little nuance in their performance — they are characters rather than fully realized individuals.
They often play a directly antagonistic role in their children’s lives, with the tension between the values of their home country and their children’s more American values causing them to come into direct conflict and supplying near-constant tension.
And of course, that tension is the experience of many Asian immigrant parents and their Asian-American children, no matter how well they might get along overall. My mother is one of my favorite people, but I also remember numerous times in my childhood when she would start off one of her lectures or scoldings with, “In the Philippines…” To which I would ultimately reply (in various snarky tones, especially as I got older) with, “This isn’t the Philippines!”
There are absolutely Asian-Americans who have parents with whom they don’t have good relationships, or whose parents pushed them to the near point of breaking, or remained detached and distant from childhood and through adulthood. I’m not here to argue that those Asian parents don’t exist, or that those experiences aren’t valid and don’t need to be told — they absolutely do.
However, what does worry me is having only those stories told. Applying a single story of parenthood to over a billion people, countless ethnicities and a myriad of countries, is damaging representation and paints Asians and Asian-Americans as some kind of monolith, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
Which is why it was such a relief and emotional experience for me to watch James Saito’s Harry Kim — and, to a lesser but still emotionally impactful sense, Mr. and Mrs. Tran — and the way in which they interacted with their children.
The cold and uninvolved Asian parenting — especially from Asian fathers — we often hear about, read about and see depicted is absolutely a real and relatable experience, but not anything I ever could personally relate to myself. While I’d never go so far as to call my Tatay (dad in Tagalog) indulgent, he was a lenient and easygoing parent who always supported me and whatever weird interests I might have.
(An aside to illustrate this: When I was a small child, I always wanted to climb trees, except that we lived in an apartment complex without any good climbing trees. So my Tatay came up with a game that we’d play everyday he came home from work — I’d shout, “TREE!” and he would freeze in place with his arms outstretched and legs akimbo and I would climb up him as if he were a tree.
My Tatay is a 5’6, wiry man, so I can’t imagine having a four, then five, then six year old climb all over you is an easy task. But he did it, without fail, every time I asked — even when we eventually moved to our own house with its own climbing tree in the backyard).
Though his overall goofiness, propensity for loud laughter, and exceptionally terrible jokes were eyeroll-inducing to me as a teen, all my friends loved him and even then I appreciated the enthusiasm and kindness with which he approached any and everyone who ever came over our house.
This was the man I saw mirrored in Harry Kim — so much so that I turned to husband multiple times while watching Always Be My Maybe and exclaimed, “That’s Tatay!” (He agreed.)
Harry Kim isn’t stern or unyielding; instead, he’s almost always smiling and wholly present for his son, teasing him constantly and gently ribbing him and pushing him in the right direction when he needs it. He gives the unflinching kind of straight talk I’ve grown used to from my own Tatay, but — as with my parents — that straight talk is always given with an undercurrent of kindness and love.
Like Sasha, my parents also had their own business (really, a string of businesses) which required them to dedicate an enormous amount of their time and energy in order to make enough money to support our family of five.
Unlike Sasha, I had two older siblings at home with me, so even if my afternoon snack or dinner was rice and vienna sausage (or rice and sliced mango, if it was in season), I was at least eating it with my older brother and/or sister.
For a long time into my adulthood, I fancied myself as holding no hard feelings about how often my parents were working and how busy they were when I was growing up. It’s not that my parents were wholly absent, and I knew that when it really counted, they’d be there — but the nature of owning your own business means you can’t be there every time you want, or your kid wants you to.
When my toddler goddaughter came to live with my parents, I started to make jokes about how lucky she is that they came to all her award ceremonies, recitals, and events; how involved they are with her hobbies and her academic life.
After about the fifteenth ‘joke’ I made about how envious I was of her close relationship with my Tatay, I came to the grand realization that I wasn’t really joking after all — I really was envious and more than a little resentful.
My feelings aren’t exactly the same or at the same levels of Sasha’s, but it’s there all the same — the hurt and resentment of being left alone, even if intellectually you understand why.
The sacrifices that immigrant parents make for their children isn’t a novel idea to explore in film, and at first it seems that Sasha’s parents will fall into the same true yet well-worn narratives that other stories have told. In fact, when she confronts them at her apartment in New York, I was fully prepared for her parents to become defensive and cold, to tell her that it was all for her and that she was being ungrateful.
Again, that hasn’t been my own experience, as my relationship with my parents in adulthood has only gotten better, closer and more genuine as time has gone on, but that wasn’t what I was used to seeing or reading about.
Instead, Sasha’s parents recognize the pain and sadness of her childhood, and rather than diminishing it or pushing it aside, they validate it, apologize — in their own way — and attempt to make up for it in their own small way by showing her that they’ve gone to her restaurant and paid full price for it.
It’s a small peace offering, one that doesn’t undo the hurt of the past — but it’s a start. And I was glad to see both Sasha and her parents recognize that while neither party can change the past, they can work towards a better present and future.
The parents in Always Be My Maybe aren’t the central focus of the narrative — this is, after all, a rom com — but their presence and their love permeates the story all the same.
Of course, they’re far from the only nuanced representation of Asian parents in pop culture — I’d be remiss to leave out Mr. and Mrs. Kim from the great Canadian comedy, or Dev’s parents (played by Aziz Ansari’s actual parents) in Master of None — but those types of roles in feature films are still too rare.
That Asian parents are complicated, complex individuals with love and empathy in addition to their flaws and foibles shouldn’t feel as revolutionary as it does, but that just speaks to the need for having these types of stories told by members of the community.
So, thank you to Ali Wong and Randall Park, for not only giving us the Asian-American version of When Harry Met Sally, but for giving us Asian parents that make me laugh the way mine do, and make me cry because I finally get to see parents I recognize and relate to on screen.
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