‘Us’ And The Horror of Assimilation

Major spoilers for the film ‘Us’ follow

Poblador.

That was my mother’s maiden name, the name of our family’s Filipino heritage. She wasn’t squeamish about talking about her home country. In private, mom would gladly answer questions about her childhood and how she was raised. She was the eighth child out of what would later be ten. Her father died when she was very young. They couldn’t afford toys so they played with paper dolls. One of her favorite foods was cooked slugs, a delicacy in the Philippines if you know how to make ‘em right.

It’s all so vivid in my head. And yet, if you ever met her in person, you’d swear she was always a white American. Me, my two sisters, and my mother are white passing — at least, depending on arbitrary factors like lighting, sun and tan. But even without that, just talking to her, you’d swear my mother was your average conservative, white suburban mom all her life. Her well-off stature, her frivolous spending, her manners towards service workers, the ways she’d dissect politics and race in America. She had completely assimilated. And despite her openness and comfort with her origins, by and large she raised her children to be white. And I always thought of myself as white until 2016, where the cold hard truths of who I was and how I was treated slammed themselves in my face.

This was the contradiction that always stuck in my head. How did my mother, an immigrant who lived in relative squalor, come to not only harbor a disdain for those poorer and less fortunate than her, but also vote for a candidate like Donald Trump and demonize immigrants like her and her family. She’d often tell me that she immigrated “the right way” while “the Mexicans” and other assorted minorities didn’t. This gave me a tactile reasoning, but not the psychological explanation I wanted. What changed in my mother? What force could I point to beyond the vague excuses of Fox News and Catholicism?

And then I saw Lupita Nyong’o.

Jordan Peele’s second feature Us follows an upper-middle class family as they’re terrorized by sadistic doppelgangers of themselves. As it’s revealed in the film’s utterly bonkers third act, the doubles turn out to be clones called the Tethered that were left behind in an underground network of tunnels after a government experiment gone awry. Furthermore, Nyong’o’s Adelaide — the one we’ve been following throughout the whole movie — is revealed to have been one of the Tethered all along, leaving her “original” self behind to rot underground and enjoy a life of privilege on the surface.

In other words, she assimilated, and became an American.

The Tethered themselves tell the Wilsons “We’re Americans,” making the central metaphor as blunt as possible. But whether director Jordan Peele intended this or not, his story is not just one of America, but how America’s history, its systems, its government, corrupts the denizens of even other nations, underground or otherwise.

Whatever kind of person my mother used to be back in the Philippines, she left her behind, just as Shadow Adelaide left the real Adelaide behind. When Adelaide starts murdering the other Tethered with reckless abandon, we aren’t seeing a mother doing everything necessary to protect her family. We’re seeing a woman with a deep, burning hatred for herself, who she used to be. How dare these people come back to ruin this life I built for myself. How dare they come to this place the wrong way, instead of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps like I did. They should want what I have. They should want to be like me. They could have all of this if they just behaved.

It has been said by much smarter writers than I that Us (and by extension Jordan Peele’s previous feature Get Out) represents what black thinkers dubbed the “double consciousness” of the black psyche: “What we think white people think of us, and what we think of ourselves.” I’m not gonna co-opt this to describe my mother’s experience; the hardships of black Americans differ significantly from the experiences of Filipino-Americans. But there is absolutely a fracture that occurs when you’re a non-white American, of any kind. The gaze of white folks just does things to everyone else. It can change you.

My mom just had the luxury of being able to hide in plain sight.