Immigration, Assimilation, and Multi-Generational Trauma: Asian American Experiences in Film
As Western film media ever-expands to feature films coming from more diverse backgrounds and perspectives than it has traditionally, experiences from many different cultures are captured and shared in the stories of these films. In the United States foreign films are more popular than ever before, as shown with Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) winning Best Picture in the Academy Awards, a first for any foreign film.
Critical acclaim aside, films coming into the spotlight from cultures and perspectives that were previously only shown through the white-washed Hollywood machine have allowed for the lives and experiences of underrepresented communities to be shared on the big screen. In particular, films from Asian American authors and perspectives tell stories rooted in the immigrant and Asian American experience, and provide an authentic perspective on the multi-generational obstacles Asian Americans face. As portrayed in the films Gook (Chon, 2017) and Tigertail (Yang, 2021), the cultural, financial, and inter-personal challenges of immigrating to the United States cause multi-generational stresses and trauma, which are reflective of the painful reality of chasing the “American Dream.”
The “American Dream” refers to an enjoyable way of living that can be achieved by anyone in the U.S., especially by working hard to become successful. Looking at the American Dream from a global perspective, America has long been seen as a beacon of opportunity. The overabundance of capitalism masquerading as upward mobility is a powerful lure, but the reality of immigrating to the United States is often overlooked.
Those immigrating to America consistently and continually face incredible adversity from racism and other institutional barriers to success. Asian American immigrants, mired in the “model minority myth” and other damaging stereotypes associated with “successful” assimilation into dominant U.S. culture, have become indirectly associated with the pursuit of the American Dream. The model minority myth, which characterizes and stereotypes Asian Americans as a hardworking and high-achieving monolithic group, parallels itself with the American Dream concept that hard work will lead to success and upward mobility. Of course, both this myth and the idea of the American Dream do not acknowledge the systemic and institutional barriers, particularly racism, which challenge Asian Americans. In reality, the path to success and survival for Asian American immigrant families is much more complicated and rarely overcome without significant sacrifice. The films Tigertail (2021) and Gook (2017) provide a window into this reality, as well as the lasting effects of struggle across generations.
Both Tigertail (2021) and Gook (2017) explore the multi-generational aspects of the Asian American immigrant experience, and the complicated relationships that form between cultural memory, expectations, and opportunity. Tigertail takes place over 4 distinct time periods, following a Taiwanese boy, Pin-jui (played by Lee Hong-chi and Tzi Ma), throughout his life as he navigates love, life, and regret in both Taiwan and New York City. Gook follows two Korean brothers, Eli (Justin Chon) and Daniel (David So), who run their late father’s shoes store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, during the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. Despite coming from different cultural backgrounds of Taiwan and Korea, and taking place on opposite sides of the United States (L.A. and New York City), both films find harmony in their portrayal of the Asian American experience.
Tigertail takes a broader, polished, overarching view of family relationships and the gradual impacts of immigrating to the United States over time, as it takes place over 3/4ths of the protagonist’s life. The film shows the challenges Pin-Jui faces while growing up, moving to America, and eventually raising his children, all in a non-linear format that provides an insightful look into the evolution of each character. This film is particularly useful for analyzing the generational trauma that follows Asian American immigrant families, as we can identify the root causes of issues that are passed through generations. We first see Pin-Jui as a young boy, as he is raised by his grandmother in Huwei, a rural community in Taiwan. In the film, there is a noticeable Western influence on Taiwanese culture, as characters sing songs by Otis Redding, and Pin-Jui admits he learned to dance from American movies. In light of this influence, Pin-Jui dreams of going to America and bringing his mother with him, as she has to work full time in order to survive. As Pin-Jui grows up, he falls in love with a girl he knew as a child, Yuan (Yo-Hsing Fang). They have a brief romance, until Pin-Jui is offered support to go to America, if he agrees to go with his boss’s daughter Zhenzhen (Kunjue Li). After Pin-Jui’s mother injures her hand at her factory job, Pin-Jui chooses to marry Zhenzhen so he can go with her to America, and eventually provide a better life for his mother.
At this point in the film, as we transition to America, we begin to see the stresses of immigrating to the United States impact Pin-Jui and Zhenzhen, as well as the impacts of such stress later in life. Pin-Jui leaves behind his remaining family, his mother, as well as his relationship with Yuan in order to travel to America, which fills him with both guilt and regret.
The film simultaneously shows Pin-Jui when he is older, now divorced from Zhenzhen and living in New York City, and his daughter, Angela (Cristine Ko) is recently engaged. He is quiet, anti-social, and thoroughly disconnected from Angela. Older Pin-Jui is a pale comparison to the lively, motivated young man of the past. He is cold, harsh, and judgemental of Angela’s life decisions, and he struggles to empathize with her problems. In an interview with the Atlantic, Tigertail writer and director Alan Yang explains, “ in the past, a lot of Asian characters have been portrayed as inscrutable and unemotional and sort of unknowable, and I think that contributes to a dehumanization of Asian people,” Yang explained. “People talk about teeming hordes of people in China as just faceless masses, but no, we’re all individuals. We all have incredible life stories; we all have rich pasts” (The Atlantic, 2020).
Yang spends a significant amount of time building out Pin-Jui’s past, and it allows Tigertail to deeply develop its characters over decades of time. The film pieces together the struggles of immigrating to the United States in brief moments; snapshots of life that show the isolation, struggle, and resilience required to survive in a foreign, arguably unfriendly place. Tigertail simultaneously shows how this struggle has shaped Pin-Jui into the man he is today: the isolation and effort he put into working caused his relationship with Zhenzhen to deteriorate, leaving him lonely and antisocial in the present. He holds high expectations for his daughter Angela, which places significant pressure on her as a child and continues to influence her as a young adult.
The interactions between present Pin-Jui and Angela reveal much about their relationship. Angela, like her father, is on a path of prioritizing her job over her family and relationship with her fiance, Eric (Hayden Szeto). She is struggling to keep up with everything, and despite working incredibly hard she still fails to gain her fathers admiration. Angela, as a character, also represents a loss of culture and assimilation into American life for Pin-Jui. In their interactions, Pin-Jui and Angela speak almost entirely in English, while in most other scenes Pin-Jui speaks Mandarin. He resents Angela’s lack of connection to her past and family, despite his own failure to act as the bridge to her heritage. Angela’s character is a perfect example of how the challenges and stresses Pin-Jui suffered ultimately manifested in similar ways for her, leading to a matching pattern of overworking, emotional detachment, and loneliness.
Gook, formulaically opposite to Tigertail, is a gritty, slice-of-life film that takes place over two days, and provides an intimate look into the struggles of everyday life for Korean American brothers Eli and Daniel. The brothers run a struggling shoe store that their late father opened after moving to America, which is in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Slightly outcast, the brothers struggle to keep their father’s dream of success afloat while dealing with racism, violence, and their own conflicting goals.
This film takes place on April 29, 1992, on the verge of the Los Angeles uprising. The L.A. uprising was a series of riots occurring over 5 days in Los Angeles after the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist caught in a high-speed pursuit. The beating was caught on video tape, and following the acquittal outrage and violence swept Los Angeles, sparking already rising tensions between Black and Korean communities (Krebcheck, Bates, 2017). Unemployment, inequality, drug and gang activity were all contributing factors to the growing resentment between Black and Asian American communities in L.A., and the community resentment was further fueled by the killing of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins that same month. Latasha was an African-American girl who was shot by a Korean store owner, who incorrectly assumed she was trying to steal orange juice. Latasha’s death heightened tensions between Koreans and African-Americans, and during the uprising riots many Korean-owned stores and businesses were damaged or targeted (Krebcheck, Bates, 2017).
In Gook, the realities of poverty and racism exist around every corner, and the film’s characters face significant obstacles in their everyday lives. Filmed in black and white, and following its connotative namesake, Gook is a film rooted in hardship. Brothers Eli and Daniel work hard to keep their father’s shoe store afloat despite community ridicule and general lack of business, although they have different goals. Eli stresses over the store, while Daniel has loftier dreams of becoming and R&B singer.
The lives of the primary cast of Gook are closely intertwined, with Eli and Daniel having close connections to liquor store owner Mr. Kim (Sang Chon), 11-year old African American girl Kamilla (Simone Baker), and her older brother Keith (Curtiss Cook Jr.). Mr. Kim, Eli, and Daniel are the only Koreans seen in the film, with Mr. Kim being a first generation immigrant who came to the United States with Eli and Daniel’s father, years ago. Eli and Daniel are second generation Asian Americans who speak, dress, and generally associate themselves with American culture; it is almost as if their connection to Korea died with their father. Mr. Kim serves as a secondary connection, representative of the many Korean small business owners in L.A. during this time period, but he is standoffish, untrusting, and he often harrasses and accuses Kamilla of stealing from his store. Mr. Kim and Eli’s relationship is strained, and the two men frequently get into shouting matches about Kamilla. There is a significant generational disconnect between Eli and Mr. Kim, and the two struggle to empathize with each other. Mr. Kim speaks to Eli in Korean, but Eli primarily responds in English. Eli and Daniel speak English when talking to all the other characters except for Mr. Kim, which casts an antiquated sort of quality on the character’s Korean heritage. In an interview with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), writer and director Justin Chon says, “I’m proud to be Asian American. I’m proud to be Korean American. And I’m proud to be Korean. But you know, our parents come to this country and they expect us to stay in this ’70s and ’80s mindset that is even, in their home countries, archaic. It’s like a time capsule. I feel like now, a lot of parents have to, but for the longest time I didn’t feel like they were following the times. . . But on the flip side, stepping inside the older generation’s shoes, they’re saying no we do understand. We came from really hard times, we came here for you guys. It’s a very cyclical sort of thing. The intergenerational conflict is just as important as the interracial conflict, in my opinion.” (CAAM, 2017).
As the tragic events of Gook play out over the course of the film, involving muggings, threats, theft, looting, and gun violence, the symptoms of shared oppression become crushingly evident. The struggle that was once their father’s has now become Eli and Daniel’s struggle, and they are left with the distrust, the fear, and all the unknown that their parents experienced as immigrants. At the same time, they have an internal struggle of connecting with their families’ culture and attempting to fit into a world that actively ostracizes them.
While Tigertail and Gook are incredibly different films from varied perspectives that take place on opposite sides of the United States, they share a significant number of factors that point to the multi-generational challenges and traumas that follow Asian American Immigrant families. Racism, isolation, and poverty create immense pressure to survive, and the consequences of working so desperately to create a successful life in a foreign country have repercussions down the line, particularly on family members. In Gook, Eli and Daniel struggle to carry what is left of their father’s legacy through his shoe store, as they slowly lose their connections to their past in the face of violence, crime, and desperation. In Tigertail, Pin-Jui’s life story is one of isolation, as he closed himself off to those around him in order to handle his own struggle. His daughter Angela grew up to become similar to Pin-Jui, struggling to balance her own health and relationships with her work and desire to impress her father. In each film, the second generation characters struggle to connect with their parents. To the first generation characters, their children represent a loss of culture to American assimilation, and a loss of respect for where they come from. To their children, they are unable to acknowledge their own struggle in the shadow of their parents’ effort to give them a better life. The intergenerational conflict in these films reflects the larger sentiment that many Asian American families face today. The challenges of multi-generational trauma are added on top of the laundry list of obstacles immigrants already face in America, and create a vicious cycle of struggle.
Bibliography
CAAM. Justin Chon Gets Personal with “Gook,” His New Film about the L.A. Riots, Center for Asian American Media, 16 Aug. 2017, https://caamedia.org/blog/2017/08/16/justin-chon-gets-personal-with-gook-his-new-film-about-the-l-a-riots/.
Gook. Directed by Justin Chon, performances by Justin Chon, David So, Simone Baker,Sang Chon, and Curtiss Cook Jr, Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2017.
Krbechek, Anjuli Sastry, and Karen Grigsby Bates. “When La Erupted in Anger: A Look Back at the Rodney King Riots.” NPR, NPR, 26 Apr. 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/524744989/when-la-erupted-in-anger-a-look-back-at-the-rodney-king-riots.
Tigertail. Directed by Alan Yang, performances by Tzi Ma, Christine Ko, Hayden Szeto,Lee Hong-chi, and Kunjue Li, Netflix, 2020.
