Finding Happy Endings for Queer Daughters in AAPI Cinema

In many East Asian cultures, filial piety can be understood as the hierarchical relationship between parent and child founded on the ethos of mutually caring reciprocity. Films in recent years have approached the Confucian philosophy in new queer contexts.

In Saving Face, Wil (played by Michelle Krusiec) takes in her pregnant and disowned mother Hwei-lan (Joan Chen). “Do you know what kind of karmic hell I’d pay as a Chinese daughter who didn’t take in her own mom?,” Wil asks.

Similarly, The Half of It establishes its protagonist, Ellie (Leah Lewis), as decidedly responsible for everything. She refuses to leave her hometown for a prestigious college so she can take care of her depressed father, Edwin (Collin Chou), and writes papers for other students to earn extra money to pay the bills.

And even though Joy (Stephanie Hsu) from Everything Everywhere All At Once initially rejects her mother Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), with her alter ego Jobu Tupaki even seemingly trying to kill her—the end of the film poignantly shows that despite all the pain between them, the mother-daughter pair are still drawn to love and need each other. Evelyn ultimately and wholeheartedly accepts Joy’s queerness and her girlfriend Becky (Tallie Medel). Another often overlooked moment is when Joy’s grandfather, Gong Gong (James Hong), takes Becky’s hands in his and acknowledges her as Joy’s girlfriend.

It’s notable that throughout these efforts, these daughters never compromise on their queerness—it’s a big reason why their happy endings are so cathartic. These films brilliantly and delicately balance the exchange of love within filial piety, showing how the families also make the effort to change their expectations of what their daughters “should” be.

Hwei-lan comes around to Wil’s sexuality, helping her daughter chase down her love interest and comforting her when it doesn’t go as planned. Months later, Hwei-lan even schemes to reunite the two, who ultimately get back together with both of their mothers’ explicit support. The film ends with Hwei-lan asking Wil, “When are you going to have a baby?”

Meanwhile, in The Half of It, Ellie’s sexuality is never a point of familial conflict. In fact, Edwin defends Ellie to her friend who is struggling to come to terms with her own sexuality, sharing how much he loves his daughter and that he wouldn’t change a thing about her.

These films and characters upset our expectations of queer AAPI narratives in film. We are used to seeing characters repressing their queerness and having to deal with being rejected from their families. These films, however, are a radical site for reimagining what the lives of queer AAPI daughters could be.

In this intersection of gender, sexuality, diaspora, and family culture, scholars like Gayatri Gopinath in Impossible Desires, and Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler in Queer Diasporas, have recognized the potential to “reinvent, renegotiate, and reimagine.” Gopinath writes, “By making female subjectivity central to a queer diasporic project, it begins instead to conceptualize diaspora in ways that do not invariably replicate heteronormative and patriarchal structures of kinship and community.”