SheldonJul 12, 2023

I finally watched Everything Everywhere All at Once and there was one scene at the beginning that perfectly captures a snippet of life in a Chinese-American immigrant household.

It's the pronoun scene. The main character keeps referring to her daughter's girlfriend as "he" and gets visibly frustrated when the daughter corrects her that Becky is a "she."

First, the bilingual dialogue is spot on! It happens so fast that it's hard to keep up with the subtitles, but if you understand Mandarin, you probably laughed at the exchange.

You might notice that Chinese immigrants are terrible at #pronouns. This is because in spoken Chinese, there is only one generic pronoun, "ta" which translates to "that person"

Any child of Chinese immigrants knows the embarrassment of correcting their parents in front of their friends when they keep calling male friends she and female ones he. It only recently occurred to me why this is.

I love this scene for bringing this to the fore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr4kJuZGQPI

Everything Everywhere All At Once, pronoun scene

YouTube
Show threadAdrianna Tan

@sysop408 Michelle yeoh’s Mandarin on screen is also super relatable for me (it’s the right accent and she keeps slipping into Cantonese haha). Every motherly figure I know talks like that.

When I tweeted this, the pro China people were very mad (because Mandarin is the most impt obv)

Jun 22, 2024 at 3:04pmWeb
Show threadSheldonJun 22, 2024

@skinnylatte I laughed so hard at that and it was also such an amazingly endearing scene because you initially are led to believe Michelle Yeoh doesn’t approve of her daughter being a lesbian or is being passive aggressive in calling her partner “he”.

You brace for it to be a not very funny scene where they’re portraying old world bigotry that many immigrants have held onto, but it’s flipped upside down immediately as both a language translation issue and a biting cross cultural joke that can only be fully understood if you’re bilingual or understand that context.

My wife doesn’t speak Chinese, but she laughed just as hard because she got the context from years of quizzing me about Chinese words and grammar… which I am not great at myself. It never took long before my explanations got so confusing that they stopped making sense to me too and I’d just have to say I had no idea.

Show threadAdrianna TanJun 22, 2024
@sysop408 my mum can’t even get the cis pronouns for her own children right, sometimes
Show threadSheldonJun 22, 2024

@skinnylatte same over here! Almost nobody amongst my dad and his siblings can get anyone’s pronouns right.

I never connected the dots as to why that was so until I saw that scene. Even the ones who spoke English more than they spoke Mandarin still had trouble with it. Some seemed to just randomly swap he and she. Some seem to have developed their own rules. People were always “he” and animals were always “she.”

Someone commented that there’s no gendered pronouns in Tagalog. I grew up in a largely Filipino neighborhood. Nearly all my friends were Filipino. Interestingly enough, their parents didn’t seem to have the same level of difficulty as mine did.

It could just be that I was a kid and never picked up on it though.