It isn’t every day the Chinese community – or Asians for that matter – see their stories writ large in Hollywood. You have The Joy Luck Club in 1993 and, more than 20 years later, Crazy Rich Asians, Shang-Chi, Turning Red, The Farewell and Minari. All great films. More recently, Everything Everywhere All at Once – by the Daniels duo, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – was released in the US to critical acclaim, but the strength herein lies not in the blockbuster treatment Asian stories have recently benefitted from but in what it says about the Chinese immigrant experience and philosophies from far afield.
Beyond the kaleidoscope of multiverse madness, this film distils east Asian philosophies like no other before it. While it may seem that the great stories of Asian immigrant families build on the cornerstone of intergenerational trauma, its heart of Buddhist and Daoist thought is what makes Everything Everywhere truly great.
