We are Multitudes: Why the Everything Everywhere All At Once Oscar Wins Matter

By Sharline Chiang

On Sunday, as I watched Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan tearfully accept their Oscar awards, I pumped my fists and dabbed my eyes. Asians sweeping the freakin’ Oscars!

Even though I already knew it was a possibility (they’d taken home the same awards at the Golden Globes), I still couldn't believe what I was seeing. Yeoh won Best Actress and became the first Asian actor to nab the award, and is only the second woman of color to do so (Halle Berry won it in 2002). Quan, who won Best Supporting Actor, is the first Vietnamese-born actor to win an Oscar for acting.

By the end of the night Everything Everywhere All At Once, the art-house-ish film starring Yeoh, Quan, and a nearly all-Asian American cast, took home a total of seven awards including Best Picture.

Asian American social media blew up. #OscarsSoAsian! (In addition, RRR's "Naatu Naatu" won best original song, becoming the first-ever song from an Indian film to win the prize. And the Elephant Whisperers won Best Documentary Short film, a first for an Indian production.) History had been made. 

I indulged in the moment, staying up way too late joy-scrolling—playing clips of Yeoh and Quan’s speeches on repeat and devouring as much coverage and Asian pride and glee as possible. A year ago I could never have imagined any of it.

The multidimensional-ness of being Asian American

When the trailer came out at the beginning of 2022, I immediately texted my good friend, another Chinese American mom who, like me, is a daughter of immigrants from Taiwan. “Holy cow, we have got to see this!” (Except I didn’t say cow.) The trailer showed a struggling middle-aged Asian American immigrant mom who’s been chosen to save “the multiverse.” She starts off looking exhausted and haggard (like so many of us!), but next thing, she’s opening up cans of whoop-ass on her enemies! It was like some kind of personal fantasy come true. And starring Michelle Yeoh—The G.O.A.T.—to boot. I thought: pandemic shmandemic, I’m going to a theater to see this.

I figured the movie would deliver plenty of laughs (which it definitely did). I was prepared to cheer, guffaw, and be entertained by a story about empowerment. What I did not expect was to find myself in a dark theater surrounded by mostly strangers as I bawled my eyes out, trying in vain to muffle my cries so as to not be ejected from the premises. (I imagined an usher saying “Ma’am, we’re only halfway through the movie. You’re going to have to leave.”) I did not expect the actual themes—Asian mother-daughter relationships; what is gained by breaking intergenerational abuse and trauma patterns; the tolls of immigration; and the piercing power of love, reconciliation, and healing. 

Somehow through all the action scenes, bawdiness, over-the-top gags, chaotic montages, strangeness, bloodiness, and hot-dog fingers, the film managed to convey the multidimensional-ness of being Asian American—especially an Asian American woman. It depicted the certain brand of pain so many of us carry resulting from intergenerational trauma, as well as our wit, moxie, and humanity with such deft and precision that it broke me wide open. (Amazing how even a few rocks can make you feel so much.)

I left the theater in an emotional daze, palms sore from clapping. My friend and I agreed that we had never seen anything like it and couldn't believe a movie like that had been made in our lifetime. Like it was made just for us. We also wondered how the movie, with its weirdness and overall Asianness, would be received by “the rest of America.” It’s not for everyone. But mostly we talked about how it made us and our families’ stories feel seen, how it seemed to reveal to us insights we didn’t even know we needed about ourselves. I said: “Is this how white people feel?” White people in this country with their generations of movies, wide selections in which characters who look like them are at the center of their own stories, heroes of their own hero’s journeys, complex and so fully human—is this what it feels like?

Not just villains and sidekicks

Ever since she was little, I had tried to explain to my daughter, who is 11 now, that when I grew up in the 70s and 80s I hadn’t seen any Asians positively represented in popular culture. Almost all the characters who “looked like me” were racist stereotypes and tropes that existed to either hinder or support the white hero’s goals. Kung fu gangsters, “Dragon ladies,” and other inscrutable Orientals were to be defeated. Sidekicks like Kato or Sulu were to be loyal and helpful. Submissive geishas and prostitutes were to be objectified and used. Then there were the nerds, the bumbling butts of jokes with heavy accents like Long Duk Dong. But it was hard to get her to understand. She, like the rest of Gen Z, had far better options, so many shows and movies led by complex Asian and Asian American characters like those in Fresh Off the Boat, Turning Red, Shang Chi, and Ms. Marvel.

Around the time she was eight, I began telling her that when I was her age, attending schools in a mostly white suburb of New Jersey, I wished I was white. I told her how my parents and I were regularly subject to racism, how kids bullied me and twice set fire to the trees around our house. I told her that like many Asian Americans, my parents and I felt we were at best invisible and at worst seen as strange and weak. She had always been eager to hear my stories even if they made her a bit sad. But she was a biracial kid growing up in diverse Berkeley, California. I knew she couldn’t fully understand or relate, and in many ways I was glad.

Then came the pandemic. 

“Perpetual foreigners, perpetual threats”

In the spring of 2020, she would begin to hear me talking to my husband about how anti-Asian harassment and other acts of hate and violent attacks against AAPI were skyrocketing across the country, including in nearby Oakland and San Francisco. About how my parents, who still live in Jersey and came to this country in 1967, had stopped leaving their house even to go on short walks for fear of being beaten. She heard me rant about how Trump, with his comments about the “Kung flu” and the “Chinese virus,” led many to blame Asians and Asian Americans for the pandemic. Each week the news of attacks were reminders that we were still seen as perpetual foreigners, perpetual threats, not fully human. 

On March 16, 2021, exactly two years ago today, a white man shot and killed eight people at Atlanta area spas. Six of the victims were Asian women. Shortly after that day my daughter refused to go on walks alone with me. She said she felt safer walking with my husband, who is white. “Because if people see us they will know we are Asian and they might attack us,” she said.

According to a report released last year by Stop AAPI Hate “one in five Asian Americans experienced a hate incident in 2020 or 2021.”

“A beacon of hope and possibilities”

On Sunday night, even as I drifted to sleep with snippets of Michelle Yeoh’s speech (“for all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities”) and Ke Huy Quan’s (“my journey started on a boat; I spent a year in a refugee camp, and somehow I ended up here, on Hollywood’s biggest stage”) echoing in my ears, those painful memories from my childhood and over the pandemic swirled in my mind. 

I wondered if this was the beginning of some never-ending era of more Asian American representation, more Oscar-worthy roles, a true bursting of the dam that would help others increasingly see us as fully human, and deserving of being included in what it means to be American. Or if this would instead be a moment met with unspoken (as well as spoken) backlash and a kind of “that’ll do” response from audience members and the powers that be in Hollywood.

Regardless, I do know this: that for Asian Americans like myself, even though living in this particular country, in this universe and multiverse, isn't always easy, getting to collectively witness Sunday night’s wins—and experience that rare surge of validation that our stories matter, that we are worthy of being celebrated and seen—made us feel, however temporarily, like this is a pretty great place to be.