How Watching Asian American Dads Onscreen Helps Me Face My Own

From the other side of the country, I called my father to wish him a happy birthday. I hadn’t spoken to him in months.

“Hi, Daddy,” I began in my forced, cheerful manner.

He told me I was a day late. His birthday was yesterday. Somehow, I had mixed up the date. What sort of daughter didn’t know her father’s birthday? Then again, I couldn’t remember the last time he had called me on my birthday.

He informed me he had to get back to work. Apparently, I had chosen an inconvenient time to phone him. After I hung up, I checked to see how long the call had lasted. Less than five minutes, it turned out.

I went to take a shower, where I would leave no evidence of my tears.

My relationship with my father wasn’t always so chilly. For the first twelve years of my life, he was not so different from other dads that I knew—prone to corny jokes and more laidback, compared to my mom. A “self-made man,” he possessed a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstrap mentality. He enjoyed showing off his success by tipping generously at restaurants and treating us to yearly family vacations. But he was also proudly frugal, regularly cutting coupons for groceries from the weekly circular and saving napkins from McDonald’s. In these contradictions, he embodied the Chinese-American dad through and through.

For better or worse, there’s a certain image of the Asian immigrant father that has stuck in our popular imagination. He almost always speaks with an accent and struggles to bridge the cultural and language gap with his second-generation children—sometimes endearingly, like Appa in the Canadian sitcom Kim’s Convenience, who Paul Sun-Hyung Lee portrays as a gruff, teddy bear of a Korean dad, endearing in his obliviousness. The Asian immigrant father is also characterized by a sense of stoicism—think every role Tzi Ma has ever played, notably a depressed, suicidal patriarch in the indie film Red Doors.

There was a time when I might have resented these renderings for how little they resembled the father I knew—one who, for starters, speaks fluent English (though he does have a habit of mispronouncing the word “three” as “tree”). And if there were misunderstandings between us, I chalked them up to being a generational, rather than cultural, difference—especially since my dad is twenty years older than my mom. If anything, this age gap, along with the fact that he already had three grown children from a previous marriage, probably helped explain why he was never strict with me. He seemed to buck the conventions.

Perhaps nothing has captured the stereotype more succinctly than the nearly-decade-old High Expectations Asian Father meme, in which a photo of South Korean actor Jeon Mu-Song—shown unsmiling, with gray hair and glasses—is paired with captions like: “Why you get B? You not B-sian. You A-sian.” The meme (which preceded his female counterpart, the Tiger Mom) feels dated and slightly racist now. Yet at the time, I remember seeing Asian Americans on social media posting and sharing the many variations with a knowing chuckle.

Even if the caricature did not accurately mirror my Asian father, I recognize parts of him. There’s the tendency to view his children’s success as an extension of his own, while their failures are never his fault. And that delineation between success and failure happens to fall within a narrow set of status signifiers. I also saw him in the fathers of my friends and classmates growing up—fathers who did not say “I love you,” who were known to take a belt to their kids, and who really did want their sons and daughters to aspire to practical careers as doctors, engineers, or lawyers.

All of them, the memes, the TV and film fathers, and my own, they personified not just parental expectations, in my eyes, but also cultural ones projected onto us, the children of immigrants, regardless of whether we’re high- or under-achieving. So, however oversimplified, the clichés were drawing on a truth: that Asian immigrant fathers believe they know what’s best for their children, even without fully knowing their children. Mine certainly did.

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In 2018, I witnessed a new kind of Asian father figure emerge in popular culture in the film Searching. It’s a technologically innovative debut from Indian-American filmmaker Aneesh Chaganty and features a predominantly Asian American cast led by John Cho. The protagonist Cho plays, David Kim, hews more closely to the first-and-a-half or second generation of Asian Americans that has grown up here in the States. His Korean-American-ness is perfectly exemplified by his late wife’s “Kimchee Gumbo,” a hybrid dish, that his brother Peter requests the recipe for.

Though David’s mother and father do not make an appearance in the movie, Peter’s offhand comment about the time he road-tripped to LA—“I didn’t tell Eomma or Appa / They were SO MAD,” he says over text message—suggests they were raised by stricter, more culturally traditional parents. Peter recalls this story to his brother when David suspects his teenage daughter Margot of skipping school. The anecdote possibly explains Margot’s secrecy, as Peter implores David to empathize with his daughter. Here, the script implies David may be wrestling with how to be a father different from his own.

In an article titled “The perception of Asian dads and masculinity” published in the Chicago Tribune, interviewees reflect on their first-generation immigrant Asian American fathers. The various anecdotes touch upon commonalities, from language barriers to a lack of affection. Dr. Josephine Kim, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who specializes in child development and immigrant issues, posits, “The Asian cultural definition of masculinity relies heavily on scholarship and not showing weakness, which translates into men showing less emotion.”

On the one hand, the fear of appearing weak is a hallmark trait of toxic masculinity—a problem that transcends culture, ethnicity, and race. On the other, the article ascribes specific historical and societal reasons to account for why Asian men, in particular, have felt insecure about their manliness, citing everything from the treatment of Chinese immigrant laborers in the nineteenth century to representation in contemporary media.

My father belongs to the generation of immigrants that came over as Paper Sons (and Daughters)—a consequence of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was not repealed until 1943. He has only ever alluded to the discrimination he faced in the barest of terms, such as how the immigration officers insisted he pick a new name that was easier to pronounce. As an adult, I once heard him acknowledge how American society underestimated someone like him—a short, Asian man from a faraway country. But it couldn’t deny his success as a businessman and entrepreneur. I understood, then, why making money mattered so much to him.

The Tribune piece also revisits the generational divide that, according to Dr. Kim, “often led second-generation Asian-American children to misunderstand their fathers as unloving and uncaring, seen through the lens of their Americanized cultural perspective.” Learning from that misunderstanding usually means recognizing parental sacrifice as a sign of their love.

But where is the line between quiet strength and the inability to express emotion? 

I honestly don’t know whether my father would describe his sentiments for me as love or not. I know I’ve said the words to him. I imagine he’s said them back at some point. But if my parents’ separation revealed anything to me, it’s that his love was conditional. I would go months at a time without hearing from him. When we did spend time together, I felt pressured to assume the role of the dutiful daughter, in which I played two sides, trying to protect both of their feelings, while ignoring my own. And if I felt hurt by my father’s absence in my life, my mother made an effort to remind me of better times, of how he had provided for our family.

This lesson is the core of the Emmy Award-winning Master of None episode “Parents.” It juxtaposes flashbacks to the hardships endured by Indian and Taiwanese immigrant fathers with their adult children’s spoiled and ungrateful attitude. My emotional journey watching the episode spans from guilt to appreciation to pride. That same pride appears later in the Tribune article when one Taiwanese American dad voices his admiration for his own father’s “quiet strength.”

But where is the line between quiet strength and the inability to express emotion?

As a father desperate to find his missing daughter, Cho has no difficulty expressing an Oscar-worthy range of emotions in Searching. Cho’s reactive face serves as the audience’s primary focal point, a reactionary compass that directs the audience, helps them interpret what’s happening in a story mediated entirely through a computer screen. Whether he’s agitated or hopeful or devastated by the latest dead-end lead, we never doubt David Kim’s love for and commitment to Margot.

In spite of his demonstrable affections, however, David comes to the realization that he does not actually know his daughter. As he conducts his amateur detective work alongside the police, he finds himself in the dark about where Margot might have gone, who she’s been in contact with, and what she’s been up to the last few months. These are answers Pam, Margot’s recently deceased mother, might have known. In attempting to shield Margot from his grief, David has inadvertently closed himself off from her. In his “quiet strength”, he discovers, potentially too late, how he has actually left her vulnerable.

It’s almost a tradition in diasporic families to keep things from their children, usually facts about the life or people they left behind in their homelands. Some secrets may be about past traumas inflicted by political upheaval, poverty, or war—consider the Cultural Revolution or the Vietnam War. And even if they’re not the stuff of melodrama, families keep open secrets that can nevertheless feel consequential, like when I learned my father’s name wasn’t really his name. In this way, our parents’ desire to insulate us from whatever shame they’ve felt can have the effect of making it even harder for us to know them.

The inverse proves equally true when it comes to my father. I can say with absolute certainty that he knows very little about me. He barely knows where I live, in a city he has never visited since I’ve moved here. I’ve switched jobs too many times for him to keep track (nevermind trying to explain the concept of “freelancing”). And I’d decided, early on in my adulthood, the less he knows about my relationships the better. I remember consulting my half-sister, concerned that my first boyfriend wasn’t the right kind of Asian our father would have approved of. “It might help that he’s in medical school,” she offered. I ultimately decided against telling him.

The irony is that this same boyfriend kept our relationship from his parents the entire time we were dating for the exact same reason. The only difference was that I didn’t really care what my father thought. I merely wanted to avoid upsetting him unnecessarily. Meanwhile, my boyfriend went about hiding my belongings and sweeping up my hair from his dorm room floor every other weekend when his parents dropped by. We eventually broke up, and from what I’ve since gleaned via social media, he’s now married to the right kind of Asian.

Our fathers may never know us the way we wish they would. And if we learned that ignorance is bliss, it’s because we learned it from them. 

Given what I’ve learned from personal experience, I know I’m far from the only person who has deliberately avoided telling their parents, and, in particular, their fathers, certain things about their romantic life—whether it’s the race/ethnicity/class/religion of their significant other, or their sexuality, or the fact that they’ve moved in together before putting a ring on it. It could be that we’re waiting for the right moment, or that nothing counts before marriage, anyway. Whatever the reasoning, there are many, many variations to this story, save for one constant: Our parents, our fathers, may never really know us the way we wish they would. And if we learned that ignorance is bliss, it’s because we learned it from them.

Quiet strength, it seems, might not be enough to make up for a real, emotional connection. Maybe spinning a narrative about struggle and sacrifice is just a way of coping with emotionally distant fathers. Or maybe what I’m saying sounds blasphemous, because as children of immigrants, we are constantly told to be grateful for what we have been given.

An interesting dichotomy regarding Asian American fatherhood is exemplified by the character of Louis Huang from ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat. Based off the eponymous memoir authored by a notorious Asian American male figure who has been accused of misogyny, the ABC series initially drew the author’s ire for sanitizing the depiction of domestic violence in his family, which he describes suffering at the hands of his parents in the book.

I’ll admit, part of me remains curious what a darker adaptation—say, an FX- or HBO-produced version of the show—would have looked like. But I also see the benefits of Randall Park’s portrayal in Fresh Off the Boat of an immigrant dad that’s warm and funny. Although it may be more aspirational than realistic, it arguably reflects the changing times.

I’ve witnessed friends and old classmates who have successfully come out to their parents, who have gone on to marry the person they love. I have seen those fathers beaming with pride at their children, even if their kids’ choices and lives didn’t turn out exactly the way they had imagined it would. But for every seemingly happy ending, there are those who are still looking for acceptance and compassion, who are still waiting for their fathers to speak to them again. And some of us are getting tired of waiting.

Cho’s portrayal of an Asian American father, as well as his expressions of a more contemporary masculinity, signal a shift away from our understanding of fatherhood as a role merely about providing material things. Embedded within the mystery of Searching is a redemptive arc about a father’s quest to emotionally connect with his daughter. As Asian American millennials grapple with longstanding tropes about Asian fathers, and become old enough to be parents themselves, they may be inclined to dismantle previous patriarchal standards in favor of a more open, honest mode—searching for a fatherhood that shares the love as well as the grief.

For others like myself, to move forward means to stop excusing behaviors of toxic masculinity that have hurt us. I haven’t called my father since the last time I spoke with him, nor has he called me. I’m uncertain about the future, about whether making amends is possible, or if that’s something I’ll just have to negotiate with a therapist. But if my strained relationship with my father has taught me anything, it’s that while we cannot change who our parents are, we have the opportunity to rewrite the narrative.

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