your american dream baby

I was eight when I read Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. That was the year I first started hearing the family stories about my great-grandfather, who was once one of the wealthiest landowners in his province until the Communists confiscated his land and assets after they took power in 1949. There was talk of how if only he had fled to Taiwan with the friends he helped sponsor to get across the strait he might have been able to keep some of his wealth; because I was too young to understand what the politics meant, I used to have these blue-blooded fantasies that someone would come find me to tell me that my family's old money would be restored, and I too could have the sparkling emeralds and beautiful dresses my grandmother recounted from her childhood.

The money was long gone by the time my mother was born. One of the only remnants of my great-grandfather's legacy was his insistence on picking my mother's name; she was his first grandchild, and because he didn't know if he would live to see the birth of a grandson, he deliberately chose masculine characters that mean intelligence so that people would know that her family wanted her to be smart instead of just pretty.

When I was born, I became the first U.S. citizen in my family. My mother chose the name Vivian because it means "full of life"; this was a new country after all, and she knew I would live up to it because I was born into the land that promises the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As a Chinese-American, my birthright was the freedom to choose who I want to be on my own terms.

— 

Something they never really tell you about is the opportunity cost of the American Dream.

The price of the birthright to being a hyphenated-American daughter of immigrants is the paradox where you're not enough for one culture while simultaneously being too much for the other, where people from either culture are constantly trying to tell you who you can and can't be because they recognize your un-belonging to their's right away.

For the first time in my life, I watched the anxiety over having a dual identity that I've nursed for so long play out in Rachel's narrative in Jon M. Chu's Crazy Rich Asians (2018).

Crazy Rich Asians is, for the most part, a spectacularly fun movie. I've been texting my friends "BOK BOK BITCH" and sending them heart-eyes emojis every time I think about Astrid Leong (approximately three times a day, six days a week) for the last three weeks, and I've been listening to the soundtrack on repeat whenever I find myself on long walks across the city. I could come up with at least dozen things I absolutely loved about it when I walked out of the theater on opening weekend, and even though most of what I love about it is lighthearted, I was caught off guard by how poignant Rachel and Eleanor's mahjong game near the end of the film was for me.

After a whirlwind week of finding out that her boyfriend Nick Young is the favorite grandson primed to inherit the fortunes of one of Singapore's wealthiest families, that everybody in his world—especially his mother Eleanor and his Ah Ma—thinks she is unworthy of his interests, and that her mother lied to her her entire life about her father's existence, Rachel hasn't been given much of a chance to prove herself to Nick's unforgiving family. But right when Nick proposes to her in spite of Eleanor and Ah Ma's explicit rejection, the scene cuts to Eleanor walking into a mahjong parlor and leaves the question of how Rachel answered up in the air.

"You didn't like me the second I got here. Why is that?" Rachel asks, confronting Eleanor for the first time once they begin their game. "Was it because I'm not rich? Because I didn't go to a British boarding school, or wasn't born into a wealthy family?"

The mahjong scene is stripped down both visually and emotionally relative to the rest of the resplendent lavishness that dominates the rest of the movie. Beneath the layers of pretty jewels and incomprehensible wealth, the game scene stands out because it explores the deep-rooted cultural differences between Rachel's Chinese-American immigrant upbringing and Eleanor's more traditional Chinese values. Eleanor's disapproval of Rachel was never simply about her socioeconomic status—it was about the fundamentally different value systems that shape their world view.

"There's a Hokkien phrase koki lang. It means our own kind of people, but you're not our own kind...you're a foreigner, American. And all Americans think about is their own happiness."

The scene itself establishes two layers to the game Rachel and Eleanor play against one another: the literal one played with the low click of the clacking tiles, and the symbolic one over Nick, the person both women love the most.

Strategy games are Rachel's professional forte. She is first introduced to the movie playing poker against her TA as part of her economics lecture, where she bluffs and goes all in, intimidating him into folding even though we find out he had the better hand. Rachel teaches her class an important lesson in game theory right before class is dismissed: you can't play "not to lose;" you have to play to win.

In the middle of the game, Rachel finally reveals the answer she gave to the proposal. "I turned Nick down," she tells Eleanor as she picks up an eight of bamboo tile, the one that both Rachel and Eleanor need to win complete their hand and win the game. "Only a fool folds a losing hand," Eleanor says upon hearing this, quick to judge both Rachel's decision and her game play.

There are always going to people who will underestimate who you are because of the judgments they make about who they think you are; they will underestimate your ability to love, especially in a world that views young love as ephemeral and family legacy as immortal; and they will try to tear you down and make you feel small and like you don't belong, because deep down, they've had to fight that feeling too—they've been playing not to lose because they saw no other choice.

"There is no winning," Rachel explains. "You made sure of that. Because if Nick chose me, he would lose his family. And if he chose his family, he would spend the rest of his life resenting you."

"So you chose for him?"

"I'm not leaving because I'm scared, or because I think I'm not enough, because maybe for the first time in my life, I know I am. I just love Nick so much, and I don't want him to lose his mom again. So I wanted you to know that one day, when he marries another lucky girl who is enough for you, that it was because of me: a poor, raised-by-a-single-mother, low-class, immigrant nobody."

As Rachel gets up to leave the table, she reveals to Eleanor that she had the better hand all along and chose not to play it: she discarded the eight of bamboo tile to let Eleanor win instead, proving to her on both the symbolic and game level that she doesn't need the literal victory to walk away from that table with her head held high. Rachel accepts and has confidence in who she is without compromise: playing to win was never about "winning" Nick; it was recognizing that in spite of Eleanor's accusations, she was always enough.

The last shot of Rachel in this scene shows her finding her mother to walk arm-in-arm out of the parlor, finally ready to go home. Even though none of us get to choose our family, love is always a choice. It doesn't matter what cultures we came from or how much money our families have: all that matters is who we choose at the end of the day, and who we choose to be.

—

When I was thirteen, I asked my grandmother if she thought my great-grandfather would have liked me. I don't remember if she gave me an actual answer or not. I later learned that my great-grandfather's preference for sons led him to give away my grandmother's two younger sisters at birth, because his patriarchal China still held traditional values close about how family—especially important wealthy ones like his—should be ordered. The only reason my grandmother remained in the family at all was because she was the firstborn, and he didn't know if he would have a male heir to carry on the family name, and that was all that mattered to him.

I can spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if the war had gone the other way, but history didn't happen like that. No one has the ability to change that. But the older I get, the more I appreciate that I was born in a different world than the crazy rich Asian one our family lost all those decades ago, and that my parents have never forced me to be anyone or anything I didn't want for myself.

I've lived my entire life fielding comments from other Chinese, other Chinese-Americans, and other Asian-Americans who tell me I'm "too American," that I fundamentally don't understand Chinese culture, that I must not be a very good Chinese daughter because I think too much for myself.

Maybe that's all true.

But the American Dream as I know it is about having the privilege to be who you are without apology and trusting that the people who truly respect you will love you for who you are. It's about mothers and daughters walking together arm-in-arm and not turning back toward the world you left behind, because there's still too much life ahead to give in to being who other people want you to be.

xoxo, vivian

Photos of Constance Wu and Michelle Yeoh—who play Rachel and Eleanor in Crazy Rich Asians—from The Hollywood Reporter.