The opening of the TV series "Beef" constructs the image of Asian characters as typical "hummingbirds." Through the concept of "suspension" discussed in an interview with Michael Sandler, we can aptly describe the image of young urban middle-class Asian Americans as "hummingbirds" - they frantically flap their wings like hummingbirds, just to stay in the air without a moment of relaxation. You can't drop out, no matter how low the chances of success are.
The female lead, Amy Lau, tirelessly juggles her career while being a dominant figure at home. She is responsible for home design and decoration, managing the household expenses, while her Japanese husband is a weak and incompetent artist's son - someone who grew up with a silver spoon. Despite appearances, this family is not a simple replacement as depicted in " Everything Everywhere All at Once," as it seems more complete, harmonious, and successful. However, Amy, like Evelyn in " Everything Everywhere All at Once," is an all-capable mother, simultaneously exhausted by the struggles for survival.
This dilemma is not unique to Asian Americans but represents the perfectionist trap faced by most urban middle-class and the younger generation. Those trapped in the systemic violence of perfectionism often experience immense anxiety, confusion, and psychological pressure. In the modern urban culture, they are required to maintain a certain bourgeois decency. This decency, condensed in the first episode by George's request to Amy to "focus on the positive side of life," becomes an unsustainable structure. Amy has to maintain a facade of a smile despite facing the bombardment of work information and the torment of livelihood.
This veneer of decency is also unsustainable structurally. Those trapped in perfectionism, anxiety, and uncertainty eventually face personal breakdowns and the arrival of extreme emotions. These emotions can manifest as directionless, goalless agitation, or high-intensity social emotions. These scenes depict characters reacting with extreme emotions and impulsive behavior in the face of life's challenges. Such behavior may result from emotional outbursts, manifested due to internal pressures and distress. In the first episode, as expressed in Danny Cho's dialogue, it conveys a sentiment of reluctance and exhaustion, stating, "I don't want to... I've had enough of always having to smile."
In the almost self-hypnotic way of concealing intense anxiety, exhaustion, and helplessness, individuals who freely sell their labor in the capital market burn themselves out in excessive enthusiasm. The symptoms highlighted in such a scenario are exhaustion, burnt-out souls, and the overflow of societal hostility.
Amy is not only a victim of perfectionism but also one of its most loyal proponents. Her speech in the glamorous lobby of a Las Vegas hotel is a classic endorsement of disciplinary practices towards achievement: "You can have all, you can." Women in perfectionism are instructed to play the role of having both success in their careers and a fulfilling family life - the demands of being both the dragon and the phoenix. To meet these demands, they keep winding themselves up like a clock.
Amy's self-hypnosis can be understood in this context. She constantly winds herself up, letting the overwhelming enthusiasm and desires cover up her profound anxiety, confusion, and psychological pressure.
In contrast to Amy Lau, who has success in both business and family, Danny Cho, a Korean immigrant on the social periphery, seems to embody the "last man" depicted by Han Byung-chul - someone trapped in excessive positivity, lacking any independent autonomy. He works tirelessly for his family's sake, taking on jobs he dislikes, willingly exploiting himself. His desire for success in both family and career is vividly portrayed.
Danny Cho has an intense desire for both family and career success. On the family front, he hopes to reunite his parents in the United States, settling them into a large mansion. In terms of his career, he aspires to become a successful entrepreneur, leading his business to smooth sailing. Similar to another Korean character, Edwin, in the series, Danny harbors fantasies and desires for success in both family and career.
To the extent that, when faced with the possibility of achieving success, Danny doesn't hesitate to betray his boss, Isaac Cho. He orchestrates Isaac's imprisonment, keeping the substantial ill-gotten gains for himself. Simultaneously, this represents a departure from traditional East Asian family values. Ironically, prior to this betrayal, they had spoken grandly about family interests, the close bond between relatives, and the profitability of brotherly cooperation. However, when faced with individual victories or the success of a smaller family unit, Danny readily chooses to betray Isaac, creating a stark contrast between the individual's triumph and the values depicted in the narrative about the Korean family structure.
Naomi, another character in the series, follows a similar path. After exchanging pleasantries as "East Asian sisters," she threatens Amy with malicious words. The metaphors of "hummingbird" and "rattlesnake" perfectly encapsulate the East Asian characters in the series, fitting into traditional narratives of Asian identity. Burdened by cultural values and concepts, they strive desperately for their families, even resorting to any means for their goals, all while avoiding discussing their true thoughts.
In fact, East Asians exhibit a high degree of self-awareness regarding behaviors associated with suppressing emotions. In the opening of the third episode, Amy, when confiding in a family doctor, reveals a heightened self-awareness of the complex emotional structure associated with her East Asian identity. They are acutely conscious of their tendency to suppress emotions and lack emotional expression, understanding that this behavior stems from their upbringing and cultural values. Despite this self-awareness, they continue to choose to suppress, conceal, and mask their true emotions, and this "suppression" often points to a lack of capacity to confront their true selves and "limitations in self-functioning." Only when they face the unreserved collapse of reality and a situation where they have no other choice do they confront their emotions.
When we place this heterogeneous emotional structure of Asians in the context of Freud's diagnosis of the human psyche, we can clearly see that East Asian families serve as a very typical case. From early childhood, these individuals experience severe "limitations in self-functioning" on an individual level.
According to Freud, human infants are more helpless and dependent compared to other animals. Their survival in the womb seems significantly shortened compared to other animals, and they are born into the world in a more immature state. Consequently, external influences from the real world intensify, demanding that humans differentiate between themselves and the external world. The danger of the external world becomes more pronounced, and the value of resisting this danger and finding objects to replace the uterine life significantly increases. This biological factor creates the first hazardous situation and gives rise to an unshakable need to be loved.
The content and direction of this early childhood "need" are paired with the expression of "love." It also raises the question of the extent to which an "original anxiety" understood as a signalized representation of danger can cause a child to exclude specific desires from further processes in their mental organization and relegate them to the unconscious. According to Freud, the key to the answer lies in the fact that signals of separation from the loved object originate not only from the external world but also from the internal world. In other words, any desire perceived within the child, which is also experienced as inconsistent with the continuing existence of the once desired love, undoubtedly triggers old, primal separation anxiety.
If a child can recognize that their own desires may be a warning signal of possible loss of the loved object, according to Freud, they will instinctively take all measures to avoid the situation predicted by this dangerous desire. The only means to achieve this purpose lies in the unpleasant impulse, and this impulse is consequently abandoned as a wish and repressed into the unconscious.
In the retrospective exploration of Danny and Amy's growth in the eighth episode, their childhood experiences align closely with Freud's concept of the "repression" process. Children repress all their desires into the unconscious, and the pursuit of those desires is experienced as a threat to the love of their caregivers. To avoid separation from their mother or another loved one, they create a reservoir for the unexpressed, initially reserved wishes. This reservoir continues to exist within them like a "strange body." When they have children or siblings, similar to excretion, they inject this "strange body" and emotionally repressed aspects into the next generation. A typical example is Danny Cho's relationship with his brother. His anxiety and fear of losing loved ones transform into a strong desire for control and dominance over his brother. He cannot openly express anxiety about separation to his brother because he loses the ability to express genuine desires in the repression of his emotional self. This results in a loss of the ability to handle interpersonal relationships and leads him to secretly throw away all of his brother's college application letters in a destructive attempt to achieve his own goals. One of the many consequences of such "limitations in self-functioning" is the disappearance of others and the isolation of individualism. This represents the situation of East Asian families in which Danny Cho symbolizes – without others, there is only an absolute self, not an indifference to others but a refusal to recognize others as independent and autonomous subjects, a family that instrumentalizes the functions of others.
However, the "love" that children early on require is often ignored in the specific emotional structure of Asian families.
In middle-class culture, concealment, lies, and decency are often about money, and conflicts that follow delve into the most sincere love and the most sublime spiritual relationships. Of course, this aligns very well with the values not only of the Asian characters in the series but also with the cultural values of East Asians. It seems that, guided by logic and a perspective on life, they excel at reducing all relationships to their material origins. When they believe that without money, there can be no complete family life, their implicit message is that without "my hard work and sacrifice," there is no happy family life for you, without "my sacrifices," there is no leisurely life for you and your daughter, hence, they naturally place themselves on the eternal moral high ground.
Because meaning is always inseparable from its origin, it is easy to identify traces of hypocrisy and sentimentality in everything that conceals or neutralizes material relationships. What is actually covered up and, therefore, more toxic is the trace of interest that increases. If anyone wants to act according to this concept, he will eradicate everything, including all truths and falsehoods, together with everything that dares to try to escape from the universal practice, no matter how weak it is, and eradicate all expectations of lofty conditions. It ultimately leads to barbarism.
Unfortunately, Asian families often do just that. They are accustomed to such actions and habitually act this way, tracing emotional connections back to the simplest material origins, even using material origins to simplify emotional relationships.
It seems that most children growing up in East Asian cultural contexts have had such experiences, where resources and material goods become the most basic care, rather than "love." Some even willingly believe that money is the most basic emotional need for a person.
The subjects portrayed in the TV series— the two main characters, in addition to being middle-class Asian immigrants in the United States, have another evident identity characteristic – they are "80s generation." I think I don't need to reiterate the complaints of the two protagonists about their age identity in the wilderness – "Every 80s generation has been ruined, fast food, candy, damn secondhand smoke." Nor do I need to restate the media's imagination of the so-called "80s generation."
Danny's younger brother has completely different personality traits and cultural habits from the two main characters, which seems closely related to his age identity. Danny's brother grows up under the affirmative command of his brother, "Go for what you want," with little burden of traditional culture.
However, behind Danny Cho's affirmative command to his brother to "be yourself" is still the demand of traditional cultural values for the suppression of individual free will. "You should date a Korean girl, don't disappoint our parents."
This is a combination of affirmative instruction for excellence and self-will limitation resulting from the heterogeneous emotional structure of East Asian families.
In the end, they successfully accept anxiety into the individual pursuit system, meaning they successfully integrate anxiety as a part of their personality. To some extent, it can be said that human self-relation completes itself through the process of candidly confronting anxiety and realizing self-possession through the emotional acceptance of anxiety.
According to Freud, humans can only fully enjoy the ability of free will when their functions operate without restrictions. In other words, there is a conditional relationship between the well-functioning of reason and human happiness, and only a rational balance between desire, value, and reality can guarantee a good life.
Although the endings of "Beef" and "Everything Everywhere All at Once" may seem far from the so-called good life.
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