As a vital part of our inner world, empathy is a necessity.
I hope that you’ve been keeping well especially if where you are is in the middle of a heatwave.
Sometimes we put our deeper pain on the back seat, this is to help us survive the day-to-day affairs. Like many immigrants, I haven’t seen my folks in the past few years due to border policy. As their only child, this feels awful.
Normally I’m coping OK, but whenever a genuine question is asked by a kind and generous person, I’d immediately go into pieces.
When the everyday demands stay high, when we are already overwhelmed by other storms, we wonder when and how we will ever get to heal the central storm of all the struggles?
But then, here is our intuition, always working in the background, leading us to the right person to have the exact conversations we need; or the right art, book, poem or film to immerse into.
In cinema, I am a frequent front row sitter. Straightening up my hunched shoulders and looking up for a change instead of perpetually looking down, leaving the loud eating or talking all far behind.
When closed-up perception plays tricks, it’s hard to ignore any details of Joy’s (Hsu) pain or struggle – dazzling, brave, explosive; or Waymond’s (Quan) versatile emotions through three different characters, within and without Wang Kai Wei’s homage.
It’s very refreshing to watch Michelle Yeoh, at 59, with her ever renowned martial arts prowess, wrapped into her raw emotions through the chaotic universe jumping.
In an interview, Michelle said, “What I saw in Evelyn was a very hard-working immigrant who’s trying so hard to be keeping her family together, to be a success in her father’s eyes, to prove that she’s a good daughter, and I see Evelyn in so many people around me. I felt that I need to tell their story. It was like taking a look at your own life and going like, ‘Am I a failure?’ Am I this? Am I that? Could I have done better?'”
“These mothers, aunties, grandmothers who are there in Chinatown, or in the supermarket, but nobody ever notices them. They just walk straight past them. I wanted to give them a voice…”
She opened up more, “This is something I’ve been waiting for for a long time that’s going to give me the opportunity to show my fans, my family, my audience what I’m capable of. To be funny. To be real. To be sad. Finally, somebody understood that I can do all these things.”
“The chaos at the moment of filming is also what Evelyn was going through. Evelyn was confused; she was fractured. She was trying to come to terms with what was happening to her…”
But then, in the past few years, who hasn’t felt overwhelmed and overloaded, scared and scarred, confused and exhausted as if everything everywhere all at once? At least at some point?
Who hasn’t gathered every ounce of themselves to just get by, when Homeland, Belonging. Uniting…these beautiful expressions became far-fetched painful words in our psyche?
Who hasn’t stared at a magpie’s flight, or a duck’s dive, or a still rock by the road occasionally, with a sigh of envy of their purer existence? Their simpler state of being? (OK, maybe just me.)
Perhaps, that’s partly why many viewers feel like they are seen.
Yet, in this film, you are not deeply lost into the whirlwinds.
You may even leave the theatre with the comfort that empathy is a necessity to survive, a vital part of our inner world.
If every decision leads to a path co-existing with others, who’s to decide success or failure?
If the more we explore, the less we know, then who’s to say if it has meaning or is meaningless?
“And if nothing really matters, why don’t we just be kind?”
Thanks for your kind company in the past years.
With love,
Yiye Zhang 章一叶
This is a new series to gather some films which Empaths & Highly Sensitive People perhaps will enjoy a lot. In my healing journey, cinematic experience has helped me significantly. Maybe it can help you in your own unique way too.
