veal
assimilating the toxic byproducts of assimilation
This post is about Beef, the Netflix show. One of the cast members, David Choe, joked about sexual assault in a 2014 podcast interview. Beef’s creator, executive producers, and stars have since released a statement saying that Choe’s “story [] is undeniably hurtful and extremely disturbing” but that “David has apologized in the past for making up this horrific story, and we’ve seen him put in the work to get the mental health support he needed” to better himself. I still love the show but am more hesitant about recommending it so enthusiastically. Below, I discuss solely Beef as the show, rather than the environment and context in which Beef was created.
I spend a shocking number of hours thinking about how to subliminally infiltrate people’s consciousnesses—I suppose that is what the original dictionary definition of “influencer” is—when the reality is pretty simple: we place outsize weight on the recommendations of those we already trust. So after hearing about Beef a few times and seeing that it has a whopping 98% on Rotten Tomatoes (where I generally agree with the amalgamation of critics’ reviews), I caved and started episode 1.
It’s here that I wish I could say I watched the entire series at a normal pace evincing proper restraint and commitment to regular activities, but that would be a lie. I devoured all ten episodes as quickly as possible, because I had never seen a show like Beef. It wasn’t just TV—it was art. Art asks questions, confounds, and prompts discussion. So here is my *spoiler-free* discussion of Beef and why I think it’s a revelation, artistically.
america’s model minority breaks bad.
Beef’s log line (a one- to two-sentence summary of a show’s premise that is used in a pitch/summary document, called a treatment, for a proposed TV show) is simply:
Two people let a road rage incident burrow into their minds and slowly consume their every thought and action.
The obvious appeal, of course, is watching these two people become absolutely unhinged over something relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme of life—reality TV antics, if you will. But I underestimated the impact that seeing two Asian leads (Ali Wong and Steven Yeun) being so petty would have on me. The road rage wasn’t just road rage. It was a symptom of a more fundamental tension, the unique third-culture dissonance which arises from a lifetime of trying to do the “right” thing at the “right” time across two different cultures, despite none of the things being right for you.
Wong and Yeun portray this specific malaise with alarming precision—while the lives of their characters (Amy and Danny, respectively) represent two poles of the Gen X Asian American experience, I nonetheless found myself alternately identifying with them.
Why yes, I do sometimes dream of blowing up my objectively great life for no reason at all. I do feel extremely smug when bad things happen to people whom I don’t like. And perhaps more shamefully, I do feel the urge to sabotage my loved ones when they’re succeeding or “doing better” than me. Do those feelings, that being buried alive sensation, mean that I a bad person? Like Amy and Danny?
There was something so gratifying about seeing Asian Americans break bad, and not even in the meth-kingpin way or the criminal-lawyer way. The mere admissions by Amy and Danny of their moral struggles—of not being kind, of capacity for cruelty, of simply being a bad person—felt like permission for something that I hadn’t even been aware that I had wanted permission for.
Sure, I’ve watched plenty of media depicting anti-heroes, tortured protagonists, or just good people who do bad things. Asian characters will sometimes be in these shows or films, but the worst havoc they wreak is usually of the heartbreak variety. While there is a certain perverse satisfaction in breaking hearts, there’s even greater allure in breaking souls. We have been socialized to view heartbreak as a necessary incidental to finding love in life, whereas breaking souls? Only truly bad people would do that—so what does it mean when I want to break someone else’s soul?
It’s not that I actually want to act on these murderous and vengeful impulses. Rather, what I want is to acknowledge them and be able to show that side of myself without the othering that has characterized so much of my life. My campaign to be seen as an American, to not be lonely in this strange land, gave me the tools for successful assimilation—but through using them, a new loneliness replaced the original.
That’s what I loved so much about Beef. It’s about assimilation on one level, steeped in immigrant parents and bilingual identities, but also about assimilating the toxic byproducts of assimilation. Amy and Danny had different blueprints for assimilation, different ideas of what was “right” or “good,” but the toxic byproducts of their dogged pursuits of the American Dream were, in fact, the same. And that made me feel a little less lonely.
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Season 2 of Sense & Sensitivity is back! This season, Hannah Stella and I take on all things New York City. Our first episode (Apple) presents a year-by-year comparison of our lives and what led us to NYC. In 2012/2013, we both took the LSAT and applied to law school. In 2019, Hannah was a stay-at-home wife and Cece was billing 1950 hours a year, before our paths began converging again in 2022. Join us as we dissect our questionable and less questionable choices and ponder what could have been—and what’s in store.
As Succession winds down its last two episodes, I spoke with Shannon of FluentlyForward about the show’s behind-the-scenes drama (Apple). I still don’t voice my hot takes online very often (see, e.g., my obsession with assimilation above), but I am a staunch Jeremy Strong apologist even in the wake of the disastrous New Yorker profile that led to days of online ridicule. Plus, he’s a Yalie, and I detected a distinct brand of Yale-on-Yale violence in the piece.
When I was in LA, I made plans to meet up with some screenwriters—on the last day before the Writers Guild of America went on strike. I learned more about the strike and found it fascinating how much the streaming networks—Netflix, Apple, Amazon—have impacted the economic model of media production. I was particularly impressed by how unified the writers were and would love to see that level of cohesion and collective action in other industries.
I’m no NFL girlie, but Elena Bergeron’s article about the allure of the NFL draft was surprisingly moving. The draft combines elements of awards shows, beauty pageants, and reality shows—with a dash of Hallmark feel-good—to create a spectacle that more than 11 million people tune into every year. (By comparison, Succession draws in approximately 2.5 million viewers per episode.)
I got a Nintendo Switch! I sped through the Famicom Detective Club games and now have an insatiable hunger for investigation-based visual novels and adventure games. If you have any suggestions, let me know!