Note from Kashika & Shahana: If the format of this issue looks different to you, that’s because we’re switching things up! Please bear with us as we do some trial and error to find what we like best and don’t hesitate to mail us your suggestions on continuewatchingwithks@gmail.com.
What we're watching
Kashika
In Shrinking, Jason Segel plays Jimmy, a shrink who loses his wife in an accident and checks out of his job and his life. It doesn’t even matter that he has a 16-year-old daughter who’s also grieving. When we meet him in Shrinking, he’s just coming back up to the surface and trying a radical approach at work where he gets personally involved in his patients’ lives and shares inappropriate and exceedingly personal stuff about himself with them. I’m fascinated by shrinks because I always wonder how someone hears so much bad and sad stuff from people day in and day out then continues to tell them to stay hopeful and look for the good in everything. But all three shrinks in the show (the other two are played by Jessica Williams and Harrison Ford) absolutely suck at their job, though I don’t think that’s intended. But it’s a dark, funny, sad show all at once, every actor is a delight, it has the found family trope, and I love rooting for good people who can’t stop making bad decisions, so I’m really enjoying it. Streaming on Apple TV+.
Shahana
This Thai show called Kinn Porsche kept showing up constantly on my Tumblr, and from the gifsets, appeared to be a show about a man in the mafia falling for his bodyguard. The show is not exactly prestige television and is super cheesy, but everyone is very good-looking and very, very gay. It’s fun. Streaming on MyAsian.
What we're reading about
Kashika
Every time another one of Taylor Swift’s friends unfollows Joe Alwyn, a new article appears. And I’m reading every single one of them. It’s so fucking annoying to think that he might have cheated. I’m taking questions in case you wanna know why I care so deeply about a celebrity relationship, but come prepared to answer why you don’t.
Shahana
I’m reading about and watching everything Anthony Bourdain did and ate in Singapore, because Kashika and I are heading there in June! So if you’ve been and have recommendations, let us know!
What we can't stop thinking about
Kashika
How hot it is in Bombay. I want to live inside a watermelon.
Shahana
The new (and possibly, last) Agust D album, D-Day, dropped on Friday, and I must tell you about Snooze, and the way he managed to work in my favourite bit from So Far Away (from Agust D, his first album) into it. I gasped out loud when I heard it the first time, and I honestly cannot stop thinking about the difference between the two songs, and the man who sings them. So Far Away’s Agust D is full of anger and pain; Snooze’s Agust D is older, at peace, and has learned that while the sadness will always be present, the anger doesn’t have to. In So Far Away, he says “나 죽지 못해 살어 (I live only because I cannot die)” and in Snooze, he says, “다 괜찮아질 거야 (Everything will be okay)”; In So Far Away, he says “결국 시련의 끝에 만개하리 (May your trials end in full bloom)” like it’s a wish he puts out in the world, that the pain will eventually be worth it, in Snooze, he repeats “결국 시련의 끝에 만개하길 (Your trials will end in full bloom)” because he knows it will, because he knows it did.
What we want you to watch
Shahana
My Wiggly Friend - A five-part series that goes all over China exploring the rice noodle and all the ways it is eaten. The show highlights small restaurants or hawker-style stalls that offer local specialties, and focuses solely on the food. The people making the noodles and their stories factor in, as any show about food must—a recipe can never be divorced from its maker. My Wiggly Friend’s is simple and unfussy, and that’s where its appeal lies. Streaming on Netflix.
In Tiny Beautiful Things, And In Life, Women Carry Their Mothers With Them
By Kashika
“Who am I? If all else fails and nothing makes sense, I am always three things: I am my mother’s daughter, I am my daughter’s mother, and I am an accomplished writer, even if I haven’t accomplished it yet.”
In Tiny Beautiful Things, Clare, played by Kathryn Hahn, writes this in a letter to an advice columnist called Sugar, in a desperate attempt to get help and make sense of the absolute shitshow her life has become. Within an episode, she ends up getting that job and becomes Sugar, which is the real-life story of how author Cheryl Strayed started writing the Dear Sugar agony aunt column for an online magazine.
I like Kathryn Hahn as much as the next person, but I started watching the show because when I was younger, having an advice column in a magazine was my dream job. Life happened and now I read AITA Reddit posts and think about what advice I’d give to the people writing in. You know the meme about how you can give great advice to your best friends but when it comes to fixing your own life, you are a moron? That’s true for both me and Clare, except that when she responds to the Dear Sugar letters in the show, Clare makes it fully about herself and shares so much inappropriate personal life history, when all she wants to say, over and over, is that love and grief are the same thing, and that’s the answer to everything.
You see, when Clare was 22, her mother got diagnosed with cancer and died within seven weeks of the diagnosis. As we progress through the show, we see how that one incident has coloured every aspect of Clare’s life, where she’s now 49, on the verge of getting divorced, competing for the title of Bad Mom of the Year, and essentially homeless. Through flashbacks, we see every tough and terrible thing Clare had to overcome and how every time she was faced with a problem, she just wanted her mom.
This is a sentiment I deeply relate to, being the kind of person who gets into an argument with her mother if she talks to her on the phone for more than 6 minutes but at the same time, misses her every second of every day. The Christmas before Clare’s mom died, she gave Clare an objectively ugly jacket that Clare couldn’t hide her disdain for. Later, Clare writes in a letter, “Someday, you look back on that one Christmas when your mother gave you a mustard yellow coat that she'd saved for months to buy. Don't hold it up and say it's longer than you like your coats to be, and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Because your mother will be dead by spring and that coat will be the last gift she ever gave you, and you will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life.” That small thing is ‘thank you’, two words that I haven’t said in any meaningful way to my mother ever.
At the end of this episode, and most episodes, I sat up in my bed and cried. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve understood a lot of things about my mother’s life, the choices she made and the choices she didn’t get to make. I still don’t see her as a full human being with her own life, but I can see that she used to have one before I, her firstborn, came along. I’ve tried to imagine what my life would have been like if she hadn’t given up so much for me. As a child, as her child, this is mostly a self-centered exercise, but it’s clear that my mother’s choices defined my life, her (dis)approval dictated my choices, and her love made way for my independence.
As I watched Tiny Beautiful Things, which is terribly titled, I tried to think of what my relationship with my mother was like when I was 22. I was two years out of home, constantly homesick, but firm in my belief that my mother belongs to my Jaipur life and not my Delhi life. I made so many dangerous, poor decisions and, in retrospect, I could bounce back from them because I knew my mother would stand by me if I blew up my life. And yet, I was lying to her all the time and not being there for her at all. A fact that haunts Clare through her 20s and 30s and 40s, as she makes bad decisions of her own and tells her brother that their mother kept her good and she doesn’t know how to be a good person when mom is not around.
Some of my friends who are now mothers, specifically mothers to daughters, tell me that they have made peace in their relationship with their moms so they can make space in their heart to make the choices they need to make for their daughters. I will never be anyone’s mom so I don’t know how to reach this milestone, but just like Clare, no matter who I am, I am always my mother’s daughter and I am an accomplished writer, even if I haven’t accomplished it yet, and for this lifetime, that is more than enough.
Tiny Beautiful Things - Disney+ Hotstar ⭐⭐⭐1/2
In Beef, Loneliness Hides Behind Anger
By Shahana
On the surface, Beef seems to be a dark comedy about a road rage incident between protagonists Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) and Amy Lau (Ali Wong) that gets progressively worse, and that’s exactly how it starts. In the hands of a non-Asian cast and crew, I wonder, if it would have stayed just that, a revenge story of two car-crossed enemies—it would have made for a fun movie. However, what sustains Beef’s 10-episode arc is how it delves into our leads and their anger, and more specifically, the kind of anger only minorities have.
But what brings our protagonists to the parking lot, where a run-in leads the two through a high-speed chase that starts their titutar beef, the meeting that sets the tone of the show, that sets up the journey of revenge, lies, and bad decisions?
Danny is a hardworking but down on his luck contractor saving to bring his Korean parents to America where they can retire, and he’s in the mall parking lot so he can return a bunch of Hibachi grills that he’d been trying to kill himself with. And then we have Amy, a successful entrepreneur trying to sell her business off so she can finally use the money to rest and spend time with her family. Both are very, very close to their breaking point—and their near run-in turns out to be the final straw.
Danny looks at Amy and sees a bored, rich woman; Amy looks at Danny and sees a stupid man who simply doesn’t work hard enough and is therefore where he is—but this isn’t just a story about envy, though that is there in plenty.
We watch Danny working constantly, scoping out jobs, falling out of trees, dragging equipment back and forth, all towards a single-minded goal—to give back to his parents, a concept all Asian children are familiar with. We are raised with a very clear understanding that our parents raised us conditionally, they did things for us growing up so we would fulfil their dreams. Danny is hustling, but never for himself.
Amy, on the other hand, simply walks about looking harried—but this is on purpose. We are meant to see Danny’s physical exhaustion, the same way we are meant to feel the sense of bone-deep exhaustion that lives inside Amy, but not unless you look really close. Danny doesn’t, and to him, it looks like getting rich came easy to Amy, because if he can’t see the work that went into building her business, she must’ve inherited it or married into it. Danny never gets to hear Amy talk about the work and sacrifice that went into building her business, so his envy continues to fuel his anger and desire to take her down.
But it is the latter half of Beef, which takes these ambivalent feelings Amy and Danny have towards each other into a deeper question inwards. Why is Amy so desperate to quit working and spend time with her daughter? Perhaps, with her daughter she will finally find the answers to the questions she has asked forever: Will she be loved even if she does bad things? Will she find her way back if she makes a mistake? Is she allowed to want love even after making a mistake? Is she allowed to make a mistake?
What Amy wants, most importantly, is to be accepted, to belong, to be home.
Danny, while coming from a completely different place, wants the exact same thing. He finds it temporarily, as many do, in church. But he still never truly belongs; you can’t accept grace from external spaces if you aren’t willing to offer it to yourself.
As the two continue to deny themselves honesty about what it is they want, they fill the emptiness inside with fucking each other over, and just like addicts, they start to realise that they need more to feel the high of being bad. Chasing a momentary high eventually lands them exactly where all addicts end up, rock bottom.
Now, Amy and Danny have no more anger left to fuel their lives—so they simply sit together and feel all the pain and emptiness it covers up. In a glorious hallucinogenic conversation (a result of poisonous berries) where the two lie by each other, they say out loud all they were afraid to say in the light of the day. “I see your life…you poor thing,” they say to each other and they say to themselves.
Finally, they are safe. Finally, they are home.
Beef - Netflix ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2
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