To refresh, my primary artifact is the film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), produced by the director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Everything Everywhere follows Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh, a middle-aged Chinese American immigrant who begins the movie with a myriad of problems. She finds herself with tax trouble for her struggling laundromat business, divorce filings with her husband Waymond who she thinks is goofy and incompetent, as well as generational conflict with her father, who sees Evelyn as a disappointment, and her daughter Joy, who is a lesbian and college dropout, much to Evelyn's chagrin. In the midst of this, Evelyn is suddenly approached by a version of Waymond from a different universe, who informs her of a great multiversal catastrophe that only she can stop. This catapults Evelyn into her multiversal adventure, where she must use multiverse jumping technology to gain the skills of alternate versions of herself, looking for a way to defeat this multiversal disaster, who is actually an alternate version of Joy. At the same time, Evelyn still has to manage her universe's mundane problems of taxes and familial disappointment.

The lens I'm looking to analyze Everything Everywhere through is a combination of historical and philosophical. The film is a prime example of post-65 Asian American science fiction, a genre Professor Fan covered extensively in his lectures. During the postwar period, East Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan put great effort into STEM education, seeing it as the means to rebuild and develop their countries. This combined with U.S. immigration policy, which emphasized technical STEM skills following the 1965 passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, to select for extremely STEM-minded Asian immigrants to America. These immigrants attached themselves to a specific "success frame", the idea that economic success and social status could be achieved in their new countries through diligent study and hard work in STEM. It is in this context post-1965 that Asian American science fiction emerged. The children of those Asian immigrants grew up being taught the necessity of a STEM education and career that aligned with the success frame. Therefore, for those Asian Americans that instead pursued writing, science fiction became a prevalent genre, as it aligned with the technical and scientific worldview instructed to them in their childhood. 

My argument so far is that Everything Everywhere All at Once has the core features of Asian American science fiction, with its themes of disillusionment with the American dream following immigration, generational conflict, and the usage of multiverses as the science-fictional element that drives the plot. The multiverse jumping as a plot mechanism is an actualization of the disappointment Evelyn holds for her life and herself, a literal expression of Evelyn's feeling that she is the worst version of herself. And while the movie's ostensible conflict is between Evelyn and the multiversal disaster known as Jobu Tupaki, the core issue Evelyn faces is actually disappointment passed down from parent to child over generations, stemming from correlating a failure to achieve a conventional economic success story with a fundamental personal failure, both on herself and on her family.