c/o Netflix
Like every good Asian child, if I see Michelle Yeoh, I watch Michelle Yeoh.
Awarded (finally!) the Academy Award for Best Actress just last year for her role in “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (2022) as Evelyn, a laundromat owner who connects with other versions of herself to save the multiverse, Yeoh is once again reinventing the Asian mother—with all the power and fear she commands—as Eileen, the matriarch of the Sun family. She secretly runs the Jade Dragons, a Taiwanese gangster triad that traffics pretty much everything.
After her estranged husband, Big Sun (Johnny Kou), is shot by a mysterious group of assassins wearing red ribbons, their eldest son, Charles “Chair-leg” Sun (Justin Chien)—so called because he famously took out a group of killers with a chair leg when he was 14—travels to Los Angeles, where Eileen has settled down with her other son Bruce (Sam Song Li) living a so-called normal life for the past 15 years.
And I thought my family was complicated.
“The Brothers Sun” shines in its clever subversion of typical Hollywood tropes of Asian characters—the tiger mom, gangster, and nerdy pre-med student—through complex story-telling and its trust in viewers to follow each story arc.
Charles is essentially the Asian John Wick, or so I’ve been told. (This comparison makes very little sense to me, as I don’t enjoy watching men do men things. Call me a misandrist or whatever.) I may not have his skills in murder and mutilation, but I nevertheless find him a deeply relatable character, burdened by his parents’ expectations when he simply wants to bake. In a memorable scene, he gets sidetracked in his mission to find out who’s trying to kill his family, instead discovering the secrets of the best churro stand in Los Angeles—with the back of his jacket covered in blood and a bag in his other hand containing someone’s decapitated head.
Chien perfectly captures Charles’ moral and filial dilemmas as he exists on the same continent as his mother and younger brother, discovers family secrets, and confronts his grooming as a child into a feared killer and Big Sun’s right hand. (We love competency here at The Argus. I love that he watches “The Great British Bake Off” and then kills a man with his own knife. Multitasking king.)
Bruce, the other leading man, is painfully awkward, with the sort of cheeks my grandmother would pinch and then haul to the dinner table. I adore him. For the sake of keeping this article spoiler-free, I will simply state that “The Brothers Sun” is worth the watch just to see him grow over the eight episodes—a length chosen likely as a nod to the auspiciousness of the number, which is a homophone of the word for fortune in Chinese.
Impressively, both Li and Chien–in the breakout roles–hold their own against the massive acting powerhouse that is Yeoh. The cast is rounded out by other incredibly talented Asian and Asian diasporic actors, particularly Highdee Kuan (Alexis), Alice Hewkin (May), and Madison Hu (Grace). What a wonderful gift to have ushered in 2024 with a TV series centering all-Asian characters and created by an entirely Asian writers’ room.
Their dedication to their art results in a show that seamlessly blends together various dialects of Chinese, including both Cantonese and Mandarin, and features multiple levels of fluency, remaining true to the experiences of the Asian diaspora across multiple generations. For those who do not speak Chinese in any form, fear not! Netflix has the show fully subtitled. The confusion is part of the point.
TL;DR: If you don’t watch this show, I will not be baking you pineapple tarts, and you won’t see hot Asian men with their shirts off. If you do watch the show, maybe I will bake you…something. #StopAsianHate. Happy Chinese New Year!
Rose Chen can be reached at rchen@wesleyan.edu.