Oh My Mother! by Connie Wang

Author:Connie Wang [Wang, Connie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Five

Thrill Seekers

Las Vegas

One of Qing’s favorite movies is Magic Mike XXL, the 2015 sequel to the Steven Soderbergh–directed 2012 Magic Mike. In the original, a young college dropout is introduced to the universe of male stripping by the eponymous Mike, an entrepreneurial but depressive dancer played by Channing Tatum, whose own life as an ambitious Tampa stripper loosely inspired the screenplay. After a series of drug-fueled disasters in the pursuit of financial independence, Mike finally extracts himself from the downward spiral in order to pursue a less volatile (and more clothed) profession as a furniture maker. It’s a Cinderella tale in reverse, and surprisingly sensitive and introspective—an art film disguised as a beefcake flick, and exactly the opposite of its sequel Magic Mike XXL, which is a road-trip movie that is also a beefcake flick, filled with haphazard cameos of shirtless celebrities, dizzying choreography, and juvenile hijinks, and little of the barbed truth-telling of the original. If the first Magic Mike is a slow burn, the second is an M-80 stuffed into a pumpkin.

Qing first saw Magic Mike XXL in the Eden Prairie AMC theater with Dexin, who, to this day, offers his sole opinion of the movie by shaking his head whenever it’s brought up, which is often. After this initial viewing, Qing began mentioning it during the daily phone calls I made to her as I walked from the subway stop back to my apartment in Brooklyn: I like how Channing Tatum makes everyone around him feel positive and good. Any man who doesn’t like this movie is just jealous! Do you think Channing Tatum is not afraid of old women in real life, either?

Tired of the lack of enthusiasm from her own family members, Qing tried to organize a group viewing for some of the other Chinese women she was friendly with in Eden Prairie—a huge risk, considering the other activities that encompassed the totality of their social life: nature walks, tai chi practice, and potluck dinners. To Qing’s chagrin, nearly everyone declined. Days later, she fumed to me on the phone: “Name one bad thing that happened in the movie! You cannot! There is not one bad thing. There is not even DRUGS.”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell Qing that drug use was one of the only overlapping themes between the two Magic Mike movies—specifically, what happens when you take Molly at the wrong time. But, then again, that was the basis of so much of our relationship: We pretend “bad things” don’t exist, and even when confronted with them, we pretend that we’re too naive to recognize them for what they were. We did this with lots of things—money problems, family secrets, hurt feelings, hurt bodies. Once, when I was ten, Qing broke her leg. While rushing out of the house to a final exam for her degree, she slipped and fell, snapping both tibia and fibula so thoroughly that she required a wheelchair for months. I never once acknowledged it. I refused to help

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