Asian Rage In Netflix’s “Beef”





Netflix and A24’s show, BEEF, follows two miserable people escalating a simple road rage incident into a months-long Tom-and-Jerry love-hate affair. While their cars never actually make contact, Amy (Ali Wong) and Danny (Steven Yeun) find a mutual comfort in their inability to let it go. In each other, they find a way to express their long-suppressed dissatisfactions with life, Amy as a successful entrepreneur trying to sell her company so she can finally rest with her family, and Danny as a contractor ever-struggling to get business off the ground so he can afford to bring his parents back to America. BEEF is easily accessible to those of us who have felt frustration for reasons we can’t quite articulate, for those of us who have to suppress rage over something we ourselves acknowledge is not that big a deal.

It’s also a beautiful portrait of Asian America, the universe that exists within the broader universe of America. Writer Lee Sung Jin not only captures the outer setting of Korean churches and Asians in White-dominated professional spaces but also what lies beneath the waters within each of his characters. The characters’ decisions are their own, yet informed by their cultural backgrounds. Thus, Lee captures the quiet grief and rage of people of Asian descent living in America, that feeling of screaming on the inside while smiling and being polite on the outside.Fumi, Amy’s mother-in-law, is ferocious. When she’s not coddling her precious adult son, George (or Joji), Fumi seems to make it her life’s mission to make Amy miserable. The house Amy designed is never posh enough, and she’s way too harsh on her daughter, June, Fumi’s granddaughter.