#tigermoms

“Things My Mom Says I Can Do” 

           It seems as though modern American television struggles with assigning diverse roles to Asian actors. Ever since Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee quite literally started kicking out action movies out to the masses, Asian roles within the U.S. started limiting themselves to either a high-flying, glamorous fighting role, or an overplayed and overdone role as a ‘strict’ parent to the obviously prodigious Asian child. Such is the case in the American fantasy thriller series, Supernatural. Within this are a couple of standard and stereotypical acting roles, including the smart Asian kid and the ‘strict’ Tiger-Mom: Kevin Tran and Linda Tran respectively.

           Linda Tran, played by Khaira Ledeyo, is the mother of the impossibly brilliant Kevin Tran, a short Vietnamese kid who was destined for an Ivy-league, elite education at Princeton. In the very beginning of Kevin’s introduction in Season 7, he gives us an idea of how his mom has raised him simply by the conversation he shares with his girlfriend. He was always raised to be the smartest kid in his class, he plays the cello like no other, he obsesses over an essay topic for the SATs that he doesn’t even know the topic to yet. It seems as though already, within their pilot episode Reading is Fundamental, we get an idea of how our Tiger-Mom here has raised Kevin Tran.

           Moving on to Linda’s appearances in the show, we see a lot of parallels between a Tiger-Mom raising her child in a normal environment, and a Tiger-Mom raising her child in hellish and adventurous conditions. Outside of her home, Linda’s focuses from Kevin’s typical studies and instruments have been refocused towards survival because of Kevin’s involvement in the Supernatural world. However, she brings the same intensity and the same Tiger-Mom attitude towards it. Whenever Kevin messes up a trap or a sigil to ward off demons, Linda yells at him. Whenever Kevin tries to check out a girl (a.k.a. expressing minimal sexual desire), she rebukes him. Essentially, whenever Kevin refocuses his interests from his duties/responsibilities towards something else, she’s there to scold him. So even though one could surmise that Linda Tran doesn’t express Tiger Mom-like qualities because of the situation and circumstance she’s in, I’d argue that she expresses the same behavior and attitude, and therefore emulates the Tiger-Mom role. Thus, this show clearly reinforces the role of an Asian mother as this strict, Tiger-Mom persona.

-Akshay Sadeeshkumar

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