The Brothers Sun & The Crisis of Conservative Motherhood
Image; Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision
The Brothers Sun is, in many ways, a vehicle for Michelle Yeoh to kick ass and look fabulous doing it. It’s about the matriarch of the Jade Dragons crime family, Mama Sun, who is fighting to protect her two sons from both internal and external threats. Yeoh is the star and highlight of the series, and there are definitely scenes where Mama Sun walks into a room with a stunning outfit, and the whole point is to go “damn, she is a boss."
Yet the show has more to say than merely showing off how amazing Michelle Yeoh can be. At its core is a text dissecting the misogyny that holds Mama Sun and her children back from a more fulfilling life. The "power" given to conservative mothers such as Mama Sun for maintaining patriarchy is cast aside for the illusion that it is, and we, as the viewers, are left questioning what remains in its place.
Mama bears, powerful or caged?
Michelle Yeoh's role as a mother comes front and center in this series. Mama Sun has sacrificed everything, including her entire life in Taipei, for the chance to protect her children. It's learned that she developed an elaborate contingency plan that involved her having to go into hiding in America with her son Bruce (Sam Li). She is the ultimate "Mama Bear" — the longstanding trope of typically passive women going into attack mode when their children are threatened that you can see everywhere from Demeter to "The Bride" in Kill Bill — and we are at least initially meant to see strength in that presentation.
Much of the initial thrill of The Brothers Sun comes from honoring the aspects of motherhood that our society normally devalues. For example, while her son, Charles (Justin Chien), briefly derides her regularly going to play mahjong with the aunties as mere "gossip," we learn that that gossip is partially the source of her power. Her triad name is "Rolodex," and those ladies hold essential information in her community, providing information that gives her an easy edge over her competitors.
In fact, there is one endearing scene where the aunties come to the rescue. A rogue group has captured Mamma Sun, and Bruce brings the aunties into a heavily armed warehouse, using them as human shields and, in effect, weaponizing how society undervalues oldness. Through this scene, we are meant to see the utility in this disregarded and "gossipy" group of conservative mothers.
However, the powerful institution Mama Sun is a part of is inherently conservative. The Triads are surrounded by arcane rituals tied to traditionalistic (and conservative) power structures. The triads depicted in the show take pride in having their roots allegedly in ancient monarchy. As her husband, Big Sun (Johnny Kou), says: "I'm reminded of our forefathers who stood against emperors," drawing on that perceived history in his bid to become a sort of Triad Emperor known as the "Dragon Head."
Yet, for all the alleged power Mama Sun has accrued, Triad society doesn't respect women that much. Her husband is the head of the Jade Dragons, even though she is the brains of his operation, and her son Charles, in episode four, expects to take over if her husband dies, despite her being very much alive. When the Jade Dragons try to meet face to face with another Triad group (an event referred to as a "square"), the head of said Triad insists that Mama Sun shouldn't come, saying: "…it would be an insult to have a woman at the center of such a historic meeting."
For most of the series, Mama Sun tries to claw her way to the top of the Jade Dragons and eventually the entire Triad hierarchy to lean in, if you will. And at least initially, no one believes in her, not even her son Bruce, who she has arguably sacrificed the most for. This complete disregard especially applies to her husband, who makes it abundantly clear how little he respects her, saying:
“You were a privileged, spoiled brat. And I convinced you that you were sacrificing for a larger purpose. But the only purpose you were serving was… me."
In this scene The Brother Sun beautifully illustrates how she was never serving herself. As with every patriarchal institution, Mamma Sun can only be seen as powerful in relation to the men above her. She can do incredible feats on behalf of these men, whether that be her husband or her children, but never for herself — and that's a shame because, as we shall soon see, conservative motherhood isn't even able to protect the very children it claims to protect.
Patriarchy hurts everyone
For all the talk of protecting her children, Mamma Sun can do nothing to stop the men she is bound to serve from harming those she loves. For example, despite it not being something she wanted, she is powerless to stop her husband from turning her eldest son, Charles, into an unrivaled killing machine for the Jade Dragons. This is because her desires are secondary to those of her husbands, who sees his family members as tools, extensions of himself to be used as he sees hit.
Charles goes through profound psychological trauma in becoming a killing machine — trauma that is not unusual for our patriarchal society. It was Bell Hooks, in her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004), who wrote:
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”
At least initially, Charles deadens himself emotionally in order to enact violence. He is stoic and passive, clinging to concepts such as family to justify the horrors he perpetuates. And as Hooks suggests, this is not just an internal process but one continually reinforced by the male influences in his life. As Charles says of his father, Big Sun's, reaction to the first time he killed people en masse: "Ba said it was the emperor inside of me, the need to protect my family. [He] told me to embrace it."
As we can see, Charles's violence is not only reinforced by the male characters in his life, but men like his father link the violence of the Triads to their ancestral legacy. There is no separation between the violence these men wield and the "mantle of heaven" they claim to represent. Its legitimacy built on the domination of others, and we, as the viewer, are meant to be conflicted by it.
As the show starts to grapple with the f@cked-up nature of the Triad patriarchy, the coolness factor behind their violence starts to fade. After all, The Brothers Sun can only be considered cool and fun when it mostly separates the violence of what the Triads do — human trafficking, sexual exploitation, etc. (activities that are often backed by literal violence and slavery) — from the Sun family itself. It would be hard to find Charles as sexy and endearing if we saw him rounding up the enslaved people the family keeps in line for profit.
That edgy facade is ripped to shreds once the family's initial enemies are revealed to be young radicals called the Boxers, who resent these activities the Triads profit from. With the mantra "the riddance of evil must be thorough," the Boxers are a group that wants to tear down the triad system and replace it with something more ethical. As the Boxer member Grace (Madison Hu) tells Bruce Sun:
“The original Triads were rebels, organized to fight against corruption and oppression. Not anymore. Now they’re the oppressors. The Boxers were formed to push back against them. We’re a faceless collective fighting against the suppressors of our people. A mandate of heaven. And right now, protecting our people means destroying the Triads completely….”
Bruce knows that the Boxers are in the right, supplying them with information several times to aid in their efforts, but he understandably doesn't want to see his family die. The emotional pull of his fraternal relationship with Charles overrides his ideals as he tries, almost impossibly so, to find a way forward. Mama Sun, Bruce, and Charles spend the rest of the season being torn between these two poles of regressive patriarchy and radical revolution. We are left with a painful pulling away from the conservative ideal of family, even as the Suns must fend off from this new radical faction. Family members and friends are killed. Trust is broken. All to claw away from the Triad patriarchy and try to make something new.
We don't quite know what the Suns will settle on, but the deconstruction of the patriarchal system is at the forefront of it. The Triad system is depicted as something that actively hurts all those involved and whose principles are nothing more than padding meant to rationalize the violence it doles out. As Charles says to his father in the final episode of the first season: "We aren't an idea. We are just gangs of men fighting over property."
As the show comes to a close, the best thing we are told to do is to leave patriarchy and all the violence used to reinforce it behind, and nowhere is that more salient than the path set forward by Mama Sun.
When the yoke is broken
What happens when the conservative mother's submission is broken? What replaces it? In the final episode, Mama Sun appears to be taking over the Jade Dragons. Perhaps all The Brothers Sun will offer us next season is a neoliberal type of lean-in politics where the spurned mom gets the power she "deserves," ignoring the morally despicable reality of Triad politics: an institution that cannot be reformed and only abolished.
Yet, even if that is all we receive, the rebuke of the conservative mother in this first season has been a treat to watch. The crisis of conservative motherhood is something that has more far-reaching consequences than just the empowerment of one individual or even a group of individuals because, in many ways, a mother's silence is what keeps the entire conservative family together. Men are not the only ones to psychically mutilate themselves in support of patriarchy. Conservative women provide a vital service to this system, reinforcing it as much as they are oppressed by it. The men they support require their care, aid, and sometimes even violence to dominate at all.
There would be no Jade Dragons without Mama Sun, even if she was not directly acknowledged for all of her efforts, and there would be no patriarchy without the many women who conform to and oppress other women in the name of the men they serve.