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Illustration by Brooklin Holbrough
My adult children ask me why I watch the TV series House.
They are surprised to see their mother, someone who stands up for women’s rights, speaks against misogyny and bristles at subtle and overt acts of racism, watch a show from the mid-2000s where the main character regularly throws out sexist and racist lines at women characters and people of colour.
I’m not sure why I’m so compelled to watch all eight seasons on Netflix. Is it the main character played by Hugh Laurie? Is it the repeating storylines? Is it the fact that an impossible problem presented at the beginning of the show is always resolved by the end? Predictability is reassuring.
Laurie’s character – Dr. House – is a man in pain. The pain is both physical and emotional and constant with varying degrees of intensity. At all times, he broods. Nothing is sacred, nothing is off limits. He believes everyone lies and the only way to find the truth is to generate an honest knee-jerk reaction to situations he creates. It’s a distraction from his pain. His unorthodox behaviour often contributes to his genius in diagnosing rare diseases, which makes him invaluable in the hospital. Some characters tolerate his games and childish attacks for they recognize them as socially awkward attempts at connecting. With the passage of time, and the experience of loss and struggle, House does mature in small increments. But at a cost, as he wears out and tears down the people whom he loves.
This type of emotional struggle is all too familiar to me, a female member of a visible minority growing up in Toronto in the late 1960s through to the 1980s.
During this period, the roles of women began evolving rapidly in the workplace. But the roles of women changed less quickly in my Korean-Canadian community. As more women were found in different work forces, the attitudes of men were mostly respectful with sexist remarks thrown about in male-dominated industries. People respected the sanctity of lines drawn and tried not to cross them. When crossed, unforeseen consequences could ensue: violence of all types, physical, emotional, verbal.
As visible minority immigrants, my family stood out from a mostly homogeneous society. We stood apart not only in appearance but in the way expectations within the family were enforced. As children, we learned that everyone not part of our family was an outsider. And an outsider would never help or understand us, what it means to be us. So, family issues were kept within the family.
As I look back, I wonder if I’m smoothing out the rough edges of a reality that was harsh within the Korean-Canadian community. I remember watching my mother work so hard in the kitchen to serve my father. I remember my mother’s hushed tone when answering my questions about the black and blue bruises on the face of her friend, whose husband held firm to the ways of the old world. A little man with a lot to say and definitive opinions. On another occasion, I was sexually harassed by my parent’s friend, the father of a fellow college student, but my mother dismissed my shock and outrage as being childish and ignorant of the ways of the world.
The men of my father’s generation were survivors of the Korean War that decimated their land, made many orphans and left them struggling to recapture a world lost: A world of tightly knit families and communities; a world of hierarchy and fixed gender roles. These men and their families moved to live in a new world diverging more and more widely from the one remembered from their homeland. We children bear the scars of this dissonance and now, as our parents age into fragility, we must find the path to forgiveness.
And that’s why House appeals to me.
The feelings of frustration, anger and exasperation I experience while watching are pale shadows of my formative years. At the same time, the line of hope, that underlies all that happens on the series also has a familiar pull. The sense of order and the need for order is the same in the hospital as it was in my community’s struggle to apply a frozen patriarchal hierarchy to families living in an evolving new country. Just like in the show, facing impossible problems and solving them through trial and error to land in a place both better and worse is reminiscent of the struggles I faced to get to where I am now.
And where am I now? Starting the last third of my life and watching House, a show that both reminds me of my past and makes me hope for a better future in the kindness and forgiveness of friends and family.
And, perhaps, of myself.
Judy An lives in Thornhill, Ont.