Sometimes I can’t cry, no matter how much I feel like crying, no matter how much there is to cry about. The feeling is physical as much as it is emotional, a sort of plugged-up heaviness behind my eyes, a tension in my chest. Often, I’ve felt frustrated and ashamed by this, my inability to cry when it feels most appropriate — when saying goodbye to friends before a cross-country move, when someone I love has died, when in the middle of a global pandemic and a national uprising at the same time, watching more of my illusions about safety and stability crumble every day. I begin to take for granted that I just can’t cry much, and then, while watching a nostalgic show about pre-teen girls, I find myself tearing up.
Though I didn’t grow up reading the Baby-Sitters Club books, I loved the Netflix remake right away. It’s funny, warm, and real, gently addressing issues like death, estrangement, the semi-parental role of an older sibling, and the tender awkwardness between a biracial kid and her white dad.
I cried the most during an episode about babysitter Claudia Kishi. Fourth-generation Japanese American, she doesn’t speak Japanese and knows about the World War II incarceration only as a historical event, not as a trauma her grandmother Mimi experienced as a child. After a stroke, Mimi appears trapped in those memories, able to say only a few words in English: “peach” for the canned peaches she grew sick of in the camp mess hall; “horse” and “house” for the horse stalls that served as a temporary “assembly center,” where her family was forced to stay for months until the Army finished building the more permanent camps.
“I don’t understand how someone could do that to a family,” Claudia says, when her older sister, Janine, explains.
“I don’t understand why they still do,” says Janine.
Takayo Fischer, the actress who plays Mimi, shares the incarceration experience with her character; no matter how many times I rewatch these scenes, her facial expressions and the Japanese accent she uses after her stroke make me cry reflexively, as if they’re pulling a lever buried deep in my heart.
I’ve never cried that way for my own great aunts and uncles, who were also incarcerated in the desert during the war. Though I’m not a direct descendant of the camps, these relatives helped my mom come to the United States from Japan in the 1970s and became surrogate grandparents to my brothers and me. The two times I visited Manzanar, the camp where Mimi lived, I walked the grounds, wishing that I could picture my relatives living in such a setting, that I could have an emotional catharsis in order to feel a deeper connection with them, but instead I felt mostly sunbaked and stunned.
I wondered why I could cry for characters in a lighthearted show more easily than I could for my own family. I remembered how, months earlier, I had a similar response to an episode of the sitcom “Superstore.” In the last episode of its second season, a tornado rips through the store with surprising violence, throwing shelves and people to the ground, making the same kind of earth-churning groan as the earthquakes that still frighten me every time they happen in Los Angeles. Two seasons in, the tone of the show is established such that I don’t expect any of the characters to die during the disaster, but they cling to each other and pray and laugh hysterically as if they don’t know they’re in a sitcom. How does it feel when the worst appears to be happening? By then at home under shelter-in-place orders, I hadn’t cried about the pandemic, but I sobbed for the Cloud 9 employees as I watched the show alone late at night.
The actual tornado scene lasts only three minutes, and though the store is destroyed, no people are killed or injured. Like “The Baby-Sitters Club,” “Superstore” is a comedy of happy, if sometimes complicated, endings. Through the established expectations of their genre, they signal that you can let down your guard, knowing that in the end you’ll be restored with a dose of optimism, unlike in the chaotic real world.
As I thought about it, I realized how many times comedies and feel-good stories had given me this kind of emotional relief over the years. As a teenager, I broke long dry-spells of crying with movies like “Lilo & Stitch” and “13 Going on 30,” realizing in hindsight the pressure points they touched in my own life: the isolation of moving and constantly starting over at new schools, the bittersweetness of leaving home for college, the recognition that I’d lost bonding time with my younger brothers by prioritizing my friends over family. I still remember these moments years later because of how good it felt — not healing, really, but necessary — to take a feeling locked in me and let it out into the world.
Earlier in the pandemic I worried all the time, about my high-risk parents and my brother who works in a high-risk job. I’ve managed over the months to turn the worry down, but still when the question arises — What if they get the virus? — there’s no magical thinking, no happy-ending genre rule that can lower the stakes. But I don’t think these shows are trying to erase tragedy, either. Rather, they create an atmosphere warm enough to make tragedy bearable.
One of my favorite examples of this kind of emotionally disarming show is “Never Have I Ever,” a teen rom-com that is really about protagonist Devi Vishwakumar acknowledging her grief over her father’s death. Reminders of his absence appear throughout a landscape of cheerful pop music, brightly colored clothes, and wholesome friendships. Frequent flashbacks to his life create a layered timeline, making him feel almost alive to us, just as dreams that he’s back in the living room watching tennis matches make him momentarily almost alive to Devi.
There’s an element of wish-fulfillment to these narratives — not just that we’ll make it through the disaster alive, but that we can keep those we love close to us through memory, creating our own layered timeline where every life goes on, in a way, forever. At the end of the “Baby-Sitters Club” episode about Mimi’s stroke, Claudia has picked up a book about the incarceration and used it to paint an image of a small girl wearing a numbered tag on her coat, waiting for the train to take her to camp. Claudia will remember Mimi’s experience and share it with others so they remember, too, the painting implies. The optimism of this moment is at once tiny and boundless. I try to hold onto it as the credits roll.