Labour of Love: Alienation, Race, and Family in Julia Cho’s <i>Aubergine</i>

Julia Cho’s Aubergine (2016) illustrates a conflicted relationship between a Korean father and a Korean American son that both identifies and challenges familiar sets of binary paradigms around race, gender, and labour. While Asian labour has frequently been marginalized and devalued throughout history through the reproduction of racial stereotypes, Aubergine deconstructs such imagery by depicting an Asian American chef who restores the labour of cooking to its original meaning by making food for his dying father. This restored labour of cooking restores filial love as well: Cho turns the father-son conflict caused by labour into a father-son reconciliation enabled by the value of work. After analysing how domestic labour in general and culinary labour in particular have been racialized, gendered, and undervalued for Asian Americans, I examine how Cho simultaneously recuperates working lives and Asian American father-son relationships. Through this process, I illuminate the importance of labour in thinking about family conflicts in Asian American drama more broadly.