Call me a Chinese auntie. Better yet, celebrate auntie power with me

“You’ve seen her, you’ve been her, you are her or you’re going to be her,” I wrote in a social media post for the event I was organising. The middle-aged Asian woman had languished for far too long in pop culture as a comedic cliché, I went on, but she was coming into her own now, as “Michelle Yeoh in her shapeless knitted vest and nurse shoes badassing in Everything Everywhere All At Once; Sandra Oh in her tiger-mum – oops, no – red-panda guise commandeering stadium space, the ladies who lunch in Crazy Rich Asians who power gossip”.

I have the lived experience of an auntie, of course, as gugu (paternal aunt) to four studious preteens. But in making that call, I was also channelling some academic theory and minoritised-person activism – particularly the work of the Critical Aunty Studies initiative pioneered by researcher Kareem Khubchandani, which speaks to the efficacy of neighbourhood gossip networks, unorthodox lifehacks and such.