The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
4 — Wednesday, March 16, 2022

“FEELINGS” ARE AMONG the hard-

est concepts to grasp, and even harder to 
reflect on enough to write about them. I 
once heard that the more specific art gets, 
the more universally relatable it becomes. I 
am proud of how these writers, compiling 
their hearts for “The Empathy B-Side,” have 
parsed all the tiny details of their feelings, 
opening their minds and lives to readers 
and bringing their emotions together into a 
collection guaranteed to tear at your heart 
and knit it back into one piece. It is hard to 
create one definition of a feeling: Everyone 
wears grief differently, and same goes for 
love, humor, horror. Thank god we have 
our favorite books and movies and video 
games and songs as shining mercies to point 
to and connect over with others, or at least 
feel a connection to these pieces that have 

helped us learn more about ourselves. Art 
serves as a constant reminder that we are 

unravelled and put back together at the 
hands and the grace of others.

I WASN’T EXPECTING anything in par-

ticular when I sent my DNA collection kit to 
23andMe, but I was still met with a confusing 
ambivalence when I got my results back a few 
weeks later. Before I found myself staring at a pie 
chart filled with just one color and its accompa-
nying “100% Chinese & Southeast Asian” label, I 
had only ever thought of my ethnicity in abstract 
terms.

The circumstances of my birth are entirely 

unknown to me. As far as I know, my life started 
when I was about two months old, but even that 
is just a supposition. I’ve been told by my moth-
er, who was told by the orphanage from which 
I was adopted, that I was found as an about-
two-month-old baby in front of a high school in 
central China. The people at the orphanage (a 
faceless, disembodied monolith that only exists 
in my vague and infrequent references to it) gave 
me a birthday — Jan. 1, a ballpark guess — and a 
name that’s still legally mine even in my adoptive 
country, but that I never use and haven’t spoken 

aloud in years.

Growing up, my family theorized that I might 

be half white, an idea I went along with whole-
heartedly. In retrospect, I’ve realized that this 
idea is intensely problematic, especially coming 
from my white adoptive family, especially as 
it was almost entirely based on superficial and 
reaching observations about my physical fea-
tures. I have a natural double eyelid, something 
that a lot of Asian women go through cosmetic 
surgery to obtain, and I have relatively fair skin, 
which somehow managed to be a point in this 
theory’s favor, even though a lot of Chinese peo-
ple have fairer skin than mine. For years, I touted 
this idea as if it somehow made me more interest-
ing, but all it ever really did was reveal my des-
peration to be able to personally claim whiteness.

It was probably the vestiges of this despera-

tion and the deeper, internalized racial biases it 
revealed that, admittedly, led to disappointment 
in finding out I was indisputably, unequivocally, 
100% Chinese, but upon further introspection, I 
realized that there was something else contrib-
uting to my ambivalence.

I’ve spent most of my life feeling like a fraud in 

my own skin. There has always been a dissocia-

tion between me and my ethnicity, created by my 
physical and intellectual distance from the cul-
ture I was born into and exacerbated by interac-
tions with people who felt they could make final 
judgments about my Asianness (or, in most cases, 
lack thereof), even and sometimes, especially, in 
spaces meant to educate me about and encourage 
my Asianness.

Even though it was just confirming something 

about me that was always more likely to be true 
than a half-baked theory about having a white 
parent, I thought that having categorical proof 
that I was indisputably, unequivocally, 100% 
Chinese might resolve something about my 
identity for me, make me feel more comfortable 
claiming this part of me even if others doubted 
it — but it didn’t resolve anything. This indeter-
mination, this tangle of identity and internalized 
racism and “culturelessness” is something that 
I’ve come to a kind of restless, uncertain peace 
with. Usually, I love finding answers, I love reso-
lutions, but this is something that — not for lack 
of trying — I’ve come to realize I may never be 
able to fully reconcile.

The Empathy B-Side

‘It feels like a costume’: Validating my cultural 

uncertainty with Diane Nguyen

‘Piglet’s Big Movie’ and 

my big emotions

I WAS AN anxious kid. It sounds 

like the beginning of a bit, but it’s 
true. I was anxious about a lot of 
things. Sleep was a big one: I would 
spend a lot of nights thinking about 
how I wasn’t falling asleep, which in 
turn made it harder to fall asleep. I 
was plagued with other irrational 
anxieties — that no one liked me, 
that my family would forget about 
me, that something catastrophic 
would completely upend my life.

Like a lot of kids, I watched 

Winnie the Pooh when I was little, 
specifically the 2003 spinoff film 
“Piglet’s Big Movie.” I remember 
being most captivated not by Pooh 
or Tigger or Christopher Robin, but 
by Piglet, the small, anxiety-ridden 
stuffed pig. And it wasn’t until more 
recently that I understood why.

In 2000, there was a study pub-

lished in a Canadian medical journal 
positing a theory that “diagnosed” 
all of the Winnie the Pooh charac-
ters, showing that they could all be 

representations of various psycho-
logical disorders. According to the 
study, Pooh and Tigger both had 
forms of ADHD, Eeyore suffered 
from dysthymia (depression), Owl 
was dyslexic and Rabbit had a form 
of what might be narcissistic per-
sonality disorder. Piglet, of course, 
was diagnosed with General Anxi-
ety Disorder.

The study was mostly done as a 

tongue-in-cheek thought experi-
ment, but there is certainly truth 
to some of the claims. When I first 
learned about this in my intro-
ductory psychology class, I found 
myself overwhelmed by a feeling of 
comprehension. This was why I had 
always felt so connected to Piglet. 
We saw the world in a similar way, 
and we shared some of the same 
anxieties.

It’s true that it’s a little strange to 

be so drawn to a character whose 
catchphrase is “Oh, d-d-dear!,” but 
I know that I’m not the only one. 
Piglet is not flashy like Tigger, ador-
able like Roo or silly like Pooh. And 
yet there’s something so relatable 
about him and his fears that it makes 
grown adults put their hand over 
their heart and affectionately evoke 
his name. He is beloved by many, 
including me.

In many Winnie the Pooh stories, 

Piglet is overshadowed; in “Piglet’s 
Big Movie,” though, he finally gets a 
chance to shine. “Piglet’s Big Movie” 
follows the crew of Pooh (Jim Cum-
mings, “Christopher Robin”), Tig-
ger (also Cummings), Rabbit (Ken 
Sansom, “The New Adventures of 
Winnie the Pooh”), Eeyore (Peter 
Cullen, “Transformers: The Last 
Knight”) and Roo (Nikita Hopkins, 
“Pooh’s Heffalump Movie”). The 
group, thinking they’ve lost Piglet 
(John Fiedler, “The Many Adven-
tures of Winnie the Pooh”), start 
following a scrapbook of memories 
to give them clues as to his where-
abouts and end up reminiscing on 
the memories themselves. It’s true 
that it’s riddled with plot holes (Pig-
let is supposedly also looking for his 
friends, and they somehow never 
run into each other at all — the Hun-
dred Acre Wood isn’t that big, is it?), 
but it’s a kid’s movie that packs a 
more emotional punch into a short 
75 minutes than most movies pack 
into a full runtime. Also, it has ador-
able, catchy songs by ’70s folk queen 
Carly Simon.

I watched this movie a lot as a kid, 

and I always loved it. In some ways, 
it’s a very goofy movie; my sister and 
I loved quoting our favorite lines at 
each other because some of them are 
so comically random and randomly 
comical. But the other half of the 
film’s emotional impact is the focus 
on Piglet’s anxieties and on the way 
that his friends neglected him. To 
this day, this movie makes me cry 
every time I watch it.

There’s 
a 
running 
theme 

throughout the movie that Piglet 

is “too small.” Piglet’s smallness is 
a reason that they leave him out of 
some of their wild antics; it’s the rea-
son that they instantly jump to the 
conclusion that Piglet is in trouble 
once they can’t find him. Piglet is 
made to believe that his size means 
that he isn’t a helpful or useful friend 
to rely on. But with the musical 
number “If I Wasn’t So Small,” he 
starts doing a bunch of small deeds 
— helping a ladybug cross to another 
plant, helping a squirrel get a “hay-
corn” and helping a bird get back to 
its nest. That’s all it takes to reverse 
his mindset — he can be helpful. 
And when he thinks that his friends 
are in trouble, he sets aside all of his 
anxieties to go after them.

His friends, however, take lon-

ger to come around. Throughout 
the film, as they move through 
the memories, there’s a recurring 
thread of Piglet’s deeds getting over-
shadowed or the credit for his work 
getting stolen by someone else. And 
Piglet usually just accepts it. There’s 
a moment of “b-b-but,” but in the 
end he always smiles and lets his 
friends have their moment: He just 

wants other people to be happy. It’s 
not until they’re running through 
the stories again that they realize 
everything he has done for them and 
how they never let him know how 
much they love and respect him.

For me, the emotional pinnacle 

hits in the third act of the movie. 
Pooh and co., trying to stay out of the 
rain, have returned to Piglet’s house, 
dejected. They’ve lost the scrapbook, 
and they’ve lost hope of finding Pig-
let. A poignant Carly Simon song, 
“The More I Look Inside,” plays as 
the crew laments their inability to 
find their friend and that they had 
failed to appreciate him before now.

And then everything begins to 

flip. They start to draw their own 
pictures in the style of Piglet’s scrap-
book: stories of times that Piglet 
helped them. They draw him as a 
knight, an explorer, an adventurer 
— not someone meek and anxious, 
but someone bold and confident. 
But in my most recent rewatch, the 
part that made me cry the most was 
when cranky, cantankerous Rabbit 
held up the picture he’d drawn of 
him and Piglet, with two beautiful, 
simple words: “My friend.”

At the end, when Piglet returns to 

his house to find all of the drawings 
that his friends have made for him, 
his eyes fill with tears. So do mine. 
Because in the eyes of his friends, he 
isn’t small — he’s big, and brave, and 
bright.

All these years later, there are 

three main things that I learned 
from “Piglet’s Big Movie” that have 
stuck with me:

1. Don’t take your friends for 

granted. A true friend will do things 
without being asked, but that doesn’t 
mean that you shouldn’t appreciate 
them.

2. A small act of kindness is just 

as generous as a large one. Taking a 
small part of your day to make some-
one’s life easier is gratifying, wheth-
er you get recognition for it or not.

3. Being anxious doesn’t mean 

that you can’t be brave. Being small 
doesn’t mean that you can’t be a 
hero.

When it comes to empathy, we 

usually talk about trying to put your-
self in someone else’s shoes, trying 
to understand someone else’s emo-
tional experience from their point 
of view. For me, “Piglet’s Big Movie” 
was never really about empathy, 
because it was already something I 
connected with. I saw Piglet’s anxi-
eties and saw my own. I saw him left 
out by his friends and was reminded 
of some of my own friendships. I 
saw him keep trying to be seen, to 
love and be loved, and I related. And 
when I saw Piglet push through his 
fears to help his friends, I felt like 
that was something I could do too. 
I could also be brave, even when it 
scared me.

Design by Tamara Turner

Design by Jennie Vang

 ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI

Senior Arts Editor

KARI ANDERSON

Daily Arts Writer

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By Darryl Gonzalez
©2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
03/16/22

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

03/16/22

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, March 16, 2022

ACROSS

1 Semi-hard 

cheese

5 Windows 

navigation aids

9 Come together

14 Block party 

item?

15 Memo abbr.
16 Atlanta campus
17 Heaps

river

19 “Check it out!”
20 *Monday NFL 

contests, e.g.

23 Boo
24 Seemingly 

forever

27 “12 Days” septet
30 Drink with 

formaggio

31 Spa sound
33 Garden pest
34 Keto and South 

Beach

35 Tech sch. near 

Albany, N.Y.

36 Transvaal settler
37 Newspaper VIPs
38 Econ. 

barometers

39 Front-end car 

cover

40 First stage
42 Skins
43 ABA member
44 Quarterback-

turned-analyst 
Tony

45 “A Gallery of 

Children” author

46 Food court pizza 

seller

48 Grafton who 

wrote 25 
“Alphabet 
Mystery” books

49 WWI German 

vice admiral

50 What happens 

on March 20, 
2022, at 11:33 
a.m. ... and what 
both parts of 
the answers to 
starred clues are

56 Analyze in a 

grammar lesson

58 Perth put-offs
59 Joint malady
60 Symbol for 

turning traffic

61 Snake River 

jumper Knievel

62 Stare in wonder
63 Video call 

option

64 “Hey” assistant

firstborn

DOWN

1 Verve
2 Sub contractor?
3 Visibly awed
4 Light-loving flier
5 Dances like 

the one seen in 
“Evita”

6 Thai or Laotian
7 Pain soother
8 Like a sprint 

winner

9 Bit of RAM

10 Face with tears 

of joy, for one

11 *View from the 

Oval Office

12 *Granny Smith, 

e.g.

13 Observer
21 Mind
22 Email tab
26 Palindromic 

33-Down hit

27 *Multi-field 

athletic venue

28 *Crunchy salad 

add-in

29 __ guitar
30 Vintage MTV 

staple

33 26-Down group
34 State capital on 

its own river

38 Toothpaste 

choice

40 The Boston 

Bruins retired his 
#4 in 1979

41 Swed. neighbor
42 Berth place
45 Granola relative
47 “Zeus and 

the Tortoise” 
storyteller

48 Texas ranger?
49 Massage spots
51 “Avatar” race
52 Breakfast items
53 Biblical builder
54 Hornswoggle
55 Originate (from)
57 Lea grazer

SUDOKU

WHISPER

“Why do I have 
to get an intern-
ship?”

“Thursdays are 
the new Friday.”

WHISPER

By Stella Zawistowski
©2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
03/09/22

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

03/09/22

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, March 9, 2022

ACROSS

1 Expand, as bread 

dough

5 Lift option

13 Responsibility
14 It borders It.
15 Crown-wearing 

literary elephant

16 Work out like a 

hairdresser?

19 Time worth 

naming

20 Late time, in ads
21 Bills worth a 

hundo

22 Enjoy a La-Z-Boy

interjections

25 A lot, to Auden
26 Mother of life, in 

Greek myth

27 Needing to be 

settled

30 Work out like a 

bartender?

35 Evidence of 

shortages, for 
short

36 Catch, as a flick
37 __ menu
38 Work out like a 

fine artist?

43 Good buddy
44 Little winged 

singer

45 Slice (off)
46 Crew implement
47 Top-flight
51 Training song in 


55 Protagonist of 

novels

56 Exec with the 

purse strings

57 Work out like a 

stockbroker?

60 Be worthy of

counterparts

62 Destine for failure
63 Partner of ends
64 Avonlea adoptee
65 Numero dopo le 

sette

DOWN

1 Rodeo performer
2 Accustom (to)
3 Component of 

the spice blend 

4 Medium ability
5 Take advantage 

of

6 Raised landform
7 Tennis immortal
8 U.S. __ 1, East 

Coast hwy.

9 Saintly symbol

10 Share a border 

with

11 Tinseled fabric
12 Half of seis
15 Literally, “tray 


17 Bring together
18 Parental control 

option

23 Much, casually
24 Relaxed
27 Gregorius of the 

Phillies

28 Either of two 

Monopoly 
properties that 
Abbr.

29 Ballpark figs.
30 Have trouble with 


31 Where much of 

“Children of the 

32 Coal, for one

33 Arena worker
34 Harvests
39 Like many 

a Broadway 
musical

40 Bingham of 


41 Conic section
42 Canapé base, 

often

47 Sing like Michael 

Bublé

48 Slide (over)

49 Otherwise
50 “Fun Fearless 


51 Company 

message

52 Cut
54 Centenarian 

fashion icon Apfel

55 Fork-tailed flier
58 Relaxing resort
59 Courtroom 

affirmation

KATRINA STEBBINS

Senior Arts Editor

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

