‘The Middle’: How white trash is similar to the immigrant experience

This 2010s American sitcom about a poor white family hit the spot of relatability for me, as a brown girl.

Growing up Asian, at least for me, meant number one, you weren’t allowed to hang out with friends outside of school. 

Those were one of those incomprehensible rules our parents had for us, and thus began a childhood of being sheltered from the outside world. 

“Why do you need to go to the mall with your friends?” my parents would rhetorically ask me. “Go to your room and study.” So that’s what I did. Sort of. 

I’d go downstairs and turn on the TV, watching hours of shows and movies unbothered because my parents kind of forgot I existed, naturally, as a middle child. 

Before iPads and TikTok, being a loner kid during the summer in the 2010s meant cable TV was my lifeline–really, just anything would be my lifeline in an immigrant household; anything I could get my hands on and away from my traditional parents was like sounding the bells of freedom. 

I would flick through the channels we had, such as ABC, Disney, Cartoon Network, and my favorite, ABC Family, which is now known as Freeform. 

Leave it to 14-year-old me to watch obscure and questionable movies and TV shows on these monotonous channels that adults and senior citizens were watching, because what kid would be indoors watching TV at 2 PM instead of being outside riding their bike or going to the mall?

Moving past random historical documentaries, “Wheel of Fortune,” and even “Children of Men,” which was terrifyingly amazing to watch as a preteen, I stumbled across a random episode of a sitcom. 

It seemed like the type of content you keep on while scrolling through your phone or talking to your friends. But remember, I didn’t really have friends to text, so I really did just watch television. 

An episode of “The Middle” came on. Specifically, a season 1 episode titled “The Break Up” in which eldest son Axl Heck is dealing with his first heartbreak after the head cheerleader he’d been crushing on rejects him. Middle child Sue and her younger brother Brick are spooked by a zombie movie they shouldn’t have watched at night. 

And of course, the parents are arguing about how to raise these children.  

What struck me about what I just spent the past 5 minutes watching with the TV remote in hand, almost about to skip, but didn’t, was that it was weird. 

It was weird because I instantly saw similarities between the Heck siblings and my own. I was also refreshingly surprised by the parents’ dynamic, which made me feel better for having a dysfunctional family whose main form of communication was through yelling. 

I wouldn’t quite describe the shows I was seeing at the time as “weird.” While the internet and my peers would stargaze at “Friends” or “The Office,” I never quite understood the appeal. 

All I saw was a bunch of white people hanging around each other, reaping the benefits of their whiteness. I’m not a Monica or a Rachel, and I am definitely not the boss of a paper company that gets away with discrimination and emotional damage against its workers. 

Friends, peers, and the millennials on my TikTok always praise these shows to extreme lengths, deeming them as culturally important, relatable, and representative of the average person’s experience in a big city, small town, or their workplace. 

But I never got it. 

I could watch said shows and enjoy them, but only at the surface level. I’d simply look around the room and say to myself, “This is some white people sh*t.”

But eventually, “The Middle” became my comfort show. A show about a lower-middle-class family in Indiana and the chaos of having kids while being in the middle. 

In a world that felt so isolated to me as a young brown girl balancing American and Bengali values, “The Middle” was in the middle for me. It became my middle ground. 

Somehow, I, a person who comes from two Bangladeshi immigrant parents, harmonized with the storylines of this show about white trash. 

With the little correct representation South Asian diasporic people get in the media, I somehow turned to this show about white trash, and it reminded me of my own cultural embarrassments, realities, and dispositions. 

I saw myself in the oldest son, Axl, who desperately wants to fit in, but has such a drastically different background from his peers, especially his best friend Sean Donahue, whose family seems to be the picture-perfect magazine cover of a nuclear family. 

Middle child Sue is no stranger to rejection, bullying, and awkwardness. She tries out for every single club, ranging from athletic to academic, and never gets in. Her picture day photos always capture her mid-blink, every single year. Her friends around her are all getting boyfriends and making out with them at the mall, and she is still waiting for her mom to pick her up. 

It is absolutely refreshing to see a character like Sue on my TV screen because never have I ever felt more at ease, seeing someone surprisingly triumph through these adolescent struggles so awfully; it gave me hope that I was going to be okay. 

It’s no insult to say that this family falls under white trash. Living in a house that is mysteriously falling apart in different areas each day, showering with dish soap and kitchen sink water, and even eating a bag of chips that actually had Axl’s toenail clippings in them. If I were the mom, Frankie, I could never recover from that. But that’s just it: Frankie is in the middle of all of this. What other choice does she have? 

The scarcity mindset that matriarch Frankie has over food, often opting to go to the show’s local store, Hoosier’s Grocery, a discounted and recently expired food store, while balancing 3 growing kids with 3 different alienating personalities, reminded me much of the Asian-American experience. 

Going grocery shopping with my parents always meant getting produce at the lowest prices, and even haggling to lower the prices in commercial stores like Costco, which my mom does not see as a problem. I think Frankie would agree with my mom’s actions and even replicate them herself. 

In one season 1 episode titled “The Jeans,” Sue begs her mother to get her designer jeans because all the girls in school were wearing them, and they were very cool. But of course, these jeans were way out of the Heck family’s price range. Still, Frankie managed to get them for the sake of her daughter’s confidence. 

This reminds me of my immigrant mother, who would buy me off-brand shoes from Payless, which was the biggest issue when you’re in middle school. 

I remember my cheeks burning when I walked around in my off-brand purple UGG boots when the girls around me had actual UGGs with ribbons on them. Seeing the Heck family also deal with these problems, such as the children wearing off-brand and not-so-trendy items, made it okay that I didn’t have the UGG brand.  

These problems seemed so much bigger when you’re younger, and it deeply impacts your psyche at a young age, but it comforted me to know that at least I wasn’t the only one who felt embarrassed to be lower middle class. 

This is one of the major plot points that spoke to me as a child of immigrants. There is so much that happens behind the scenes of living in an immigrant household, such as having to translate documents for your parents when you’re trying to do your algebra homework, or questioning why you’re eating certain foods for dinner when your classmates eat pizza. 

These are not the usual things my American peers would face or understand, but I was happy to know that there was the Heck family, which was also full of oddballs. 

The show has plenty of scenes where Axl confesses to his parents that he’s embarrassed to have his friends over because of the state of their house, and compared to his perfect friend Shaun, the Heck house is a dumpster. 

“The Middle” celebrates the go-getters who never seem to get anything, but keep on trying. It showcases the borderline abusive yet loving relationship you have with your siblings, especially as a middle child. 

It showed me that my experiences as a first-generation daughter in America are actually quite similar to those of white trash in the Midwest. 

Cover image: https://www.primevideo.com/detail/The-Middle/0OOTZCO006T2SVQMBYGCUV16RP