East of Eden Recap: Thou Mayest

East of Eden
Departure
Season 1 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★★★
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Jafar Panahi’s 2000 film The Circle follows a number of women throughout a day in Iran. Characters include a trio who broke out of prison and a woman worried about how her son-in-law will react to her daughter giving birth to a baby girl instead of a baby boy; eventually, many of them end up in the same jail cell. They are constrained by their circumstances and trapped in a circle created for them by a patriarchal, restrictive society. The system has enforced upon them a reality in which their choices are so limited as to be nonexistent.

I thought of The Circle a lot while watching “Departure,” another exemplary, big-swing-taking episode of East of Eden that’s the first of three directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. This is the only episode for which Zoe Kazan has a co-writer, and Alexander Chee is a prestigious author and critic who helps build out Lee after he leaves the Trasks to pursue his dream of opening a bookshop. (Not a laundry, Adam, you dweeb.) Just like earlier episodes followed Kate to help us understand her better, in “Departure,” the Lee we know, who feels stuck between Chinese and American cultures, takes a chance on himself. “It must have been lonely, living so long in the white world. How did you survive it?” asks Bei (Aidan Du Chiem), the young man who befriends Lee in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Has Lee survived? Can he break out of the circle that society has placed around him — or was living with the Trasks and being adored by Cal and Aron how Lee broke out, and he just doesn’t know it yet?

People are trapped in all kinds of routines in “Departure,” and I worry about all of them. Cal and Aron are following in Charles and Adam’s fractured footsteps. Adam is still pining over Cathy/Kate. Kate’s realization after dealing with abusive client Mr. Bacon (Christopher Sommers) that men will enjoy humiliation as long as they believe it’s on their terms has helped her amass power and wealth through blackmail. Charles — my heart hurts for Charles, dead on his farm, wealthy at the time of his passing, and with utterly no one to share it with except a brother who for ten years never wrote him a letter. And did I immediately think of Kate reading Wuthering Heights in her childhood, that story of wretched love and ghostly despair, when Kate hears Charles say her name after learning of his death? I sure did. Kate’s going full Heathcliff, baby, and I look forward to how the voice of the only man whose love she could have maybe, one day, accepted will affect her. I’m sure it will be fine! I’m sure it won’t be a “Silver Springs” situation!

Ten years have passed since the events in “Kate.” For all intents and purposes, Lee, now with shorter hair and wearing western clothes, is Cal and Aron’s father, while Adam silently steps over the boys as they’re playing. Adam is checked out, which is why it’s so cruel when he bans Lee from speaking Cantonese with the boys. He’s still a white man, and he still gets more say than Lee in the household, even though Lee is the one keeping it together. (A gorgeous line from Steinbeck explaining Adam’s decision: “I guess it was plain jealousy. I gave it another name, but maybe I didn’t want them to be able so easily to go away from me in a direction I couldn’t follow.”) And yet, Adam isn’t as bad as the Bacons, the well-to-do family who stop by the farm: Mrs. Bacon insults Lee with “A Chinaman’s no substitute for a mother or proper schooling,” and Mr. Bacon pushes Adam to be a landlord. And their daughter, Abra, well, it’s no surprise that she comes between Cal and Aron immediately. 

As soon as Aron suggests to Abra that instead of playing husband and wife, “We could pretend you’re my mother,” East of Eden crystallizes the kind of boy Aron is. The Trask twins have grown up with the lie that their mother died, and while Cal hides his wounds from that absence, Aron doesn’t. That’s why Cal telling Aron that he believes their mother instead ran away makes me very concerned. Cal saying “Maybe she didn’t like us” is such a sad, understandable thought, almost like he absorbed that feeling via osmosis from Adam’s constant brooding. And you just know that when Samuel stops by for his first visit in years, he wishes he could hit Adam a couple more times to shake him out of his depressive funk. “Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you feel large and tragic?” is such a read, and Samuel is right. It’s easier for Adam to withdraw than it is for him to live, and his sons feel that ignorance every day.

With Adam, Samuel, and Lee together once more, East of Eden gives us its defining scene, the core idea around which Steinbeck wrapped his novel and the message that every person who has read this book has taken with them: Thou mayest. I suppose when you live in the middle of nowhere, the best way to pass the time is to debate scripture, and Lee explains that for years he’s wondered about the Cain and Abel story the men discussed when naming the twins. In some Bibles, the phrasing is “Thou shalt,” or a promise; in others, “Do thou,” which is more of an order. How could one holy book give its readers such seemingly contradictory directives? To find the truth, Lee studied Hebrew and consulted with Jewish scholars in San Francisco who identified the word “timshel,” which “might be the most important word there is. It offers a choice. Our future isn’t determined by God, or by our past. Even Cain, in his weakness and filth and the murder of his brother, can still choose his course,” Lee explains. What’s the point of fatalism or the point of nihilism? Every day, you have a choice. What will it be?

Lee’s speech inspires Samuel to tell Adam that his wife now owns a brothel, “the most vicious and depraved in this whole end of the country,” and it inspires Adam to stop by Kate’s when he’s in Salinas six months later for Samuel’s funeral. The brothel is huge and painted black, like a plump beetle luxuriating in the sun, and the opulence of its internal decoration is matched by Kate herself. Our girl is layered in gold chains and wearing a tiara in the middle of the day, but the years have taken a toll; kudos to the series’ makeup team for making Florence Pugh look older and harsher. The scene between Pugh and Christopher Abbott is notable both for how electric they are together — Adam standing up for himself! Kate rolling her eyes at Adam’s idea of love! — and for Kate’s ambivalence about the idea of goodness. She’s got blackmail material against the elected officials, judges, and ministers who visit her brothel, pictures that she sneeringly shows Adam. These adulterers and abusers; why doesn’t Adam think they’re bad — why just her?

Kate is speaking from her experience, her sexual assault and the assaults she knows other women have suffered, and Adam is speaking from the certainty of what he felt during their marriage. It’s just that the wavelengths of their rightness don’t align. “You only see the one side, and you think that is all there is,” Adam tells Kate, and something about that message seems to stick with her, even though she won’t admit it. Maybe she’s unnerved by how unbothered Adam was about her suggestion that Charles is the twins’ father. But really, what does it matter who fathered them? The boys are all Adam has — especially after Lee tells Adam that he’s leaving. 

This whole episode is one banger conversation after another. Hoon Lee says “If you’re free, maybe you could let me go” so wistfully, and I adore how Lee’s request to leave touches Adam so much that he finally writes Charles a letter. Adam sloughs off some of his past by writing the words “Charles, I never hated you” — but not all of it. He moves the family into town, and he finally hangs up Cyrus’s portrait, but he doesn’t agree with Lee that the boys should know their mother is alive. He doesn’t bend even when Lee tells him about his own mother, raped and killed by indentured Chinese men who, after being treated like animals by their white bosses, became frenzied when they learned a woman was among them. “The many crimes committed against those men flared up into a kind of madness,” Lee warns Adam, but Adam refuses to understand the lesson. Adam has one foot outside of his circle, but that’s about it. 

Lee, meanwhile, travels to San Francisco’s Chinatown, and it’s not what he expected. The boardinghouse he planned to stay in is gone, destroyed in the fires after the 1906 earthquake. Lau, the “learned” and “principled” cook-scholar who helped raise Lee after his mother was killed, is known not for his teachings but for running a baccarat game. “People aren’t just one thing,” Lee had advised Cal and Aron, but now he’s realizing that his hoped-for version of himself, a bookseller speaking Cantonese and living among his community, might not materialize. Lee’s “My dream has made me a stranger to myself” could apply to everyone, couldn’t it? Adam dreamed of reconciling with Charles, but instead he learns Charles is dead. Cal prays to God that he “be like Aron. Don’t let me be mean,” but his desire for similarity is akin to his own annihilation. And when Kate opens Adam’s letter and sees that Charles sent her his memento version of their wedding photo, the one where she and Charles look like they’re together, I believe something in her cracks. Something in her that hears Charles’s voice and makes her realize, perhaps for the first time, how alone she is. 

California Dreams

• My biggest laugh this episode: Kate’s exasperated “No one stays 19, Adam,” when Adam asks her, “Were you always like this, or have you changed?” 

• Lee looks devastated by Bei calling him Adam’s “imaginary wife,” but Adam absolutely reacts to Lee’s departure as if they got divorced. He buys an expensive car? Come on, man.

• The $100,000 Charles leaves Adam in 1911 would be about $3.5 million today. In the book, Charles leaves $50,000 to Cathy. 

• Not a ton of characterization for Abra yet in the show. Steinbeck wrote her almost like a mini Cathy: She, not Aron, suggests that she pretend to be Cal and Aron’s mother because they’re “little motherless orphans,” and she’s bossy and immediately interested in separating the Trask boys. I always agreed with Cal, who dislikes her on sight. 

• A revealing Steinbeck line about the twins: “Aron was content to be a part of his world, but Cal must change it.”