Evelyn Wang's Everyday Life
Evelyn Quan Wang is a Chinese immigrant who runs a laundromat with her husband in the United States. Her life is a permanent, suffocating chaos: the laundromat is on the verge of bankruptcy, her taxes have been in disarray for years, and she faces an imminent IRS audit. At the same time, her elderly father, Gong Gong, has just arrived from China for a visit, adding considerable emotional pressure, as Evelyn feels she has never lived up to his expectations. To make matters worse, her adult daughter, Joy, tries to formally introduce her girlfriend, Becky, during her grandfather's visit — something Evelyn dodges and handles clumsily, unable to confront her daughter's homosexuality in an open and loving way.
Her husband, Waymond Wang, is an affable, patient, and eternally optimistic man whose conciliatory attitude Evelyn reads as naivety or weakness. What Evelyn does not yet know is that Waymond has prepared the paperwork to begin divorce proceedings — a decision that reflects the emotional exhaustion he feels after years of being ignored and undervalued by his wife. The couple must go together to the IRS offices to meet with tax auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdre, a rigid and hostile official who threatens serious legal consequences if the laundromat's financial documents are not submitted in order.
This starting point establishes Evelyn as a woman trapped: between debt, family disappointment, a breakdown in communication with her daughter, and the feeling of having made the wrong decisions throughout her life. Her world is mundane, exhausting, and lacks the grandeur she perhaps imagined when she emigrated. Yet everything is about to change in a radical and unexpected way.
The Inciting Incident: the Multiverse and the Threat of Jobu Tupaki
In the IRS office building, while waiting for their audit appointment, something extraordinary occurs. Waymond suddenly and entirely out of character undergoes a personality shift. It is revealed that he is not the Waymond of this universe, but a version from what they call the Alphaverse — the first reality in which the scientist Alpha Evelyn developed "universe-jumping" technology. This technique allows people to access the skills, memories, and bodies of their alternate selves in other parallel universes, provided they perform absurd or statistically improbable actions that serve as quantum triggers.
Alpha Waymond explains to Evelyn that the entire multiverse is being threatened by a destructive, nihilistic force known as Jobu Tupaki. This entity is, in fact, the version of Joy from the Alphaverse. Alpha Evelyn subjected her daughter to such intense and relentless universe-jumping that Joy's mind eventually fragmented, allowing her to experience all universes simultaneously. This overexposure led her to a devastating conclusion: if everything is possible and nothing has permanent consequences, then nothing matters. Jobu Tupaki has embraced absolute nihilism as a philosophy of life and, as an expression of that existential void, has created the Everything Bagel — an object that functions as a black hole capable of destroying all existence. Her apparent goal is to drag all of reality into nothingness.
Alpha Waymond claims that Evelyn — the version from this ordinary, seemingly talentless universe — is paradoxically the only person capable of stopping Jobu Tupaki. The reason is counterintuitive: precisely because Evelyn made so many unremarkable decisions throughout her life, her universe contains the greatest number of unexplored alternative paths, making her someone with unlimited potential to access skills from other versions of herself.
The central conflict is thus established on two overlapping levels. On the epic, multiversal plane, Evelyn must learn to master universe-jumping technology in order to confront Jobu Tupaki and prevent the destruction of all reality. On the intimate, emotional plane, the story is essentially a tale about a mother and daughter who do not know how to communicate — about the weight of unfulfilled expectations, generational guilt, and love expressed in clumsy or harmful ways. Jobu Tupaki is not truly seeking to destroy the multiverse out of pure chaos: at her core, she is a suffering daughter who wants her mother to understand her, or to join her in accepting that nothing makes sense. The Everything Bagel is both a weapon of destruction and a metaphor for the void Joy feels within herself — a hole that no one, and especially not her mother, has ever known how to fill.
