Look. At surface level, I could already tell Turning Red was practically made for me (a 3rd generation Chinese Canadian 13-year-old in 2002 who’s an overachieving band geek? hell yeah) but I wasn’t fully prepare for how MUCH it actually was for me, specifically. I’ve never met Domee Shi but I’m spooked at how similar Mei’s opening “I’m 13 and I do what I want!” speech is like this “story idea” I had in one of my eighth grade journals (and in fact, when my parents watched this, Dad remarked “That’s just like Danielle!” when Mei declared she was 13 and could do what she wants/says what she wants)
You’re probably expecting me to talk cultural specificity, and there is that (which I’ll talk about later) but what Turning Red nails best for me is that confusing mélange of emotions when the hormones finally hit.
In revisiting my diary and poetry/things I like/notes about boys journal, I can remember that turning point where boys went to from whatever to the stuff of daydreams. There was a notebook I passed around with three other girls and we had nicknames starting with M in case anyone got it (it’s ya girl Mowzer here). Initially I kind of snarked on my friend, but about halfway through the year I got emotionally hit in the face with the realization that oh shit, my guy friends could be like, dateable and not gross boys so Mei’s pivot from thinking Devon dresses like a hobo to wanting to draw merboy fanart was uh, relatable. (Part of me was tempted to also show that part of my journal, but despite the fact that I’m a married woman who’s been in the same relationship for the last decade I’m somehow still mortified that Other People might see my in-hindsight-incredibly-obvious crushes. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up sharing them nested on the FB version of this post). When Miriam asks Mei why she’s staring at Carter Murphy-Mayhew, I felt that.
It’s always been cool to hate what teen girls like, but I’m delighted that Turning Red has brought all of our middle and high school journals out to show our burgeoning creativity.
The element that made me cry here (much like Encanto) and on rewatches is how the antagonist of the story wasn’t a person, but rather generational trauma. Mei is a go-getter, and overachieves because she wants to be that girl, not because of strict expectations. Ming thinks if Mei is a good girl, her panda experience will be less traumatic (And this in turn is because Ming hurt her mother during the panda phase, and is so traumatized by hurting the person she was closest to that she locks it up tight). Teenage Ming gets upset because she’s so angry that even being perfect isn’t good enough for anyone, and maybe that’s why she panda’d out over Jin because he accepted who she was. It would be a shallow read to consider Ming Lee as a stereotypical Tiger Mom: from the very beginning, Mei tells us that she herself is self-driven, and she’s good at everything (except basketball, maybe). When she steps out of line, Ming isn’t disappointed with Mei, but instead blames external forces for misleading/tricking/harming her Meimei, that Devon is the tempter, that the friends are manipulators. It’s a toxic kind of love, because it pedestals Mei and takes away her agency where in her mother’s mind, Mei is the blameless victim for the wickedness of this world.
And that’s probably why conservative parents who don’t read beyond the headlines got mad lol, because they don’t like seeing themselves in the mirror and reflecting on what that perspective means. I’m reminded of the response to Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (which also captures this age from the eyes of one in it). It’s rare to see tweenage years from the perspective of the ones experiencing it, and this Vulture interview with the Babysitters Club showrunner Rachel Shukert really felt resonant as I read through the Discourse on Turning Red.
People are extremely uncomfortable with this period in girls’ lives. It seems to be the time of life that girls lose faith in themselves, and I think it’s because they don’t see representation of where they’re actually at. Girls are expected to go straight from Doc McStuffins to Euphoria. They’re not ready for TV about having sex, but they don’t want to be little girls. So who are they? It’s a really easy time for girls to define themselves solely by how they’re seen by other people and then you don’t get your sense of self back until you’re 35. What if you weren’t missing those 20 years?
What if you always got to be yourself and see yourself represented in a real way? And not have to be all about who thinks you’re pretty or who thinks you have the right clothes? Or how old they think you are or how old they think you look?
[…]
There’s something about stories geared to this age that always felt like hindsight from adults, as opposed to what it actually feels like to be that age. What we could do with The Baby-Sitters Club was make the girls as smart and interesting and mature as girls are without making it all about how other people see them. It’s about how they see themselves.
I really felt it when Ming apologizes to Mei for making her feel that pressure when trying to avoid repeating cycles of trauma, and when Mei acknowledges that she’s becoming who she is and is scared of drifting farther from her mom in that process. Children aren’t mini-mes; they’re their own people. After one of many clashes with my mom (alas, no concerts for me to try to go to but moms and daughters fight over all sorts of things), my dad gave me a piece of advice that I later learned he got from my yeh-yeh: “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what your mom and I think: the only person you have to satisfy at the end of the day is the one looking back at you in the mirror.”
Turning Red is incredibly relatable for anyone who went through puberty but the cultural specificity is the hoisin sauce on top for me. Mei appears to be 3rd generation Canadian, meaning her grandparents were the first generation to settle and live in North America. The conflict between Ming and her mother implies there’s that classic first vs second gen friction that we’ve seen in other stories such as The Joy Luck Club and it’s refreshing to see stories beyond that. The earliest waves of Chinese immigration were predominantly from the Pearl River Delta region, partially due to unrest at home and partly due to economic opportunities from mining and labor needs in North America, and these pioneers spoke Cantonese or in some cases, Toisanese (which I grew up thinking was Canto until some words clued me in that it was a different dialect). The chant that the aunties and Grandma (who I really wish they’d call po-po, but oh well) sang is in Cantonese, a translation of a poem found by Disney colleagues in Hong Kong. When it came to the lovingly luscious-looking food, production designer Rona Liu said they paired with cultural consultants for Toisanese specificity:
We were lucky enough to be paired with Gold House, our cultural consultants. We had our own history lesson about the first immigrants in Toronto’s Chinatown. They’re not just Cantonese, they’re Taishanese. So you’re going to see eel rice. That one was funny because usually it comes in a clay pot, but we were thinking, mom is cooking in a western kitchen, so maybe she just puts it in a casserole dish. Those were the details we were trying to balance, that it didn’t feel so Chinese that you forget they’re in Toronto.
In the pre-ritual meal, that’s where we went full feast. There’s abalone with snow peas, steamed fish, steamed chicken, a seafood soup — all those things of Taishanese origin. But then, like the first time Jin is cooking and when [Mei’s mom] Ming cooks the breakfast porridge, we’re mixing it in with more home-y, less fancy food: onion pancakes and fried eggs, stuff that’s more like, your mom isn’t going to be busting out her cooking chops every day. Some of the stuff is frozen — the green onion pancakes you just pan fry. Things that we all grew up with.
Didn’t see as many of these, but it’s also a shallow kind of drive-by comment to assume that this movie is Disney pandering to the CCP market when it 1) deals with the supernatural which is a no-no to the censors and 2) doesn’t use China’s official dialect because DID YOU KNOW: the diaspora is not the same thing as the motherlands we left, especially if we left a long time ago, before the current regime even came to power. Turning Red will probably run into the “no ghosts and lying is bad” section of CCP censorship (that Coco got past, likely due to the filial piety aspects). But also maybe they’ll chuckle at the 4 = death/bad luck reference? Who knows. It’s a lazy, Othering comment to associate diaspora work with the CCP.
It’s the diaspora take that I find interesting here, too. Becoming a panda was a blessing in the Old World, but when the family immigrated it became more of “an inconvenience”. The women of the family sealed it away when they came of age, and it surprises them when Mei wants to keep hers. The panda-as-puberty metaphor is obvious, but the read I picked up here is also that to better survive in their environment, Mei’s aunties sealed away part of who they are, much how assimilation erases cultural specificity to better “fit in”. Mei embracing her panda reminds me of later generations who want to honor their origins and are comfortable holding on to multiple identities.
I’m really bad with conclusions, but in general, I really liked Turning Red and the third act makes me cry every time. It feels made for me, like a comfy sweater found in the back of my closet when visiting my parents, but also resonates a lot with the millennial teenage experience.
It took me over a month to write this, and in that time Everything, Everywhere All At Once has gotten a wide release. It very much feels like a companion piece (as one of the Daniels noted), but from the mother’s perspective in the mother-daughter relationship. Highly recommend seeing that as well, if you can!