Not Your Average School Girl: A Film Review of "Turning Red"
On the complexity of Asian female identity formation
Hello from underneath piles and piles of thesis drafts! I will admit that this is the latest I’ve ever started working on a newsletter (the day before I send it out), which is in large part because I’ve gone cross-eyed trying to make edits to my master’s thesis before I have to send it out to my committee this coming Friday. I know that “a done thesis is a good thesis,” but the pressure to be perfect, or at least make my project as good as it can be, is too much to keep me from submitting something that hasn’t been obsessively and meticulously rearranged, reworded, and proofread. That being said, I have some really exciting non-school-related things happening next week that will be good for the soul, so that will hopefully balance out the misery that I’m in right now. I just have to keep reminding myself that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Thank you to everyone who has had to deal with and continues to keep up with this cranky, irritable, anxious, and horribly insecure scholar-version of me. She’ll be out of the woods soon. Your tender love and care has been much appreciated.
THE WEEK IN GRATITUDE
After a grueling four months-long job hunting process, I am so stoked to say that I accepted a job offer last week! The past two weeks have been filled with many second round interviews for different positions, and I’m so relieved to not have the uniquely horrible anxiety that job hunting often brings hanging over my head anymore. I won’t say much about the position just yet, but I’m so excited to still be working with college students and helping them through their lil academic (and maybe even personal?) journeys. This will also mean that I’m … going to be staying in Madison??? Let the Midwestern saga continue…
To take a break from all of the end-of-the-semester stress, my friends and I went to the zoo this past week. Jesikah very graciously gave us her expert tour of the Henry Vilas Zoo and it was fun to frolic around and say hi to the animals, even though it was cold and most of them were asleep/away. Did y’all know that seals were that graceful in the water? All is to say, we will be returning when the weather is nice and everyone is awake/not getting fed.
My three closest friends in Madison have a funny habit of all being out of town during the same weekend, but I took this as an opportunity to take myself out on a little solo date last weekend. With the Wisconsin Film Festival taking place, I had a ton of options for what to fill my time with, and I went to go see the french film A Tale of Love and Desire directed by Leyla Bouzid. Lying at the intersections of eros, youth, literature, and feelings around shame and tradition, the sensual coming-of-age was right up my alley. Watching it is part of my more expansive project of leaning back into love poetry and having an unabashed appreciation for romance and its numerous complications. Here is a preview from Tone Madison for the lovesick and curious.
POEM OF THE WEEK
For those of you who have been reading this newsletter from the beginning, you know that I think a lot about what it means to live a Meaningful Life (which doesn’t always necessarily mean a Cool One) and how geographical place factors into this. Now that I’ll be staying in Madison for the foreseeable future with no real, tangible deadline for when I have to leave, I have a new opportunity to think about what this place means to me, what I want to do with my time here, and how I want to grow deeper in community with all the wonderful folks in my life. I was once told by a poetry instructor that I often used the word “small” in my poems, and that this might be something that I’d want to look into and/or interrogate. I think Mary Oliver’s “I Don’t Want to Live a Small Life” speaks to some of my anxieties around this, and points to all the wonderful things we often overlook but should be grateful for.
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to experience Pixar’s new animated film Turning Red with my brother while we were both home. I’m not gonna lie—that shit struck a chord, y’all. If it wasn’t already TMTH that the protagonist was a young Asian American girl who strays from cultural and familial expectations of who she is supposed to be, her name was MEI MEI, which, as 4 year old genius Rei made note of to his mom, is literally my name!!! Let’s just say that I was crying five minutes into the film and never stopped.
As much as I would’ve loved to write an essay that delves into my mommy issues and how they relate to this film, I instead decided to intellectualize my emotions (in an attempt to further hide from them) and cooked up the following piece instead. Admittedly, I’ve been holding onto this article for a few weeks now in the hopes that my favorite publication Bitch Media would pick it up, but much to many readers and writers’ shock and subsequent devastation, the feminist pop culture magazine recently announced that it will be shutting down after a quarter century of publishing fearless, indicting, and hyper-intelligent feminist critique.
As someone who has all but worshipped the publication and has rested all of my writerly dreams on my involvement with Bitch, I am crushed beyond words by this news. It has always been my dream to publish with Bitch and my Ultimate Writerly Goal was to someday work for them. To know that there is no place on the Internet that quite possesses the magazine’s sharpness and bravery makes it even harder to see it go. As former editor Marina Watanabe wrote on Twitter, “This is a loss for marginalized writers. Full stop. Bitch published stories and perspectives that weren’t being covered anywhere else.”
In small part, this essay is a promise to never stop being critical of the media that I consume—to always view TV, film, and other art through a feminist lens. Though pieces like this might have a harder time finding a home in the wake of Bitch’s folding, I hope to never stop writing about what excites me, what infuriates me, and how these ideas might lead us to a more feminist future.
In a particularly gut-wrenching scene in the newest Pixar animated film Turning Red, protagonist Mei Lee desperately thrashes around her temporary bedroom, hoping to beat the “red panda” out of her. At 13 years old, the Chinese-Canadian teen has just discovered that any intense emotion she feels will literally transform her into a red panda, the result of an intergenerational family curse that cannot be resolved until the next red lunar eclipse, when she can separate herself from her animal spirit and trap it in an amulet. Determined to prematurely beat the difference out of her, she throws herself against the floor, trying and failing to remain fully human, with panda ears and a panda tail sprouting from her body with every thud and grunt.
Hilarious, heartfelt, and told with refreshing nuance, Turning Red speaks to the hardships of finding yourself when bound by the limits of gendered, racial, and familial expectations. Complete with a helicopter mom and her unrealistic expectations of who Mei should be, children of the Asian diaspora can easily locate themselves within the film—something that seems to irk the white male film reviewers of the world—without feeling like they’re watching the same worn out plot ascribed to characters with minority identities. And yet, even as the film ends with Mei embracing the messy, bold, and sometimes volatile parts of her, Turning Red illuminates the various internal and external constraints that Mei must grapple with in order to become her full self.
Despite the mythical element to Mei’s abnormality, her inclination towards self-hatred is universal to the adolescent experience. At a time when conformity—from outfit choices to music taste—is crucial to fitting in, to have a glaring difference is a matter of life and death. That Mei’s story unfolds on the brink of her teenhood is intentional: a time marked by puberty and the first iterations of soul searching, any successful coming of age story relies on the liminality of adolescence, when almost everything is possible but everything also feels impossible.
The very fact that Mei’s transformation relies on intense emotions of all kinds—lust, rage, elation, and devastation—and the subsequent horror that the red panda elicits from her parents reveals our larger societal fear of teenage girls. Soon after her transformations begin, Mei’s parents move her out of her regular bedroom into a spare room that is furnished with only a mattress, lest her red panda self bring about more destruction. But it is not the physical wreckage nor the emotions themselves that her parents, and we as a society, are actually afraid of—rather, it is the unfiltered ways in which these feelings coarse through teen girls.
Largely untempered by the outside world and its many judgements, the lens through which teen girls see the world is both raw and relentless, a direct threat to the dullness and occasional dishonesty with which we’ve grown accustomed to feeling our own emotions as we grow older. At the start of the film, untouched by the inconvenience of the red panda, Mei is filled with spunk and moxie, empowered by her ability to express herself in whatever ways she wants. It is only once the red panda becomes a part of her that she must learn how to restrain her self expression, often through practices of grounding and “being zen.” In teenage girls, we see all that we have lost, and rather than encourage these emotions’ flourishing, we do all that we can to quell their budding flames. We fear zealous young girls in the same way Mei’s parents fear the red panda—both are symbols of the uncontrolled, of that which has yet to be (or worse, might never be) tamed.
In Mei’s case specifically, the control that her family tries to exert over her emotions carries a heavily racialized aspect in addition to its gendered implications. For Mei to indulge in the intensity of her emotions, and thus, embrace her red panda self, would mean to break out of the molds of Asian femininity, which is characterized by docility and subservience. While certain forms of deviance are practically expected of other girls of color, with Black and Latina girls being coded as inherently antagonistic and being hypersexualized from young ages, young Asian women are expected to maintain a childlike innocence and purity that will carry throughout the rest of their lives. Ironically, it is within this structure of feminine subordination that Asian women are subsequently sexualized, as evidenced by the widely popular pornographic trope of the Asian schoolgirl and the booming obsession with all things kawaii (Japanese cute style).
Aspiring always to be a “good daughter” to her mother, Mei puts immense pressure on herself to excel in all aspects of her life, rarely stepping out of line or admitting to “deviant” feelings like having crushes on boys or wanting anything other than what her parents expect of her. In a scene where Mei tries to prove her control over her panda self, her parents show her a series of photographs and items made to elicit major feelings: social justice issues, past failures, and finally, a box of kittens. Applauding her for her calm and collected reactions, Mei’s parents reinforce the societally taught lesson that in order to be a good woman, one must always carry out the emotional labor of managing their own emotions for the sake of others. For the Asian woman in particular, one’s emotions must also always give in to the wants and commands of her elders, whose old age is equated with authority and knowing best.
Perhaps most interesting to Mei’s overall identity formation and her tumultuous journey towards self acceptance are the ways in which she is depicted as internalizing other people’s racialized perceptions of her, which she then uses to her advantage. Determined to go see the boyband 4*Town perform live with her three closest friends, Mei hatches up a plan to raise money for concert tickets by offering photoshoots with her panda self and creating red panda-centric merch to sell to her newfound fanbase at school. The idea comes to Mei after a few of her classmates walk in on her transformed self in the school bathroom and immediately begin fawning over how adorable she is. Her fears of monstrosity and alienation are assuaged by responses not only of tolerance, but an unexpected enthusiasm.
Falling into the affective trap of what Asian-American cultural scholar Dr. Leslie Bow has coined as “racist cute,” Mei avidly commodifies herself and her cuteness for the pleasurable consumption of others, even though the excitement that surrounds it can be interpreted as inherently racist. In a chapter entitled “Racist Cute: Caricature, Kawaii-Style, and the Asian Thing” from her new book Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy, Bow explores how objects that can be coded as Asian do not elicit the same feelings of disgust and disdain as other objects that are neatly categorized as “racist kitsch,” such as blatantly offensive mammy cookie jars and lawn jockeys. Instead, the excitement and affection with which we meet and consume these “cute” objects are not only demonstrative of our inclination to anthropomorphize Asian subjects, but identify a particular mechanism through which “unequal relations of power,” racial and otherwise, are maintained.
Like the waving cat or the Chinese dragon, it cannot be denied that the red panda itself is an animal most closely affiliated with Asian culture and Asian cuteness, a correlation that Mei identifies as an opportunity for both economic revenue and social merit. Especially since she grew up leading tours of her family’s Buddhist temple, Mei’s expert commodification of her panda self is reflective of how she has been made to perceive and present Asianness in early 2000s Toronto—as something to adore, be mystified by, and consume. In many ways, Mei’s self-commodification of her cuteness serves as an extension of her family’s long-standing practice of self-exoticization for non-Asian audiences. To make a caricature out of herself and her culture is a skill that Mei has honed over time, a lasting legacy of dehumanization by way of self-caricaturization.
This illusion of the red panda’s absolute cuteness is shattered at her classmate Tyler’s birthday party, where Mei lashes out and pounces on the birthday boy who hired her to be a mascot of sorts for the evening. Pinned to the ground, Tyler, who had originally paid Mei to come because of the excitement he knew her presence would bring, cowers in fear and demands that she leave. In so much as the red panda allows Mei to be a more complex and nuanced version of herself, the singular image of cuteness that has circulated in others’ imagination about this side of her positions Mei right back into the same limited depictions that she had worked so hard to break free from in the first place.
The representations of Asianness, girlhood, and feelings in Turning Red are far more nuanced than the Disney franchise’s past attempts of depicting people of color and their lived experiences. The artful reckoning of intergenerational familial trauma between Mei and her mom that concludes the film is something that many children of the Asian diaspora can only ever dream of. As an Asian-American viewer myself, I had yet to see my childhood experiences and tumultuous interiority so thoughtfully reflected on the big screen until now. And yet, beyond its successes in cultural representation, Turning Red’s biggest achievement lies in its ability to show the coexistence of playing into and breaking out of gendered and racial tropes, the eternal struggle of those inhabiting identities that fall outside of the agreed upon norm. With the red panda being a site of both liberation and constraint for Mei, Turning Red elevates Asian cinematic representation to a new level with a tender complexity.