My wife and I have been fans of Domee Shi’s work ever since we first saw her short film, Bao, before the premiere of Incredibles 2. To this day, my wife has no recollection of the first half of Incredibles 2 because of the impact Bao had on her that evening. When we heard Shi was directing her first feature film, Turning Red, we knew we were in for a treat. Little did we know just how profound of an impact her story would have on our own stories, the depth to which we would reflect on our own coming of age experiences, and the generational trauma that we would revisit as fellow East Asian immigrants.
On my part, I discovered upon watching Turning Red how similar my childhood was with Shi’s. We were both born in East Asia during the late-1980’s, had parents born in post-war (and post-Confucian) societies, immigrated to North America as young children, and grew up in diverse neighborhoods–Shi in Toronto and myself in Los Angeles. In retrospect, it’s not surprising how relatable Meilin (the protagonist of Turning Red) was to me, a Korean American Christian man, and equally not surprising how some White Christian reviewers may have missed the complex cultural layers undergirding some of the more disagreeable parts of the movie.
The Red Panda and the Strength of Immigrant Women
Shi’s red panda is a metaphor for all the messiness, awkwardness, emotions, and excitement surrounding puberty. More specifically, Shi wanted to help “girls and women feel seen” and help girls not feel so alone through it all. The juxtaposing shame culture that Meilin inherits from her family and the individualistic culture she navigates at school intensifies the silence, the loneliness, and the emotions.
We’re told by Ming, Meilin’s mother, that the red panda was a gift to the women of their family until their “family chose to come to a new world and what was a blessing became an inconvenience.” This is the familial baggage, or the generational trauma, that the red panda must be seen through. We can’t understand the red panda apart from the generational trauma that Meilin, Ming, and the other immigrant women in their family all bear in order to not be seen as perpetual foreigners in the West. It’s not surprising then that Ming, as a first-generation immigrant child, had the largest red panda of them all.
The Red Panda and Diagonalization
The red panda’s redeemable qualities really shine when considering the family’s historical context. As their matriarchal ancestor, Sun Yee, first demonstrated, the red panda can become a source of great power to save their loved ones from ruin. For Sun Yee, to embrace the red panda meant harnessing her raw emotional strength to shatter patriarchal assumptions about the helplessness of women. A proper appreciation of the red panda resulted in life and salvation for her family, not death and chaos.
And this is where Meilin reflects more of Sun Yee than her mother, Ming, who banished her own red panda for the sake of social conformity. Meilin finds herself in a tension between her mother’s encouragement to conform and her friends’ encouragement to rebel. Much of the story is her wrestling with these Eastern and Western voices but neither produce lasting happiness.
From the Eastern perspective, the damaging impact of conformity becomes more apparent for Ming, Meilin’s own mother. In a heartbreaking scene near the end of the movie, we see a teenage Ming bearing alone the immense pressure to conform and the underlying generational trauma that accompanies it. From the Western perspective, we see how listening to her friends and following her selfish desires almost destroys Meilin and her family.
But the truth lies not in the middle but in a “diagonalized” reality that bridges the simplistic binaries of individualism and collectivism. Diagonalizing allows Meilin to break free from the false binaries forced on her by the competing ideologies of the East and the West, resulting in her rejecting errors and embracing truths from both sides.
The Red Panda and Generational Healing
Embracing the red panda (her individuality) and accepting her mother’s brokenness (her family history) results in a healthier balance of honoring one’s parents and individual freedom. The movie concludes with Meilin not having to choose between her family or her friends but reaping the benefits of having both. We’re given the impression that perhaps her family’s generational trauma has finally turned a corner and that, through Meilin’s diagonalizing, healing has finally begun in her family.
In many ways, Meilin’s story is my story. I grew up as an immigrant child with immense pressure from my dad’s side of the family to become a doctor like my paternal grandfather and with immense pressure from my mom’s side of the family to become a lawyer like my maternal grandfather. But when I was 14-years-old, I came back from a youth retreat with a desire to explore pastoral ministry as a calling. After telling my parents, however, I was brushed off for being “emotional,” which drove a wedge in our relationship.
Yet, throughout high school and college, this conviction only grew stronger. It wasn’t until my former senior pastor intervened during my senior year of college that my parents let go of their desires for me to conform to their will so I could instead honor them by honoring the Lord first. If I hadn’t embraced my “red panda” in order to properly honor my parents, Rosebrook Presbyterian Church wouldn’t exist.
In short, Turning Red isn’t encouraging the pursuit of our hedonistic desires; it’s about rightly framing our individuality while appropriately bringing honor to our parents, our traditions, and perhaps even our faith.