How Turning Red helped me reconcile the generation gap between me and my own 'tiger mom'
Seeing the dynamic between Mei and Ming Lee reminded Christine Vu to be more forgiving towards to her mother
This essay contains spoilers for the film Turning Red.
Amidst all the wackiness, boy bands, and hormones in Domee Shi's new film Turning Red, there is one particular scene that has stayed with me since attending its Toronto premiere. At the climax of the film, its protagonist 13-year-old Mei meets a version of her mother, Ming, in the woods as a young girl who is just as scared of change as she is. The brief but powerful moment is all it takes for Mei to really understand her mother.
Seeing a "tiger mom" revert to her teen self, overwhelmed by her own insecurities, reminded me to be more forgiving of my own mother. While turning into a panda isn't something that runs in my family, we are not without our own version of wounds passed down through generations.
Turning Red wastes no time establishing where Mei comes from, with scenes of Toronto streetcars rolling through Chinatown and enough views of the CN Tower to consider it a supporting character. And as in real life, there is diversity at every turn: Mei's friends, her classmates, the customers at the Daisy Mart. That's Toronto. Although it makes me beam to see a place I've been calling home for nearly a decade on screen — in a Pixar movie, no less — it's in stark contrast to where I was when I was Mei's age.
I spent my childhood in northern Alberta, where we passed the time driving up dirt roads just to see where they went. There were no streetcars, but endless lines of charter buses for the commuters going to and from the oil sands. I was one of just a few non-white kids in my school. It felt like my family were the first Asians anyone in the city had ever encountered.
Unlike Mei, I didn't grow up in a temple, but we practiced our own kind of rituals. My mom owned a busy salon called Amajestik, and like Mei, I skipped hanging out with friends to help around the family business every day after school. I answered the phone and booked appointments so expertly that new clients would come in shocked to find a 10-year-old behind the desk offering them tea, coffee, or water while they waited.
My mom was also overbearing, like Ming, running drills with me so I'd never come home with less than 100 per cent on tests. And while she never hid behind trees (at least that I know of), she had her own way of keeping tabs on me — her clients always unwittingly reporting on my whereabouts through idle chit chat about spotting me at the mall or somewhere I was not supposed to be.
When I hit puberty, my mother's worst fears came true: I was becoming more Western-style. I retired from the salon to work at a Boston Pizza with my friends, I was watching too much TV, I listened to music she did not like, and I wanted a bra — not one that she brought back from Vietnam, but one from La Senza Girl. As if it could not get any worse, my Vietnamese was becoming rusty. There was just no understanding one another.
When you barely speak the same language, you learn how to say what you need in few words. There was an all-purpose phrase my mother used a lot. When serving me my favourite food, she would look at me eating enthusiastically, and say with satisfaction, "You born from me!" That meant, "Of course I know your favourite!"
If she caught me trying to get away with something, she'd say, "You born from me!" with a slightly angrier tone and preceded by a click of her tongue. This one meant, "I know how you think."
"You born from me." That sentence encompassed the beginning and end of me with what felt like no room for my own self-discovery. I was made from her flesh and bone. More than an extension of her, she was me and I was her. Like Mei, I felt stunted by my mother's expectations and responsible for her emotions.
In the movie, what is first seen as a metaphor for getting your period is actually a broader statement on Mei's experience of becoming a woman. Her ancestor Sun Yee, known for her love of red pandas and facing a dangerous war, asks the gods for the ability to turn into a giant panda to protect her family and her village. Mei inherits this reactive impulse to turn into a panda whenever she feels a strong burst of emotion. Down the line, and across oceans, this once-protective power is eventually seen by her elders as a troublesome quality that Mei is forced to grapple with.
It's an apt metaphor for how cultural traditions born of survival can become sources of shame when confronted by the ultimate survival tactic — assimilation. It's significant that only the women in Mei's family carry the panda "affliction," again a nod to menstruation but also a recognition of how often matriarchs are forced to carry the family burden and often end up getting punished for being difficult or "too much" because of it.
What was "too much" for Ming is just enough for Mei, and she manages to find her own way while saving the bond with her mother in the end. Seeing Mei make her own decisions and become her own person, Ming comes to accept her daughter and becomes the mother she needed for herself, breaking the real generational curse.
"Someday you'll understand," the ladies in the pedicure chair would turn to tell me with a sigh after having a conversation about me with my mom as if I wasn't standing right there. I've been experiencing those "somedays" a lot lately. Who knew it would take a giant red panda to have it all make sense?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
