Pixar’s ‘Turning Red’ is a coming-of-age classic

The first time a friend of mine told me that she talked to her mother every day, I was shocked: How do you do that? I was embarrassed at the thought of even telling my mother that I had kissed a boy. The notion of your mother being your best friend, that was foreign to me.

I’ve always envied the easy closeness that my non-Asian friends seems to share with their mothers, being able to talk about anything—boyfriends, sex, failures—without shame. I envied their frank honesty, their uncomplicated comfort with one another.

So often, a relationship between an Asian mother and her daughter is one built on a throne of necessary lies and omissions. In The Joy Luck Club—Amy Tan’s iconic novel—one of the characters, June, says, “My mother and I never really understood each other. We translated each other’s meaning and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.”

This sort of silence goes both ways. The mother will not tell the daughter about her past, what she was like as a girl, and what her dreams used to be. And the daughter will not tell her mother about certain details of her life, such as when she’s sick, when she stays out too late or drinks too much, or when she finally has sex for the first time.

Both mother and daughter in these situations act from the same impulses: protection and love. Why tell your mom that you were sick, that would only worry her. Why tell your daughter about your past, it will only pain her. Better to teach your daughter to work twice as hard, to stay silent, and to marry well—the survival technique that your mother taught you.

In Shi’s other animated film Bao, a Chinese Canadian mom (also living in Toronto) is so afraid that her son, who is a steamed bun, will become a stranger to her that she literally swallows him whole to prevent him from leaving. What Shi brilliantly and succinctly did in Bao was portray the fear shared by many Asian immigrant parents, in a way that is understandable, even to those who are not Asian. The proof is in the outcome: Shi won an Academy Award for the short.

Turning Red is similar thematically, but told from the point of view of the child. Mei finds herself lying and withholding from her mother for the first time, choosing to not share her crushes, or what she’s really doing after school every day. And it’s not because Mei is afraid of Ming, or of being grounded or forbidden from seeing her friends.

It’s a feeling that is familiar to many Asian women watching: You aren’t completely honest with your mother because you are afraid to sully the image she has of you as the perfect and obedient daughter. You are afraid of disappointing her. Because there are few things worse than disappointing your mother.

Though Turning Red clocks in at 110 minutes, it fails to fully humanize Mei’s mother, Ming to the same degree as the mother in Bao. The film does not devote adequate screentime to explore one crucial driver behind Ming’s actions, and why Mei is so afraid of falling short of her mother’s expectations: Ming’s immigrant identity.

This feels like a missed opportunity given that Shi is a child of immigrants, and even told the Canadian publication Macleans that as a girl she wondered, “Why are my parents so unfair? Why are they so crazy and overprotective?” And later, Shi understood, “It just comes from wanting to protect your kid and the experiences my mom went through when she was younger in coming to a new country, and having this only child who could be taken away at any moment by the forces of the universe.”

I grew up in an immigrant family with a similar story as Shi, and intimately understand how Mei and many kids like her live constantly with guilt and expectations of having parents who sacrificed for them to be there, and the expectation that the children must make good on those sacrifices.

Shi recalled that her parents didn’t discourage her creative impulses head on, but told her, “If you choose art, that means you’re poor.” If you choose to not be a lawyer or a doctor, you better work damn hard to make sure you succeed.

The film makes Ming overbearing to a fault, without delving into her motivations: that she is likely driven by fear, rather than a cold desire for control over her daughter. And it set up Mei’s deference to her mother as a character flaw, even though it’s something that is so ordinary and common among immigrant families. 

What Turning Red does succeed at is showing Mei successfully balancing her Asian heritage and Western upbringing, in a way that signals there is hope, and a good middle ground, for those of us who feel torn between two cultures. 

CinemaBlend managing director Sean O'Connell was recently lampooned for his criticism of Turning Red, saying (in a now-deleted review) that “by rooting Turning Red very specifically in the Asian community of Toronto,” the film was not “universal.” O’Connell also said he could not see himself in it, as if a Chinese Canadian girl was more fantastical to him than a house held aloft by balloons. 

By being so refreshingly specific, Turning Red makes it clear that universal stories are not limited to those about white men like O’Connell. An Asian Canadian girl’s coming of age tells the timeless tale of the teenage struggle to balance self-acceptance and family pressures, and belongs to the same genre as classics such as Lady Bird and The Breakfast Club.  

And for this Asian American, Turning Red also reminded me of my own fears, even now that I’m in my thirties, of letting my mother know my fully messy self—someone who doesn’t always follow the rules she taught me.

I recently agonized over telling my mother that I was spending Christmas with my boyfriend and his family in Minnesota. I was afraid—of her worry and her probing questions. Then my mother sincerely wished me a safe journey, and asked, “Where is Minnesota?” Asian moms, you think they are set in their ways, but they can still surprise you.