It’s such a joy to see not one but two popular movies released in the same year that not only feature Asian-Americans, but accurately portray aspects of the experience as a core part of the story and its themes. I think that they speak to two sides of the same conversation, and that they both happened upon the same core theme shows how important and formative this conversation is to the community. Turning Red, the first film of the two, explores the idea from the point of view of the child of immigrants: it’s the Asian-American experience. Spoilers to naturally follow.
From the ancestral lore as told to Meilin from her mother, their family has the ability to harness emotions to transform into a powerful mystical beast: any strong emotion will release your inner Red Panda. But when their family decided to “come to a new world”, what was once a blessing became an inconvenience.
If “strong emotions” turns you into a Red Panda, then it is basically an expression of your inner primal self, all weird and animalistic, socially unacceptable and unique, as every family member manifests their red panda differently. In essence, it’s your id on display. That this comes up around puberty makes a ton of sense.
In Chinese and other Eastern cultures, individualism is traditionally frowned upon, or at the very least not valued highly. Family comes first: respecting and caring for your elders, keeping familial bonds tight, securing the future of your children, and all the discipline that this would demand. After all that, there isn’t much time left for self-exploration. Anything that doesn’t fit or contribute to the other priorities becomes a problem. Or an inconvenience, perhaps.
This is explicit in the first two minutes of the film which both summarizes the entire movie and explains Meilin’s family, the world and values of her mother and the generations before them. And coming from this world, the most effective solution to resolve the Red Panda problem, the unpresentable parts of your self, is to excise them completely. Simply suppressing your unwanted feelings into a tight explosive ball is amateurish compared to ritualistically cutting them out and trapping them into breakable lockets. Pencil me in for the next lunar eclipse.
For Meilin however, raised in a culture that prioritizes self-actualization with a peer group that loves her unconditionally, (“panda or no panda” she imagines them saying,) her eventual solution is to synthesize her disparate parts into a cohesive, psychologically healthy and occasionally fluffy whole. That by the end of the movie her family believes and trusts in her enough to let her make her own decision is by itself already wonderful, but what elevates this movie is the cost of this decision, and the moment of doubt that it casts.
Because at the end, Meilin says to her mother: “I’m finally figuring out who I am. But I’m scared it’ll take me away from you.” And then I want to cry a little.
This moment is not just the crux of the story, but of the Asian-American experience, immersed in a culture since birth that is at times diametrically opposite to the one of your family. It means in your life you will need to make choices, consciously or not, about which culture’s values you want to believe and invest in, with each choice implicitly meaning the rejection of the other culture not chosen.
Whether opening your mind to today’s progressive ideas or just focusing on better understanding yourself, a decision to embrace modernity will erode the relationship with a more conservative family if they are not on the same journey with you. And a decision to embrace tradition and history and the culture of your roots may come at the price of weaker integration with society, and all the opportunity costs that would entail: new ideas, friendships, romances, and careers; never had, and never envisioned.
This is a universal truth I’m sure, to many children of immigrants anywhere, or any other expression of a wide intergenerational gap. That every day we all make choices, some tiny and some large, and that they all come with a cost, and over time all these different sized choices will add up to the Story of You: both the one you are and the one you are not, the mirror counterfactual self that you could have been but chose not to be. In the compromise that is life, many paths are beautiful, and though there is no wrong answer you can only have one. You have to choose. And every choice has a cost.
At the end of the movie, after the ceremonies are complete and Meilin has made her choice and all is said and done, she says “I’m not going to regret this, am I?” To which the Red Panda Goddess thing smiles and swoops her up for a joyous ride. The movie ends with a montage of her new balanced and furrier life, all of which implies that Meilin made the right decision. But it is telling that the question is explicitly left unanswered; only time will tell if that decision was worth the cost of a mother and daughter drifting apart. And that is a question that maybe only Meilin can answer.
[This essay is the first in a two-part series, concluding with this piece here on Everything Everywhere All at Once]
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