“Turning Red” Offers Brilliant Insight That Asian Mothers Would Rather Destroy a City Than Go to Therapy
Tackling Toronto’s infrastructure is so much easier than tackling intergenerational trauma.
March 15, 2022
By: Grant Yang
The new Disney Pixar animated movie Turning Red wonderfully demonstrates universally accepted truths such as the awkwardness of experiencing puberty, the value of having supportive friends, and the willingness of Asian mothers to cause millions of dollars of structural damages to their city rather than go to therapy.
One day, main character Meilin Lee wakes up to find that her middle-school body can shapeshift into a red panda, an ability that has been passed down to all women in her ancestral lineage. Desperate for her mother, Ming’s, validation, Meilin tries to quell her red panda spirit to no avail, resulting in a conflict that reveals that Ming also could never be the perfect daughter for her own mother. However, rather than openly communicate about this intergenerational trauma with a therapist for a single second, Ming does what all Asian mothers would rather do than confront their own feelings: enter a rage-filled furry-Godzilla form and terrorize the city they grew up in. After ripping apart a stadium and likely killing dozens of Toronto natives (it’s ok, they’re Canadian), the family heals their trauma the Asian way by simply never talking about it ever again. And who said mental health was real?
