by Christine Ma
“Turning Red,” a Disney-Pixar film about a 13-year old Chinese girl from Canada undergoing a sociocultural identity crisis ostensibly brought on by her period, her love of boy bands and her filial piety, has become the epicenter of an ongoing national debate about relatability and representation.
It all started with a since-deleted Cinemablend review commenting about the difficulty connecting with the film if you weren’t an Asian person from Toronto. Accusations of racism and white supremacy abounded.
As a Chinese woman who remembers puberty and also loves both boy bands and filial piety, this movie appeared to be made for me and my exact demographic. I did not find it particularly relatable, yet I loved it anyway because relatability is not the point. It never was.
Ask any storyteller in the medium of your choice, and they will tell you this: A story lives in the specifics. No one wants to hear a tale about a generic person of indeterminate history, age or gender living in an undisclosed location with underdeveloped passions, desires and vices. We want to know all the idiosyncratic particulars.
When a Vince Gilligan show about a Ph.D.-toting high school chemistry teacher-turned-drug lord with a terminal disease became one of the most highest rated shows of all time, no one wondered if entrepreneurially-minded nerds with cancer were going to be the only ones who could relate to “Breaking Bad’s” Walter White.
When “Encanto” infiltrated every household in America with its musically irresistible story about refugees with the unique hereditary trait of performing magic, nobody stopped listening to “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” because they’ve never had an uncle with the gift of prophecy. “Avatar,” “Star Wars,” “The Avengers” — the successes of these blockbusters suggest that having traits that no average human being has access to is the hallmark of appealing to a wide audience.
Highly successful minority auteurs seem to naturally intuit this. When Arab American standup comic Ramy Youssef made an Emmy Award-winning show about a Muslim man who falls for his cousin, sleeps with married women and hallucinates about Osama bin Laden, he was asked about the secret to his success. He said: Make your story narrow. Representation is corny; universality is a death knell. Because there is no “universal” person, attempts at creating universal stories just end up feeling toothless.
Perhaps that’s why “Turning Red” did not feel all that relatable to me despite its protagonist and I sharing virtually all the same sociodemographic markers. Behind all the specificity of its portrayal of Toronto’s notoriously multicultural setting and its efforts to make sure that every supporting character came from a different racial/ethnic group, I couldn’t help but notice its striving to represent everybody, or at least as many different bodies as possible.
And as a minority person myself whose own work has been accused of being too narrow, weird or unrepresentative of all Asians, I get it: When you are the only voice of a people because your group has been historically invisible, the urge to speak for all those you represent is almost irresistible.
This appears to be a Catch-22 specific to marginalized storytellers. There seems to be this collective push for #OwnVoices stories and better representation, but when these historically underrepresented stories finally get sold, publicized and given screen time, they invariably get put through the wringer over how well they reflect all members of one group or another — in the case of “Turning Red,” all Asians or girls or 13-year-olds or American/Canadians or homo sapiens.
It’s time we stop asking about whether something is relatable and start asking whether it rings true. George Saunders, in his latest treatise on the art of storytelling, “A Swim in the Pond”, observed that the defining marker of a successful storyteller is their sense of causality. Do the events and characters of a story make sense and hang together?
In the case of “Turning Red,” I admit I’m not totally sure how the onset of Meilin Lee’s menstrual cycle is linked to her turning into a red panda, but no matter. Sometimes the best stories demand that we suspend our need for logic and just watch, delighting in seeing little teenage heroes do what they do best: Defy our expectations and do their own thing.
