Can ‘Turning Red’ and ‘Everything, Everywhere, All At Once’ be Considered Contributions to Social Innovation?
(Note: this article addresses the themes of Turning Red and Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. I highly recommend that you experience these films for yourself, but don’t let that discourage you from reading on!)
The North American New Wave
Chinese representation in western movies has seen a spike in mainstream popularity over the past few years, spurred on by box office success Crazy Rich Asians in 2018. Since then we have seen multi-generational and international Chinese families take centre stage in 2019’s The Farewell and 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. These films were unafraid to embrace and celebrate being Chinese in America, and in my humble opinion are all the more better for it!
2022 is no exception, and in March we saw two major contributions to Chinese diasporic representation on film: PIXAR’s Turning Red, and A24’s Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (EEAAO). Turning Red is director 石之予 Domee Shi’s first feature-length work following the release of the short film Bao in 2018. The film explores puberty, periods, and paternalistic relationships – all set to the backdrop of early 2000s Toronto when Tamagotchis and track suits ruled the streets. Protagonist Mei is a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian forced to reconcile two halves of her identity: on one hand, she embraces the responsibilities of her role as devoted steward of the family’s red panda temple. On the other, Mei wants nothing more than to sneak out under the cover of darkness to see boy band sensation 4*TOWN, live in concert with her friends.
The working class family at the heart of EEAAO similarly reflects the lived reality of many Chinese-Americans, albeit with a more sober conflict surrounding… you guessed it, death and taxes! 楊紫瓊Michelle Yeoh and 關繼威 Ke Huy Quan play husband and wife Evelyn & Waymond, owners and operators of a local laundromat. When Evelyn discovers that she is the target of the universe-destroying Jobu Tupaki, Evelyn must balance her tenuous relationships between husband, daughter, and father in a cosmos-spanning conflict that addresses moves from nihilism to Everything Bagels at the drop of a hat.
(Note: it is no coincidence that this profession is chosen for the family, given that laundries were one of the only – and therefore most common – occupations available for early Chinese immigrants to North America. Perhaps in some parallel universe not too distant from our own the CBC has funded a ‘Lee’s Laundry’ sitcom centred on the exploits of an intergenerational Chinese family... one can dream.)
Lost in Translation
There is a lot of confusion and miscommunication about the ‘Chinese’ language, which is most commonly associated with Mandarin or ‘Modern Standard Chinese’ (MSC). And this makes sense because most universities and other educational institutions around the world offer MSC as the default representation of ‘Chinese’ to non-native learners. Even the United Nations refers to Mandarin simply as ‘Chinese’. However, this pattern of treating ‘Chinese’ and ‘Mandarin’ as one-and-the-same is horribly misrepresentative. The Sinitic language family is home to dozens of mutually unintelligible languages, and the differences between them can be as distinct as French is from Portuguese or Spanish.
The earliest Chinese immigrants who arrived in North America came from Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangdong province – natively Cantonese speech regions – in southern China during the 1850s. These early migrants were incredibly resilient in the face of adversity, shouldering the human cost of nation-building projects like the Canadian Pacific Railway and segregated into ethnic enclaves. Despite this they remained innovative with enterprising residents creating the foundations for long-lasting cultural communities, otherwise known as ‘Chinatowns’. Cantonese is the fifth-most common language spoken by Canadian seniors and remains the most common Chinese language you will hear in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary as a result of this history.
We Don’t Talk About Canto (… no, no no!)
Turning Red and EEAAO come at a tumultuous time for Chinese people in North America. Race-motivated hate crimes rose across the country since the start of COVID-19, and it is no surprise that East and Southeast Asian populations saw a 300% rise in police-reported incidents in 2020, reflecting broader global trends in violence against Asians. In the United States Cantonese language programming was cut in major institutions like Stanford in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to North America’s oldest Chinatown with over 500,000 Cantonese speakers today. Publicly available Cantonese language programming is severely lacking in Canada, and there are real concerns over community workers’ and first responders’ inability to provide culturally-inclusive care as a result.
Chinatowns have also come under fire in recent history in light of urban development and changing Asian demographics. ‘Save Chinatown’ movements have occurred in every major city in Canada over the past ten years, and the link between language and speech communities that Chinatowns represent cannot be overstated. For many heritage speakers who experienced shame growing up not speaking or learning the language, the loss of Chinatowns is a major threat to our ability to connect with our history.
Given that Turning Red is explicitly related to the Chinese Canadian experience it was a welcome surprise to see Mei and her mother watching Cantonese opera on their CRT television. Not only this, the ritual chants used in the film were created in collaboration with a Cantonese language coach based out of Hong Kong. The family’s home is also located in the heart of Toronto’s Chinatown, providing visual representation of the continued importance that these spaces hold for celebrating Chinese history and contributions to the multicultural Canadian experience.
The same is true for EEAAO, albeit a little more complex: Evelyn and Waymond code-switch between Mandarin and English in conversations with each other, and the language switches to Cantonese when Evelyn speaks with her father Gong Gong (which is the Cantonese pronunciation for 公公, meaning ‘maternal grandfather’). Daughter Joy embodies the split identity caused by the intergenerational loss of language and the accompanying shame that comes with the losing access to one’s mother tongue; unable to speak with her grandfather while simultaneously struggling to communicate with her own mother.
Where Social Innovation Fits In The (Motion) Picture
Films and popular culture have incredible potential to drive progress in addressing the fundamental root causes behind anti-Asian hate. On a personal level I know I speak for many of us caught at the intersection of ‘being too Chinese to be Canadian, and too Canadian to be Chinese’. Despite this experience being personal, the characters in Turning Red and EEAAO explore this through the universal emotions of love, anger, sadness, joy, and catharsis; by experiencing these stories through the lens of others who don’t look like us or speak our language, we actively grow our capacity for ‘systems sight’.
In adopting Donella Meadows’ 12 Leverage Points one can see how movies have the power to change the very mindsets or paradigms governing how systems related to race & language are developed. For Chinese Canadians like myself, simply seeing ourselves and our languages represented honestly and in all our complexity is a major step forward for true belonging. Public opinion is also heavily influenced by cultural portrayals of minority groups in media (Amin-Khan 2012), so perhaps taking action to mitigate Anti-Asian racism can happen in the storytelling realm in addition to direct activist spaces.
See the following Stanford Social Innovation Review articles, as well as their dedicated Arts & Culture page, to explore how representation and storytelling are crucial components of social innovation:
The Science of What Makes People Care: especially “Communicate in images”, “Invoke emotion with intention”, and “Tell better stories”.
No art? No social change. No innovation economy: Canada’s population growth is increasingly defined by immigration and there are greater calls to develop society’s human, social, and creative capital to address ongoing & future multicultural issues
Storytelling and Social Change: there can be no policy change independent from culture change.
Also check out Babs van Vierssen Trip’s earlier article Three Times Stories Sparked Change on ABSI Connect’s blog page to explore the impact of literature on social change.
References
Amin-Khan, T. (2012). New Orientalism, Securitisation and the Western Media’s Incendiary Racism. Third World Quarterly, 33(9), 1595–1610.