Turning Red

[liralen]

We got to see Turning Red with Jet tonight!  It was a lot of fun. As Jet put it, part of it was not a part of my experience, but it was very entertaining. The whole puberty with other girls and being so... it just wasn't a part of my growing up; but it was fun to see anyway.

The part of it that was very much a part of my growing up was both... painful and connecting. The whole experience of growing up in a Chinese household as a female to a mother who was Chinese was too close to home. For those who want to avoid spoilers, you should stop here.  Just go see it if you haven't, yet. You'll understand more of me, than I might.

It was the line, "I will never be good enough for her." 

I never felt like I was.

Even with perfect SAT scores, getting into Caltech, being one of two women in a class of 200 MSEE's, making enough money in one year to pay off two cars and most of a house, none of it was good enough. There was always MORE I should be doing better. When I retired, Mom pretty much said, "You can't DO that. You can't stop working!"

I could. I did.

And I knew that I was disappointing her. But... by that time, I had grown enough to know that she didn't define me anymore. But she tried.

I am good at math. I'm good at engineering. I published a couple of books. I played the piano so well I took second in a competition across all of California (Mom, of course, was upset I didn't win. Dad couldn't contradict her so neither of them ever praised me for any of it so I didn't either until much much later). I used to spin and knit Shetland shawls so delicate you could pull them easily through a wedding ring. I used to play soccer twice a week, running 90 minutes at half back and having a blast and the very last game I played, when I broke my ACL, the referee came up to me to tell me that she thought I'd gotten a LOT better since I'd started. She was right. I now paint. I raised an amazing kid. I have broken the chain in that my son knows what he's worth and has the self-esteem to understand how good he really is at all he does.

I cook to the point where I'm sad that people tell me they can't cook for me because they'd be embarrassed because of what John posts about my cooking on Facebook, and I happily eat what they give me because it's made with love and that's what counts, not the technique or whatever the hell. I cook so obsessively because what I do is never good enough (for her), but everyone else is doing the best they can and that's enough for me.

I need to accept that what I do should be good enough for me, but it really isn't. John loves it, that's good enough, but I keep trying to make things better.

My therapist asked me what the good side to that is, and I wanted to tell him there isn't any. But I do better work and have accomplished so much because of that crazy drive. He's right in that. Linda once said that she thought I did everything well. Maybe that's part of why I miss her so much.

Linda gave me the praise I'd always craved. And I think that if I'd had that praise from my parents, I might have done even better and actually loved more of what I did. The minute my parents weren't able to reinforce my piano habit, I dropped it like a hot potato. The minute I didn't need the high math and science required to pass my classes, I forgot most of it and never really looked at it curiously again.

I do now, sometimes, with Jet, when he's intrigued. With him, I'm now watching the Minute Physics series on Special Relativity and how to really understand the math related to it in part because he's fascinated, and in part because I can freely do it for my own reasons now. And I know that I can understand it pretty readily. 

I'm glad the main character in Turning Red got accepted by her mom and her mom, in turn got accepted as family by her grandmother as well. That the love was real, even when she didn't do what the old generations wanted. Even though she did not venerate her ancestors enough to obey them in every detail. A new generation born in a different land. We get to break away. 

I loved that Accented Cinema in their review of  Turning Red said, "Thank God, finally a movie with a Chinese-descent protagonist who doesn't "GO BACK" TO CHINA." Especially for those of us born here, we're not foreigners "going back" to a land we've never seen. We belong here. And Mei belongs in her home town in Canada and she knows it. 

Comments

[rmd]

I am so proud of you for breaking that chain. You may have made mistakes as a parent - I don't know - but if so, they were TOTALLY DIFFERENT mistakes. :)

For me, that parental disappointment stuff (I grew up with what felt like a nonstop flow of the "oh, if only you'd APPLY yourself" bs) is very much a "worms in my head" experience that just digs in and messes with me on some primal level. I did find what may be the ultimate inappropriate parental disappointment: I read somewhere that Buzz Aldrin's dad was disappointed at him for not being the first one to step foot on the moon. I MEAN.

[liralen]

Woah. That is a whole new level of that kind of BS. Wow.

I'm so glad we can just call it inappropriate now. *laughs quietly*

Yeah, it's a primal thing... and I keep having to consciously sidestep it, but I DO which is good.

And, yes, I've made entirely different parental mistakes! And freely admit it, especially to Jet. *laughs* He will just get to step up from here. It's a good thing to have each generation at least learn from the last.

[rmd]

Just to note, if you think there are mother/daughter issues in "Turning Red", they pale by comparison to the mother/daughter issues in "Everything Everywhere All At Once". The film is REALLY GOOD but boy howdy does it poke at those issues and it also is about folks from a Chinese family so I'm sure it'll have all manner of subtleties that I missed. (But it's really good)

[liralen]

I just saw it, yesterday...

Oddly enough... Evelyn's helplessness in the face of trying to express her love for Joy _helped_. How impossible it was for her to say things positively, especially with the way *her* father expressed himself, just...

For some reason how things fit together in Everything Everywhere All At Once worked WAY better for me than how it went in Turning Red, where everyone there said things that no one of my mother's or HER mother's generation could have said in ways they would never have said it. Oddly enough Evelyn's "You're too fat!" was so much like my mom's "You can't retire! That's stupid!" that it made sense to me in a way Turning Red was too much a Disney-fied experience.

Evelyn trying to express her love for Joy by finally defying the expectations she thought her father had was... perfect. I don't know why, but it actually hurt?!? a lot less than Turning Red, where the idea that my mom could actually SAY what Mei Lin's mother said, just... it's such a complete fantasy. Where seeing Evelyn try so hard and suck so badly at it. THAT felt so much more real and heartfelt. Mom really does try her best, and I know that she does love me when she says things like "you need to eat more" or "Jet's too skinny! He's too cold! He has to have a coat!!" Just like Joy could interpret to her girlfriend.

Anyway... not sure if that conveyed what I meant. But... yeah. I loved Everything Everywhere All At Once, and while I did cry a bit at the end, it wasn't the same kind of despair I had from Turning Red, oddly enough.