Animal wives stories fascinate me. I think it is because how much of these stories speak to the experience of being woman-shaped in the world and how many men ask you to be smaller for them, to flense your wings and forget your wolf pelt, to lay at their feet by the fire and be good, be tame, be quiet.
Of course, I’d hate those stories if they didn’t end with the animal wives escaping, draping the skins that their husbands had said they had burned —they never burn the skins, they love the wildness of women too much; it’s just that they can’t bear it belonging to their wives— over their spines as they run. Back to the woods. Back to the water. Back to who they were before a man made them something they were not.
(In my favorite versions of these stories, the animal wives get their revenge.)
Strangely, I’m thinking about animal wives stories today because I watched Turning Red on Friday, and haven’t been able to get the movie —and the responses to the movie— out of my head. Turning Red has been described as ‘exhausting’ and ‘limiting’ in terms of its appeal because it is so rooted in the Asian community of Toronto,.
Limiting.
Because what? It isn’t a touristic look at what it might be like to be Asian-Canadian, or thirteen and discovering your body is no longer the same as it was, and you want things that you don’t have words for? Because it isn’t easily palatable? Because there are Asian women there who aren’t sexpots or dragon ladies? Because there is a mom there who isn’t dead, and a father who isn’t remote and is instead kind and supportive and awed by the ferocity of the women in his life?
Because this isn’t the shape that society wants Asian people to occupy? Because this world of ours is so used to minorities being small and subservient to the expectations of our so-called betters, and having a story that centers out experiences and our dreams feels... uppity, maybe?
It makes me think of Nghi Vo’s gorgeously written Siren Queen, which is set in the Golden Age of Hollywood and is not unlike the history we lived except movie magic is realer there than it is in our world. In it, we have Luli Wei who is desperate to be a star but not desperate enough to suffer through the roles they expect of her. She does not want to die again and again and again for a hero, to be the catalyzing tragedy. She doesn’t want to accessorize someone else’s story.
I hope to hell that Turning Red does phenomenally in the box office. It is ground-breaking work in a hundred different ways. The casting alone, the fact so many of the characters are voiced by people of accurate background. I want its numbers to be jaw-dropping, and for the moneymen in Hollywood to look at Turning Red and think diverse voices can sell. (I understand this is a very cynical thought to have but let’s face it, a lot of these people don’t care, one way or another. All they worship is the dollar.)
I want more things like Turning Red. I want more Shang-Chi. I want more Into The Badlands. I want more Fresh Off the Boat. I want more Crazy Rich Asians (I cried myself hoarse in a movie theatre over that movie. Not because of the story itself but because of how the movie treated Southeast Asia like something deserving awe.) I want more Kim’s Convenience. I want more Chosen & the Beautiful. I want more In The Watchful City. I want all of it. Every story, good or bad.
I want all of them.
I want our communities to not have to dig and hunt and fight for the space we should have been given from the beginning. I want us to not live in a world where movies about French rats and talking cars are regarded as more relatable than a movie about a thirteen-year-old Chinese kid.