Earlier this year, I was scrolling through TikTok when the sound of a piano, accompanied by a baby bird chirping, stopped my thumb mid-air. In the video, a little green puppet girl with big eyes and two tufts of hair holds a yellow felt bird in a blanket. “Hey, birdie. It’s okay, birdie,” she coos. “I’m gonna take care of you, birdie.” My mind went back to the difficult year I’d just had: the loss of my father to cancer, two consecutive layoffs from jobs I loved. But this video made me feel oddly comforted, as if I were both the girl and the bird. We were going to be okay.

After that night, I started encountering her repeatedly, via different versions of another viral clip in which she glides into a room wearing a princess costume as an older-woman puppet sings, “Who’s that wonderful girl? Could she be any cuter?” On TikTok, the video became a meme template for capturing situations in which a slightly hapless person is celebrated for the most minor of achievements, such as getting out of bed in the morning. I began singing the song to my dog.

Soon I discovered that the little girl, Mona, and her tenderhearted grandmother, Nana, come from a Canadian children’s TV series called Nanalan’ that began as a series of shorts, in 1999. The title—a portmanteau of Nana and land—refers to the backyard where Mona plays during each episode. Even though the show has been off the air for more than a decade, a new generation of adult fans is finding comfort in its depiction of childhood as a safe and nurturing time.

If many contemporary kids’ shows, such as Paw Patrol, CoComelon, and SuperKitties, are loud, fast-paced, and frankly annoying for many grown-up viewers, Nanalan’ is the opposite. The practical effects recall much older programs, such as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: The rods used to move the puppets’ arms are visible in each shot, large black beads take the place of eyes, and pieces of two-sided toupee tape are used to attach objects to Mona’s and Nana’s hands. The conversations between Mona and Nana are entirely improvised between the co-creators Jamie Shannon, who uses falsetto and garbled English to perfectly voice a preschooler, and Jason Hopley, whose gentle chuckles and vibrato-filled singing lend wisdom to an otherwise child-centric show.

Each episode follows the same rough structure: Mona, who is almost 3, is dropped off at Nana’s house so that her mom can go to work. Mona plays outside with Nana’s dog, Russell (or “Russer,” as she calls him). At the midpoint, Mona and Nana might go over to the neighbor’s house for a puppet show, and the day may end with a read-along or a lively song and dance. There are no magical quests, no special effects, no overt moral lessons that a character preaches into the camera. Instead, Mona learns by experience: the joy of blowing bubbles into a glass of milk or watching butterflies outside, guilt over breaking Nana’s prized statue and blaming the dog.

More than a decade after parting ways, the creators reconnected due to what they describe as the “Nanalution.” (Yes, that’s Nanalan’ and revolution.) Although the show was originally created with an audience of small children in mind, the Nanalution has reached nearly half a million followers on both TikTok and Instagram. In fact, the program’s audience is largely Millennial women from the U.S., according to the research and analytics division for the United Talent Agency, which represents Hopley and Shannon.

“The world seems a bit smaller and a little bit sadder or more tense,” Hopley told me of why he thinks a ’90s children’s show is resonating with older audiences now. “Nanalan’ seems to answer some kind of wonderful need for people to feel safe, comfort, and unconditional love.” This was essentially the show’s goal from its inception, Shannon told me. But in recent months, Nanalan’ fans have latched on to the Jungian concept of the “inner child,” seeing Mona and Nana as a balm for their own unaddressed aches. The phrase “heal your inner child” has now become the tagline for Nanalan’ on social media.

Courtesy of Jamie Shannon / Nanalan’ Official / YouTube

Brooke Dumain, a clinical social worker and a therapist, explained to me that childhood trauma can manifest when a primary attachment figure, such as a parent, fails to attend to a child’s “emotional needs.” The child doesn’t have the space or proper tools to explore and process difficult feelings, such as loneliness, anger, and shame. But Nanalan’ is full of scenes demonstrating what happens when children receive the support they need, such as when Nana comforts a sobbing Mona after the little girl admits that she lied about the dog breaking Nana’s beloved statue. Nana assures Mona that she can confide in her about anything, even if she’s in the wrong. Nana doesn’t excuse Mona’s behavior, but she gently guides her granddaughter toward the right path without ever raising her voice. Mona, without overtly being told, also comes to terms with her guilt about the dog being punished in her stead, culminating in her confession of wrongdoing to Nana. “So much of inner-child work is around reparenting in a certain way so that you’re … allowing yourself to experience hard emotions and, as the adult now, saying to that little kid, ‘This is okay; this is what’s happening to you,’” Dumain said of this particular mode of therapy.

Although other children’s shows may have characters contend with similar emotions, Nanalan’ stands out for the simplicity of its conceit. Thanks to Mona’s minimal facial features, her puppetness allows viewers to more easily project themselves onto her, Shannon explained. The universality of her experiences—accidentally damaging a favorite toy, learning to cope with the end of good things—lends a certain timelessness to Nanalan’. When conceiving of the show, the creators asked themselves, What is it that a child is going through at that time in their life? “They’re the center of the universe, and everything is remarkable … There’s a spider web you could look at for hours,” Hopley told me. “It’s that kind of experiential life that Mona has. She’s that curious. She is the icon of all that is joyful in the world.”

If Mona is the archetypal child, then Nana is the de facto moral compass and the ideal adult in the room. When Russell spills milk all over Mona’s dress, Nana is there to help Mona identify her emotions—“Are you feeling mad? Are you feeling kind of sad?”—and take some deep breaths to cope. She reassures Mona (and the dog) that the spilled milk was simply an accident, and helps Mona put on a clean dress. “Nana exists to literally let Mona be who she is with support and love and guidance,” Hopley said.

The “mad and sad” scene is another viral Nanalan’ clip, in part thanks to the funny noises Mona makes when she responds to Nana’s questions. (The McLaren racing team even got in on the joke.) The irony of a slower-paced children’s show finding newfound popularity on TikTok and Instagram, where a user will scroll by a video in mere seconds, is not lost on the two creators. With a core team of just three, including their social-media manager, Shannon and Hopley keep up with demand by regularly posting snippets of the show and hosting live videos on TikTok and Instagram, as well as releasing full episodes on YouTube.

In addition to comments praising the show for its healing nature, Shannon and Hopley see the tangible impact that Mona and Nana have on viewers through Cameo, the marketplace that allows fans to pay for a personalized video from their favorite celebrity. Although they’ve fielded a number of event-oriented requests—marriage proposals, Valentine’s Day and birthday messages—the duo say their most common requests are for pep talks for viewers going through a rough period, such as grieving the death of a pet. The work can be emotionally taxing, with Shannon and Hopley receiving as many as 40 requests a day (for videos that cost $125 to $175 a pop). For them, these requests show the extent of their fans’ connection with Mona and Nana. “In production, you make a show, and you send it off to the world, and you don’t really hear much back,” Hopley told me. “But for Cameos, you are directly being asked to help somebody.”

As for the future of Nanalan’, the two creators’ sights have turned to Hollywood: Recently signed by agents at United Talent Agency, Shannon and Hopley are looking toward expansions such as a TV special and an album with new music. One of their agents, Emily Miller, told me that part of the appeal of Nanalan’ was that it’s a low-cost but already proven project “in a TV landscape where budgets are so high and buyers don’t want to take risks on super, super expensive things like Lord of the Rings.”

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In transcending its target audience of preschoolers, Nanalan’ could go on to have an outsize presence in the rich history of children’s programming. Like the Australian animated show Bluey, which follows a family of heeler dogs through everyday parent-child scenarios (and has since turned into a $2 billion franchise), Nanalan’ demonstrates how simple storylines can resonate with contemporary audiences by offering an outlet for their most childlike emotions. Put simply, life is full of joy and full of sorrow; one year could be marked by big achievements, followed by another of major losses and disappointments. Even if we don’t have our own Nanas to guide us, a show like Nanalan’ is there to help remind us that what we feel is valid, even when there are things outside our control. Like Mona and her birdie, we can learn to be okay.

When we meet Jin, the protagonist of R. O. Kwon’s new novel, Exhibit, the 29-year-old photographer is in a holding pattern: For months, she’s been incapable of producing a single image she wants to keep. Joining this creative atrophy is a new, existential gulf in her marriage: Philip, her husband, suddenly wants a child, and no part of Jin echoes the sentiment. Such disconnects might prompt a person on the cusp of their 30s to seek the guidance of friends, a therapist, or perhaps religion—time-honored, if also unexciting, options for someone invested in resolving their personal or marital conflicts. Jin, however, finds herself taking a very different route. Early in Exhibit, she goes from privately nursing her frustrations to sharing them with an alluring stranger. In place of confusion, she begins to feel something that had been eluding her: intense, exhilarating desire.

Philip hadn’t just presented Jin with a surprising new wish to have a child; he’d also been struggling to indulge one of her emergent longings. “Philip, I wish you’d hurt me,” she says early in the novel. While Philip strains to understand why Jin might want to engage in BDSM, the stranger Jin confides in is not a newcomer to the practice. Lidija Jung, an injured ballerina Jin met through a mutual friend, eagerly accepts Jin’s need to be submissive—to derive pleasure from pain being inflicted on her by someone she trusts—with eager acceptance. Stern and daring, she ushers Jin into the world of kink, a foray that reignites the frustrated photographer’s creativity. Their escalating intimacy becomes a container for Jin’s guilt over the yearnings she doesn’t feel, and an accelerant for the ones she does.  

Like most affairs, the illicit relationship at the center of Kwon’s novel does not actually begin with sex. Jin has been hiding the conflict in her marriage from her loved ones, but it’s one of the first secrets she admits to Lidija—the only other Korean American woman at a friend’s party. The pull she feels toward Lidija is instantaneous and impossible to ignore. In her memory of their first encounter, Jin recalls Lidija sticking out as though a spotlight is shining on her—“this large halo, glaring like a path to the sun.” In a conversation that begins poolside and stretches late into the night around a firepit, Jin divulges her artistic ambitions and erotic desires. “Lidija’s life had but slight overlap with mine,” she thinks. “I might risk being honest.” But any distance between the women is short-lived, and the risk wildly underestimated.

Soon, Jin’s life revolves almost entirely around Lidija, who gives Jin space to explore her interest in kink without fear of judgment. Complicating the tidy moral boxes of a straightforward infidelity story, Exhibit takes an expansive view of the things that women are punished for wanting. At times, the sheer ferocity of Jin’s desire is uncomfortable to read. But the novel doesn’t demand a reader’s approval of Jin’s cheating; whether she is justified in hurtling toward her urges matters less than the spectacle of her craving. Searching and introspective, Exhibit reflects some of the same social issues that Kwon has addressed in her nonfiction—the stigmatization of kink, the complexities of queerness, and the constant, destabilizing threat of violence against Asian women. Kwon presents these concepts as barriers to self-discovery: Jin’s clandestine journey teaches her, in part, how to want.

In vignettes that jump between periods of Jin’s life, Exhibit sketches a portrait of a woman at odds with the expectations placed on her. Once intent on surrendering her life to the Lord, she loses her faith during her college years—yet unlike the fanatical cult devotee at the center of Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, Jin isn’t led to violence by her disillusionment. Photography offered one path to catharsis for Jin’s spiritual crisis: She made large-scale triptychs depicting “lustful pilgrims who, for a sight of the desired face, will trek land, beg, hope, abjure, living discalced.” These snapshots, which sublimate her prior devotion, anchored a buzzy solo exhibition—and, months later, still attract the ire of religious zealots who deemed it sacrilegious. As Jin wrestles with public accusations of blasphemy, she also feels the weight of a rift with her mother, who refused to attend her daughter’s secular wedding. The mother-daughter scenes are some of the novel’s most affecting, showing the ripple effects of Jin’s selfish rebellions outside the narrow domains of romance or religion. That familial titles—mother, father—are written only in Hangul deepens the sense of strained, diasporic intimacy.

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Before the start of her relationship with Lidija, Jin had already spent years of her marriage outside the bounds of socially acceptable femininity: She never wanted to become a mother, and didn’t pretend otherwise. Often, she found, her refusal to have a child seemed to upset people—a judgment that did not extend to men, as no one had thought Philip was strange for not imagining himself a father when they’d married. For women, she concludes, the decision not to have children represents a fundamental rejection of the natural order, a defiance that could very well signal something more sinister: “People start asking, So, what else might this bitch think of doing?” Lidija observes in one of her many brisk, illuminating exchanges with Jin.

Jin’s queerness adds an additional layer to what she experiences as widespread suspicion of child-free women’s motives.  The novel channels—and reframes—a point that the author has made in her own life: In 2018, Kwon, who is married, came out as bisexual on Twitter. In an essay explaining this decision, Kwon wrote that the second-most-common lie about bisexual people is that “we’re unusually promiscuous, sexually greedy, incapable of monogamy. None of this is true.” Indeed, Exhibit takes great care to show that Jin’s bisexuality isn’t what compels her to cheat: Jin had slept with several women before meeting Philip, and publicly came out while married. The lust she feels for Lidija isn’t the result of lifelong queer repression; Jin’s destructive decisions are her own choices, not the supposedly innate pathology of all bisexual people. Jin is painfully aware of these attitudes, and of beliefs about queer people within her own community. Even when she’s acting reprehensibly, Jin still values pushing back against the dogma of elders who insist that queerness is a foreign plague afflicting white people, not Koreans.

Spending time with Lidija, a relationship that is clarifying and sacrosanct even as it sows deceit, offers Jin a reprieve from ill-fitting roles: dutiful daughter, reverent parishioner, self-sacrificing wife. With Lidija, Jin is neither a heretic nor a would-be mother. She’s a formidable artist, one whose dormant craft is reinvigorated by the freedom and inspiration she finds in another Korean American woman. Insulated from the power imbalances that restrict women’s lives, Jin can finally reckon with the role that power plays in sex. Providing Jin the pain she craves, the pain it took her so long to ask for, doesn’t give Lidija any pause. To Jin, the affair is a kind of revelation. “I’d leapt past shame to a fresh, unruled place,” she thinks.

Exhibit spends considerable time exploring how Jin’s and Lidija’s innermost desires are refracted through another damaging external lens: common racist stereotypes that portray Asian, and Asian American, women as naturally subservient. As a high-profile ballerina, “Lidija’s life relied, for the most part, on white people’s rating of bodies on the stage. Often, hers might be judged foreign.” Lidija couldn’t change how other people assessed her body. But she did, until her injury, have power over what it could achieve, and her penchant for control offstage is inextricable from her artistic mandate. Lidija, who has trained her own body to withstand pain, trains Jin’s body to do the same, and the indulgent interplay sparks something in both women.

With Lidija, Jin no longer has to hide, or apologize for her submission. But Jin still struggles to fully feel, much less publicly embrace, her love of kink, and as she considers the possibility of exhibiting self-portraits as a submissive, the thought inflames the same anxieties that had kept her from sharing this part of herself with her husband. Kink doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the racism that shapes so many other parts of American life can influence how people engage with it. Projecting images of her consenting to submission would still be “just what people expect, that I’ll be servile, quiet,” she tells Lidija. “I’ll add to the china-doll trope. It gets us killed.”

Exhibit treats both art and desire as serious pursuits, so the weighty proclamation doesn’t feel out of place in the women’s conversation. But Lidija doesn’t reflect the same anxiety back to Jin. Irreverent and self-assured, she challenges Jin’s timidity without dismissing the concern. The exchange is so tender that, for a moment, it’s tempting to forget that most secrets like theirs don’t stay hidden. No matter what becomes of the affair, though, Jin will emerge a different version of herself. Having ached for so long, she’s transformed by the thrill—and peril—of getting what she wants. Exhibit’s unflinching portrayal asks what we might learn from confronting some of the reasons for her stasis. Jin’s misdeeds are fictional, but the societal constraints she faces exist well outside the novel’s pages.

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