One Korean-American woman finally sees herself reflected in a romantic lead, and learns to embrace all the parts of her identity. This essay is read by Anna Cathcart, who plays Kitty on To All The Boys I've Loved Before.
LARA JEAN: The forbidden kiss. We knew that it was wrong, that he was betrothed to my sister. But if this wasn't what he wanted, then why did he come to the field of desire? It was fated that we should meet like this--
[pillow hits Lara Jean in the face]
Hey!
REBECCA: It’s funny cause it’s like, you don’t really picture yourself as the heroine when you’re watching movies. You picture… When you grow up and you’re watching mainly white mainstream movies, it’s like you don’t even put yourself in that role. I guess I didn’t.
MEREDITH: I’m Meredith Goldstein, advice columnist for the Boston Globe, host of the Love Letters podcast, and avid television watcher. And this is Because I Watched: A podcast exploring how real people’s stories have been changed, thanks to their favorite Netflix shows and movies.
It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me, even just online, that I am a big fan of romantic movies. I mean, love is my business.
It’s not just that movies about love are fun to watch – although they often really are. Especially when you’re alone, with snacks. It’s also that I think these movies are good for us. They keep us hopeful. When a romance story goes beyond the expected, it can teach us lessons. It can give us ideas. It can remind us why we all go through so much for the people we care about.
That’s why it’s so important that people can see themselves in characters, in their stories. Yes, this is a love story, but there are many ways to be in love.
Today’s story is about one Korean American woman who finally saw herself on screen in the character of Lara Jean in To All the Boys I've Loved Before, the kind of movie that makes a person want to be smitten.
This story was written by our subject, Rebecca Ritchey and is read by Anna Cathcart who plays Laura Jean in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before.
ANNA: The worst of it took place thirty years ago when we lived in a trailer park in Southern Illinois, perpetrated by neighbors who didn’t like the arrival of an interracial family. My mother’s emergence from our home was enough to provoke taunts of foreign gibberish and fingers stretching the skin of eyelids. Bricks met our windows with alarming frequency. Our dog was run over one sunny afternoon. When the threatening phone calls got to be too much, my father packed us up in the middle of the night and drove our family to Ohio.
This was years before the cops dragged my mother from our high-rise apartment in Seoul. By then our neighbors were Army families poking their heads out of doorways to glimpse the destruction of my parents’ fights—coffee cups in shards on the carpet. Eggshell walls stained brown. Divorce followed shortly after.
My mother always lived on the periphery of my life. She’s habitually nomadic so my clues to her whereabouts come about in odd ways—like the high roller’s club cards brimming in my mailbox from Las Vegas casinos. We don’t speak the same language, so our infrequent phone conversations are rudimentary at best. But her features confront me every day when I look in the mirror: almond shaped eyes, a wide-set nose and heart shaped lips—a stranger’s face on my own.
ANNA: On one hand, my mom is a stereotypical Asian mom: overtly judgmental and critical of my eating habits. And yet, I don’t really know her beyond a collection of specific memories: She smoked Virginia slims and drank coffee in paper cups from subway vending machines. She could cut pear skins in long, curling strokes and pop her gum with every chew. She had stacks of cash lining her dresser drawers. Strange men came to our home every week to play poker—for a fee—identified years later as members of the Korean Mafia. I played in empty refrigerator boxes as she took me around Seoul, peddling cheap appliances from the Army commissary on the black market. When your mother is a con artist, lack of a common language is the least of your problems.
Our collective fear is that we all become our parents eventually. I’ve often wondered if my reluctance to fully embrace my ethnicity lives in that fear. The part of me that refuses to allow any part of her in myself turns into a kind of self-loathing, amplified by the rest of the world trying to parse my identity into boxes.
Ask any Asian-American person and odds are they’ve been asked the same seemingly innocuous question:
“…Where are you from?”
“Ohio” is not an acceptable answer.
“No, I mean…where are you really from?”
This is rarely asked with malicious intent, but it feels intrusive and pointed all the same. You, with your unaffected English and Midwestern sensibilities, are not American enough. Not really from here. When you’re of mixed race, the question is even more uniquely phrased: “What are you?” as if you were anything less than human.
ANNA: When media depicts Asian stories, race is almost always the focal point: the mysteries of the orient, othered and exotic. Geishas dance in kabuki makeup. Chinese grocers sell their wares. Second generation children of immigrants navigate middle-America. None of these stories have ever come close to capturing my experience. When I’m out with my white father, I can’t help but wonder if people think I’m adopted. When the waitress at the Korean restaurant brings my dad a fork, a man who lived in Korea for fifteen years and speaks more of the language than I do, he rolls his eyes, asks for chopsticks and a pair of scissors to cut the bowl of naengmyeon he just ordered.
Growing up I rarely invited friends to my house. I was afraid of their reaction to the mini fridge full of kimchi that I hid behind cans of pop, or the celadon teapots arranged on oriental furniture—remnants of our old life in Korea. One of the few times I did invite someone over she wrinkled her nose at the dried seaweed in our cupboard and asked me why my family ate leaves. I was embarrassed and ashamed of the things that made us different and unappreciative of my father trying to keep our mother’s culture alive in the house.
I quickly grew to detest the Asian side of myself. I believed the stereotypes I saw perpetuated in television and movies—that Asian women were meek and submissive. I became determined to subvert these ideas. I spoke up in class. I got tattoos. I held a solid C-average in math (let’s just pretend this was subversion, shall we?) I pushed my Korean identity so far down it barely existed, clinging to the idea that it amounted to a string of stereotypes that I could simply reject. I thought if I could behave and present myself in such a way, the world might see me as I saw me.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before premiered on Netflix just two days after Crazy Rich Asians hit theaters. It was encouraging, yet strange, to see so many Asian faces leading mainstream movies. Never one to gravitate toward teen love stories, I dismissed the hype about To All the Boys at first. But with Twitter abuzz and the Internet extolling its virtues, I finally settled in for what I thought would be another formulaic rom-com.
Instead, what I found was my own family staring back at me: a single white father trying (and failing) to cook Korean food for his half-Korean daughters. Kitty, the youngest, casually sipping on a bottle of Yakult, a Korean yogurt drink I spent my childhood drinking. A biracial Asian-American girl navigating the pitfalls of adolescence and growing up, all without race as a plot point. Even her name, Lara Jean Covey, is as nondescript as my own - Rebecca Ritchey. I’ve often marveled at the way it conforms so easily on paper, giving nothing of myself away.
ANNA: Lara Jean is presented just as she is: the heroine of our story. Her race is a non-issue, not even commented on beyond the fact that the John Hughes classic, Sixteen Candles, is her favorite movie. When Peter points out the racist caricature of Long Duk Dong, a grotesque stereotype whose arrival onscreen is accompanied by the sound of a gong, Lara Jean barely registers his shock. She’s already well aware of this. But she also understands that in order to connect with the story, she has to ignore that part. The same way I love Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but cringe through Mickey Rooney’s performance. Even the book covers of Lara Jean’s bodice-ripping romance novels only feature white women. There are justifications we make in order for us to see ourselves as the hero of our own stories. The irony is that Lara Jean herself is our Holly Golightly, adding to a growing list of Asian-American led cinema where we don’t have to fast forward past any more Mr. Yunioshi’s.
I used to look for pieces of myself in other places, mostly commercials filling diversity quotas: the black mom selling Temper-Pedics with her white husband and white son or the mixed-race little girl pouring Cheerios on her black father. I delighted in the way these families were presented with no explanation. This was the reality that I knew. I never thought it would matter so much for me to see the whole of myself represented on screen until I finally saw it. It’s the reason diverse voices in media are so important. Ignoring the biracial experience paints an incomplete portrait of Asian-Americans. Perhaps if I had been exposed to these stories when I was younger I could have saved myself a lot of self-hatred.
It took a long time to embrace my hyphenate-identity, but I think I’m getting there. I’ve immersed myself in Korean culture in many ways—watching variety shows and delving into the addictive world of K-pop. I bought a textbook to help me learn the language (I’m up to Chapter Nine) and I’m hopeful that one day I can have a real conversation with my mom. I’m also learning how to cook Korean cuisine, so trips to the Asian grocery are a common occurrence. I don’t bother hiding the jars of kimchi in my refrigerator anymore. And Peter Kavinsky is absolutely correct—Yakult is really good.
ANNA: I’m, like, blown away that To All The Boys means this much to her! I think that’s really really cool that something that we’ve worked on and care about so much can mean this much to someone and actually change their life in a way, not just, oh that was a cute movie. It actually means a lot to them. And that just blows my mind, and I feel very grateful that I could be a part of something like this that could do something so special for someone. All I can say is that I hope that the film industry continues to have more representation of all kinds, so everyone can see themselves on screen, no matter what way, if it’s race, if it’s anything really. That they just feel like someone understands them is super important, and there’s nothing like it. To feel understood and that someone gets you, and that there’s other people like you out there. So that’s really all I can hope, and I think this is a great start. To All the Boys represents obviously a lot of important things to a lot of people, so it’s definitely headed in the right direction. But, yeah I’m very proud of everyone involved in this.
REBECCA: You want to see these people in these sort of steryotypical rom-com roles almost because it’s like, it could be anybody. It could be any face, it doesn’t have to be a white face. It doesn’t have to be anything that you are used to seeing all the time because if you go outside of this and go into different intersectionalities of identity and diversity then you’re just going to be able to tell so many different stories and let people see that representation they normally don’t. And for me that was like the first time I’ve ever seen it.
MEREDITH: Thank you for listening to Because I Watched. Next week, we’ll hear about how the Netflix series Sex Education made things a little less awkward for a mother and son.
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Because I Watched is produced by Netflix and Spoke Media.
Today’s essay was written by Rebecca Ritchey and read by Anna Cathcart. And special thanks to Rebecca for sharing her story, as well as writing it.
This is Meredith. We’ll see you next week!