(Photo from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before)

Aanchal Saraf

Midway through Netflix’s breakout summer hit of 2018, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (TATBILB), Lara Jean sits on a couch with Peter and her younger sister, Kitty. The three are watching John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles (1984), when the character Long Duk Dong appears on screen. Peter pauses to ask, “Isn’t this portrayal kind of racist?” When Lara Jean, who is Korean American, agrees, Peter is baffled as to how the sisters could like a movie they recognize as being racist towards Asian Americans. Kitty emphatically responds “Why are you even asking that question? Hello, Jake Ryan!”

The scene is deeply sympathetic to both Lara Jean and Kitty, a recuperation of media that Asian-Americans couldn’t fully identify with but still find deeply meaningful to their formative years. Peter is quick to bring up why the sisters’ movie choice might be a complicated one. But TATBILB also suggests that representation needn’t be this way, a dismissal of caricature alongside an identification with the presumed universality of a white lead. The film itself frames a laptop playing the movie, so we see a twice mediated Sixteen Candles, and a Long Duk Dong refracted through even more layers of mediation. In its very deliberation on the scene, the movie asks us to consider exactly how TATBILB is different. We do well to sit with Kitty’s inquiry–why even ask about representation when you’ve got the two Covey sisters right there as a redress for any offense Long Duk Dong may have ever caused?

The plot of TATBILB revolves around a box of letters Lara Jean writes to crushes throughout her life, fantastic declarations of love that the viewer knows are bound to end up in the wrong hands at any moment–or the right hands, it turns out, as one of those (un)intended recipients is jock Peter Kavinsky, played by white actor Noah Centineo, who has recently catapulted to Tiger Beat magazine cover levels of teen stardom. Peter has just been dumped by Lara Jean’s primary antagonist, a disappointingly one-dimensional character named Genevieve. In a hope to make Gen jealous, and to thwart the suspicions of Josh, the ex-boyfriend of Lara Jean’s older sister Margot and another one of Lara Jean’s letter recipients, Peter suggests the two enter into a fake relationship. The two teenagers discover soon after, however, that their pretend relationship has led to real feelings. In light of the recent release of the universally panned sequel, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, and in the hope of a much better third film to close out the trilogy, I thought it could be an appropriate time to revisit the beloved first installment, which had a magic I found to be sorely lacking in the latest iteration.

The protagonist of the TATBILB trilogy is Lara Jean Covey, played by Vietnamese-American actress Lana Condor, the middle child of a mixed-race family headed by a white father and a Korean mother, the latter of whom passed away years before the window of time in which the movie takes place. TATBILB has been hailed as a victory for Asian-American representation in film. More so, Lara Jean is the Asian-American female lead of a mainstream teenage romantic comedy, a genre in which such casting is unprecedented. However, critics have pointed out the lack of Asian male characters in the film as well as the ethnically interchangeable casting of the Covey sisters, none of whom are played by Korean actresses, as challenges to these so-called representative victories. This essay is less interested in those particular critiques, while still acknowledging the long genealogy of cinema that reinforces the historical desexualization of Asian men and casts Asians as other Asians based on geographic proximity of homeland or shared colonizers alone. [1][2] While much pop culture criticism surrounding TABILB during its initial release lingered on its racial representation (a celebration that often amounted to “Sixteen Candles but better, because…diversity!”), I am more interested in thinking about its representation not through its racial casting but through a series of unlikely objects: food, face masks, and photos. In what follows, I hope to think with TATBILB generously, pressing on the film to ask not questions of accurate representation or authenticity, but of affectual condition. Does this movie feel Asian-American? And if so, what lessons does TATBILB offer us about such a feeling?

The scene I opened with is engaged in what scholar Laura Hyun Ki Kang calls a compositional struggle. [3] Works that call active attention to their composition in relation to other representative works are engaged in compositional struggles. While Kang’s term is applied to media engaged in a more critical paradigm of social commentary than a teen rom-com may be thought to, I want to believe that TATBILB is engaged in a similar compositional struggle, perhaps at a different register. As the characters reflect on Long Duk Dong, the film contests the bounded genre of the 1980s teen rom-com and its elision or exaggeration of Asian-Americans. [4]

Such processes of contestation occur on many levels and in many moments throughout the film, but the TATBILB’s primary compositional struggle is one that reimagines an Asian-American woman as its protagonist. Film producers, initially attempting to cast Lara Jean and her sisters as white women, pointed to the lack of anything in the film that was recognizably and specifically Asian-American. Jenny Han, the Korean-American writer of the YA series that the movie was based on, protested such casting with the insistence that Lara Jean’s “spirit is Asian American,” raising the question of what exactly an Asian American woman’s spirit could or should feel like.

In her work on the racialization of the Asian-American woman’s body, scholar Anne Cheng has coined the term “ornamentalism.” Nearly homophonous with orientalism, it is the idea that Asiatic femininity is a matter of style, of ornament. [5] There is no dearth of examples in TATBILB that point to the continued logic of Asiatic femininity as a matter of style, to both problematic and imaginative ends. Whether or not the “spirit” of the film is Asian-American, its materiality evokes and oftentimes attempts to authenticate the presence of the Asian-American woman. In order to engage representational feeling alongside representational content, that is, think about subjects and objects together, I dwell on Asian American objects in the film, and how various characters make meaning through them.

Food occupies a variety of spaces of meaning, from reifying domestic social roles to obscuring complex geopolitical entanglements. In the opening scene of the film, Lara Jean’s father, a white widower, is attempting to make an unspecified Korean dish, though an informed viewer can easily identify it as bossam. His attempt is cast as a failure: the pork is cooked beyond edibility, and the oldest Covey sister, Margot, steps in as a maternal figure to transform the not-meal into something palatable. The kitchen as domestic space continues to be a site of representation. Author Jenny Han was consulted at various points by director Susan Johnson on how to make the movie feel “more Asian-American.” [6] One of Han’s key interventions was that there should be a rice cooker in the kitchen “at all times.” The table spread with bossam and the rice cooker serve not just as stand-ins for the Covey matriarch, a Korean woman, but also import an Asian-Americanness onto the film, and onto the Covey sisters themselves.

In preparation for her role as Lara Jean, actress Lana Condor received a “get-ready” pack from author Jenny Han, filled with Korean sheet masks, Korean snacks, a diary, candles, and stationary. [7] Though the Korean snacks and sheet masks are both “Asian American” objects, they suggest vastly different visions of “ornamental” representation. One such snack, yakult, becomes its own site of mediating ethnic particularities, as it is one of the few explicitly “Asian” objects in the film, as well as a foregrounded object rather than ornamenting a backdrop. Yet the drink comes to serve as a site of constructed ornamentalism, eliding national difference in order to emerge as a wholly authentic representational object. Despite its Japanese genesis, yakult is referred to in the film (by Peter, may I add) as a Korean yogurt smoothie. This slippage conflates two countries that share a particularly complicated history, Japan having violently colonized and occupied Korea for decades.

In fact, yakult’s ubiquity throughout Asia and the diaspora is inextricable from Japan’s own geopolitical history in the region, from 19th and 20th century regimes of occupation to its turn as a soft power techno-giant with still undeniable valences of power and narrative construction in its relations with South Korea. Yet yakult becomes the site at which Lara Jean and Peter’s relationship literally catalyzes. Peter goes across town to the Korean grocery store to get yakult as a snack to share with Lara Jean on the bus ride for a school ski trip, the journey itself a manifestation of his love for her. Ethnic interchangeability in this movie is fractured through longer histories of who is in the United States and how. This interchangeability is deployed through an ornamental logic, which accounts for which ethnic groups get placed under which broader categories of Asiatic “types,” said types defined by kinds of aesthetic styles that are in themselves constructed around regions with proximate histories and geographies. That interchangeability extends to yakult, which quickly becomes Korean amid a complex set of geopolitical entanglements that could complicate such an easy categorization. Yakult emerges as a complex object in this movie, haunted by the ways in which its history resists the movie’s categorization of it as Korean.

Whether yakult transcends these mediations by emerging as an object of interracial romance is doubtful. But yakult, and many of the other “Korean” foods in the film, provide us at least with one way to understand the racial shorthand of objectification. Lara Jean’s Asian-Americanness is often configured through the foods she eats as well as a racialization of the spaces in which she lives. These objects and background ornaments provide a nonnegotiable Asian-Americanness in a film working through the conventions of an otherwise very white genre. In the place of other kinds of material connections to homeland or identity, these objects become racial stand-ins, resonating at the level of difference. Unfortunately, when suspended uncritically at the level of difference, this kind of world-building appears to reify the idea that racial objectification is a matter of course when composing the Asian-American woman. In communicating racial feeling through consumptive practices alone, these moments threaten to trap the Asian American woman’s existence within the logics of capital.

The appearance of face masks in the film bears a different kind of resonance, and perhaps brings us closer to a more reparative mode of adornment, rather than ornamentalism. In a scene in the film during a class ski trip, Lara Jean hides from Peter in a hotel room with her friend Lucas, a gay black man and the only one of Lara Jean’s former crushes played by a man of color. Lara Jean reveals that she and Peter have been faking a relationship as she and Lucas literally peel the Korean sheet masks off their faces. The two sit upright in separate beds, a lamp on the table between them illuminating the pile of romance novels on Lara Jean’s bed. It is a scene of intense and deeply platonic intimacy.

While trends of “porcelain” and “glass” skin could be considered contemporary manifestations of historical logics of ornamentalism that permeate popular discourse around Korean skincare, this scene uses ornament as a site for recovery. Lara Jean puts on, but equally importantly, peels off, the sheet mask to remake and reconstitute herself. It is not for naught that Lara Jean’s companion in this ornamentation is also entangled in his own histories of unmaking, closeted in the film and visually minoritized in his high school. The Korean sheet mask is not ornament deployed for the sake of achieving a particular Asiatic aesthetic, but instead a practice of indulgence, of sharing across the rubric of friendship, and for an intimacy forged outside parameters of sexualization. For women who are both embodied and erased through literal objectification, Asian-American women provide us a chance to take seriously the entanglement between living women and the things produced in concert with their own selves. In the case of women who have been unmade at the site of skin, or flesh, subject to any kind of monstrosity, the ornament also provides a possibility for reassembly.

It is here that I am stirred to bring in another method of recuperative reading. Jose Muñoz, may he rest in power, posits an idea of brownness that is interested in works that refuse performance through simply a feeling of loss, instead establishing a vitality in that which has been removed or dislocated. There are many ways to receive TATBILB: a movie about family, about romance, about memory, about growing up, about being mixed-race, about being Asian-American, about girlhood. In the multiplicity of nodes of attachment, Muñoz provides brownness as an indexing term. One could hope that the relationships between family, friends, and lovers in TATBILB evoke “a way of desiring, feeling, and radiating value” that is not rooted in accumulation or ownership. [8] For Muñoz, brownness is a feeling, a not politics but a not-not politics that lives somewhere beyond a demand for recognition.

Muñoz’s work, for me, shows how representation can move beyond prescription into a realm of feeling that produces a “something else” that we can cling to; not identify but not-not identify with, in the face of insurmountable odds. I hope that this sense of brownness can offer us a way to think through, for example, the elision of ethnic specificity in casting the Covey sisters without simply critiquing it as a failure to represent. Brownness compels us to destabilize traditional fixed categories of identity and linearities of identification and expand to a broader way of understanding the multiplicities of either. Brownness is interested in sociality, not social categories. There is something about this movie that feels Asian-American, and that includes, in all their generative complexities, the revised racial casting and Asiatic ornaments that pepper an otherwise typical 1980s teen rom-com.

Even so, this movie is deeply interested in offering us a different vision of the 1980s, the decade that saw the largest relative increase of Korean immigrants to the United States, a quadrupling of the number the year before. In addition to its writing through Sixteen Candles to arrive at another possibility for Asian-American presence, the film also gives particular weight to the Tears for Fears song, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” In a scene nearing the end of the film, Lara Jean joins her father at a diner, during which he reveals to her that this was her mother’s favorite song. He rarely talks about his wife, a fact both he and Lara Jean acknowledge within the scene itself. He poignantly pulls out his wallet to show her the photo he keeps with him always, capturing Lara Jean’s mother mid-twirl, dancing in the diner aisle to her favorite song. This is the only time Lara Jean’s mother appears in the film, unnamed and blurred in her movement, a joyful exuberance that compels Lara Jean’s father to divulge that he regrets not joining her in dance more often.

At the risk of reading too much into this moment, I do want to reflect on the gravity of this scene to see what it may offer us when we consider memory through the valences of race and history. The photo of Lara Jean’s mother exacerbates our alienation as the viewer, showing how memory is “both an inescapable and unreliable mediator of place and identity.” [9] We know so little about her mother, and the photo itself reveals very little. In the hands of Lara Jean’s father, seen through the window of the diner, the photo itself becomes a multiply mediated form that again makes clear to us its own mediation. In relation with the song, the photo rewrites a possible past. That is to say, what does it mean to imagine a young Korean woman dancing to “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”? To recall it again and again as an act of re-membering a history that’s only ever been told a certain way?

The photo reminds me of scholar Grace Cho’s work on memory. In her book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, Cho reckons directly with the trauma of memory and remembering, in particular the ghostly absent presence of the figure of the Korean war bride. My inclusion of Cho is not to suggest that by being a Korean woman married to a white man, that Lara Jean’s mother is automatically a war bride. Rather, it is to work with Lara Jean’s mother’s absent presence alongside a historical context that joins her to other Korean women with American servicemen for husbands, acknowledging that a substantial amount of Korean immigration to the US was either through such marriages or through war brides sponsoring relatives who in turn would sponsor other relatives. The Korean woman, through this particular historical valence, disappears into the domestic, the “closely guarded space of the family.” [10] It is worth noting here my earlier discussion about representation through the site of the home, the kitchen in particular, and how that space carries not just an Asian-Americanness, but a particular memory of the Korean mother.

The picture of Lara Jean’s mother operates as intervention, what Cho may call an unearthing of trauma that in itself calls attention to the ruptures it has produced. In the photo’s inability to fully capture movement that exceeds its capacity, it seemingly fails as a memory device. This rings especially true when considering another scene in the film in which Lara Jean admits to Peter that she feels guilty in moments where she forgets that it hasn’t always been just her sisters and her father, where she forgets she even had a mom who passed away, much less deliberates on remembering her. But the photo is encoded with a possibility of collective naming, a feeling of liveliness that supplants the ambiguous personal history that Lara Jean’s mother and the war bride share. To take Kang and Cho in concert, then, is to consider the act of remembering as agential. It is a re-membering of a history that so often insists upon the narrative elision of the bodies and lives of brown women. It is these acts of remembering that drive the movie, and that, in fact, drive its central romance too.

I’d be remiss, then, if I didn’t sit with the deep sense of brownness that this scene evokes. Lara Jean’s father tells her, “seeing you come alive like that, you remind me of her,” the her in his statement being his wife, Lara Jean’s mother. If brownness is indeed the vital force left behind after loss, then perhaps Lara Jean’s acts of living and remembering are its material traces. [11] In the ending moments of the scene between Lara Jean and her father in the diner, he tells Lara Jean that her mother would request “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” over and over until the diner closed or until her parents were kicked out.

It seems appropriate here to mention that I’m not the only one who kept rewatching this movie. Popular reception of this movie has reflected on its rewatchability. For Kang, this is the critical crux of what it means to remember. Neither identity nor subject are premised on a linear development of memory. Instead, it is a “much more complicated and unpredictable process of doublings back, retrievals, and rememberings” that links us to ourselves. [12] This act of repetition echoes within and around the movie-the multiple watchings of Sixteen Candles, the multiple listenings of the same cheesy 80s song. They are acts of watching and listening happening within the movie itself, sites of compositional struggle that show us how racial memory and racial feeling can be reimagined to create something entirely new. Father and daughter sit in the same diner, framed by the window as if they were subjects of a still photo, and begin to listen to the song on loop. They do not dance, but they do remember.

Works Cited

Cheng, Anne. “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman.” Critical Inquiry. 44 (Spring 2018): 415-447.

Cho, Grace. “Introduction: The Fabric of Erasure.” Haunting the Korean Diaspora. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 1-25. Web.

Kang, Laura Hyun Ki. “Compositional Struggles: Re-membering Korean/American Women.” Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 215-270. Print.

Muñoz, José E. “Vitalism’s after-burn: the sense of Ana Mendieta.” Women & performance: a journal of feminist theory. 21.2 (2011): 191-198.

[1] Kang 249

[2] I am even less interested in the readings of this movie that descend into misogyny in the name of representation. For an eloquent take on this phenomenon, situated in a larger set of instances of harassment of Asian women who date/marry white men, see Celeste Ng’s recent piece: https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/when-asian-women-are-harassed-for-marrying-non-asian-men.html

[3] Kang 217

[4] Here, I do want to briefly consider that TATBILB has one original text that it at least tries to be faithful to: the book from which it is inspired. But because the translation between book and film is always already nonequivalent, I want to treat the film as its own text.

[5] Cheng 416

[6] See https://goo.gl/EsNzeY for an interview with author Jenny Han and https://goo.gl/hWRt2W for an interview with director Susan Johnson in which both elaborate on the importance of these scene details.

[7] See https://www.glamour.com/story/the-real-love-story-in-to-all-the-boys-ive-loved-before

[8] Muñoz 197

[9] Kang 237

[10] Cho 14

[11] Muñoz 195

[12] Kang 236

