Guest post by K-Jane author Lydia Kang
Lydia Kang is an author of young adult fiction, adult fiction and non-fiction, and poetry. She graduated from Columbia University and New York University School of Medicine, completing her residency and chief residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. She is a practicing physician and associate professor of Internal Medicine who has gained a reputation for helping fellow writers achieve medical accuracy in fiction. Her poetry and non-fiction have been published in JAMA, The Annals of Internal Medicine, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and Great Weather for Media. She believes in science and knocking on wood, and currently lives in Omaha with her husband and three children.
About K-Jane: A funny, moving YA novel following a third-generation Korean American teen who goes to extreme and hilarious lengths to connect more with her Korean heritage, perfect for fans of Maurene Goo and Rachel Lynn Solomon.
My youngest kid has a penchant for thrifting and transforming old clothes with needle and thread. A musty vest turns into a corset; a gauzy beach cover transforms into a witchy bat-winged dress à la Stevie Nicks; a fragment of lace becomes a choker.
They remind me of someone I used to obsess about all the time. Someone I wanted to be: Andie Walsh, from the 1986 movie, Pretty in Pink, written by John Hughes. Unlike Andie, however, in the 1980s I was scrawny, short and Asian. But what we did have in common was that we were decidedly not cool. I had wanted to double down on that left-of-center uncoolness. I longed for thrift store finds and combat boots and hacked my hair into a half-punk hairdo when my parents went away for a weekend. My Korean immigrant mom told me my style looked “poor” and preferred that I wore my sister’s soul-killing, uncool hand-me-downs.
Andie was also romantically pursued by (multiple!) guys, fiercely herself in the face of “richies” who flaunted their money and their designer clothes, and hung out with the actual cool kids. You know. The ones wearing black. The ones who hung onto the remnants of punk rock. The ones listening to The Cure and Siouxie and the Banshees and Echo and Bunnymen.
You’d think I’d be happy to watch Pretty in Pink with my own teenager, so I could show them Andie’s style and why I saw similar genius in the two of them. But I was nervous. John Hughes left an indelible mark in the lives of teens in the 1980s. His movies had shown a whole generation that not all teens existed in the realm of Porky’s and Animal House. Hughes’s movies focused on the minutiae of teen life: Who will invite me to the prom? Who will remember it’s my birthday? He tackled classism in high school, the stress of academia, and the emotional and sometimes physical brutality of being an outsider. Crushes were center stage in the stories, and they were just that–they fueled roller coaster emotions and wreaked havoc.
But.
My god, Sixteen Candles was a nasty, awful mess. It possessed one of the most egregious, racist portrayals of an Asian character that I have ever seen on film. It handles rape with such casualness that “nauseating” hardly describes it. Jake’s girlfriend is literally handed over to the Geek’s character to do with what he wants while she is fully incapacitated and inebriated, and she actually smiles the next morning and when asked if she enjoyed the experience says hesitantly, “I have this weird feeling I did” because, you know, she wasn’t thinking at the time, since she was unconscious.
Pretty in Pink isn’t anywhere near as awful as Sixteen Candles, but I had to interrupt the movie repeatedly while we watched because I couldn’t not talk about it. How the teen boys around her acted as if Andie owed them her attention. Her love. Her body. I used to think Duckie was cute. I dreamed of telling Andie, hey, let me have him, he’s so devoted! He’s so quirky and cute! But watching this time around, he sickened me. The nonstop romantic harassment of Andie was too much. My kid agreed and found Duckie to be gross, too. Even if he did have awesome style. My kid and I were so irritated that Iona, Annie Potts’s character, changed her singular style to fit a new love interest.
And though The Breakfast Club had the ability to give teens of different backgrounds a voice they’d never had in cinema, Claire was still verbally attacked far more than her male school detention detainees. And the “freak” Allison Reynolds? That makeover is seen so differently today. Her transformation to the center of normal was the only way she could be bequeathed a romantic relationship and a happily ever after. Allison had to (at least visually) leave her lower class status to be considered dateable.
On rewatching it, I muttered, “She looked better before.”
So yes, I did refer to Andie Walsh’s style throughout my book, as it was an inspiration for Jane. But Jane wisely comments, “Yes, I know John Hughes made major problematic movies, with some awful character and script choices. And yes, I have never forgiven him for the whole Long Duck Dong and rapey fiasco that was Sixteen Candles. But I can’t help myself.”
Because I can’t help but love parts–but far from all–of John Hughes’s stories. Molly Ringwald herself wrote an essay in The New Yorker, wrestling with the complicated feelings she had working with John Hughes. She’d been his muse and perhaps a teen muse for a generation. But in the end, it’s not that complicated. John Hughes did some things well, many things horribly, and yes, his work is a part of cinematic history, but a part that I am more than okay with leaving behind.
I am proud of Jane–even if she is only fictional–for cherry-picking what she liked out of John Hughes’s oeuvre and rejecting what she despises about it. After all, the world is now filled with plenty of coming-of-age stories that are complex and nuanced, without needing to normalize or perpetuate the horrible yuck within the John Hughes era.
