It hurts to see that not only has a white author, catering to young people, has sailed along without reckoning with her racism, her fetishization and her lazy caricatures she’s been rewarded with even more success. While people of South and East Asian descent often find themselves decrying the “model minority” stereotype (see: pushback against Andrew Yang’s call for Asian Americans to get more enthusiastic about the flag) or vying for more visibility in media, centering cultural critiques can obscure the poverty and disproportionate rates of incarceration more likely to plague Southeast Asian communities.īut as books like Eleanor & Park continue to find success, the representation conversation will churn on with depressing regularity. The Asian American experience of racism is tough to parse because of deep divisions along class and ethnic lines. Omaha is a military town people bring wives and husbands back from all over… So … in Eleanor & Park, Park’s dad gets sent to Korea because his brother has died in combat in Vietnam. government had come together to deliver my father across the continents to his soulmate – and he just left her there,” Rowell wrote in a Goodreads blog post in 2013. “What if fate and circumstance and the U.S. Rowell herself has admitted she rooted the book in the realm of fantasy: She says her father was deployed to Korea at age 17 during an Army stint and apparently fell in love with a Korean woman while overseas… but they didn’t stay together. White guys think they’re exotic… Everything that makes Asian girls seem exotic makes Asian guys seem like girls” descriptions of Park’s mother comparing her to a China doll that further solidify the misogynistic “exotic” stereotype the fact that Park literally does kung fu against a bully at one point… the list goes on! And on! (Rowell and production company Picturestart did not respond to a request for comment.)
Since the movie deal was announced, dissenters have taken to Twitter to denounce Rowell’s Cho-Chang–ass naming choices ( Park is an extremely popular Korean surname, not first name, something Rowell acknowledged in an FAQ) the choice to hire a Japanese director to tell a Korean American story her descriptions of Park as feminine her description of another Asian boy's "just barely almondy" eyes dialogue between the two main characters where Park says “Asian girls are different. Like, their hearts are just right there, exposed.” The author also said she was “EXTREMELY DELIGHTED” by the movie news.Īsian American book critics and YA lit fans do not share her enthusiasm. “Of all my characters, I always feel most protective of Park and Eleanor,” Rowell, who is white, tweeted following the announcement.
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