Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls

9. Escaping from Korea: Cultural Authenticity and Asian American Identities in Gilmore Girls

165 EscapingfromKorea Cultural Authenticity and Asian American Identities in Gilmore Girls H Y E S E U N G C H U N G Inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. —P O G U E C OL ON E L (BRUC E BOA), in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) When are you going to let your parents know that you listen to evil rock music? You are an American teenager, for God’s sake! —ROR Y addressing her best friend, Lane, in the pilot episode of Gilmore Girls This chapter opens with quotes that are derived from two cultural productions that could not be more different from one another. It may seem antithetical to compare two things that are about as similar as “hammers and veils,” “raincoats and recipes,” or “ballrooms and biscotti” (paired objects that provide the titles of three Gilmore Girls episodes). After all, Full Metal Jacket is a testosterone-filled antiwar film set partially in a U.S. Marine boot camp and in wartime Vietnam , while Gilmore Girls is a female-centered, lighthearted television dramedy set in the small town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. Yet each text ushers in dialogue that conjures the interwoven tropes of duality and passing, two recurring motifs superimposed atop the contested terrain of Asian and Asian American identity formation. 166 | Race,Class,Education,Profession In a patriotic lecture delivered to Private Joker (Matthew Modine), a cynical war correspondent who wears a peace-sign button along with a helmet bearing the inscription “Born to Kill” to represent the “duality of man” metaphor he so frequently invokes, Pogue Colonel justifies U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War as a benevolent attempt to Americanize willing imperial subjects in the Third World. Joker’s Jungian conception of man as both pacifist and militant, internally withdrawn and outwardly aggressive, when joined to the colonel’s Manichaean bifurcation of Asian identities (as would-be Americans trapped in Asian bodies), is related to the way in which the character Lane Kim is first introduced to audiences of Gilmore Girls. Lane, like the South Vietnamese in Full Metal Jacket, is dualistic: a rock-obsessed , all-American teenager who has to pass as an obedient “Korean” daughter in the presence of her hymn-loving, Bible-toting parents (or rather, parent, as Mr. Kim—like Kirk’s mother—never appears in the Gilmoreverse despite numerous references to his existence).1 Significantly , in the episode “Face-Off” (3.15), Lane’s mother, Mrs. Kim, is compared to the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket (by her future son-in-law Zach), an assessment that not only conjures the unyielding nature of this woman (who is known to wield a mean cricket bat) but also says much about the continued applicability of that film as a cultural touchstone evoking the harshness of stoic Asian “others.” From the moment Lane makes her first appearance, she is codified as someone who passes.2 Walking toward the front gate outside Stars 1. Throughout the seven-year broadcast of Gilmore Girls, these allusions to the offscreen presence of Lane’s father led to the rise of “Kim spotters,” a subset of GG fans who watch intently for any hint of their favorite character’s perpetually absent papa. Unfortunately for these audience members, Mr. Kim is nowhere to be seen in the series, not even at his own daughter’s wedding (in the Season Six episode “I Get a Sidekick Out of You” [6.19]). In a way, his conspicuous absence paves the way for another more problematic omission in the series’ finale: Mrs. Kim, who is not there in the town square to tell Rory good-bye. 2. In “Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days” (3.01), other characters are jokingly (self-)identified as passers of religious and sexual identities. For example, Lorelai, after tasting kosher bacon, tells Sookie, “I am so Jewish.” Later, informing his wife EscapingfromKorea | 167 Hollow High with her schoolmate Rory (who will soon transfer to Chilton High), she puts on a colorful pullover with the “Woodstock” logo atop a plain pink T-shirt. Responding to Rory’s question quoted above, the Korean American teen girl reasons, “If my parents still get upset over the obscene portion size of American food, I seriously doubt I’m going to make any inroads with Eminem.” Then, Lane informs Rory that she will go on a hayride, a town...