The “XO, Kitty” subplot that caught me by surprise
Park Young-Sol/Netflix
CAUTION: As usual, spoiler alerts below.
As a huge fan of Jenny Han’s To All the Boys universe, I was definitely curious to tune in to the spin-off streaming on Netflix. Like its predecessor and shows like Never Have I Ever, this show features attractive teenagers navigating school, drama, and relationships. In a refreshing change of pace, the producers centered the stories around primarily Asians and Asian Americans rather than a single Asian character navigating in a white American world.
The series takes place in Korea with Kitty being drawn to the country to A) be with her long-distance boyfriend Dae and B) learn more about her mom’s life as a teen before coming to America. It is very clear that the A plot is mostly a distraction and surface-motivator for Kitty but the B plot creates more intrigue and depth as time goes on.
Impostor Syndrome and Asian Gatekeeping
“Even though I am half Korean, I feel like zero,” Kitty remarks, lamenting her own disconnect from her Korean heritage and therefore her mother. As an adoptee who doesn’t know the language or culture I was born into, I related to Kitty’s struggle twofold. The first was the overwhelming sense of imposter syndrome; an attempt to balance and navigate the confined expectations people have for me. The show touches on feeling too Asian for white spaces but not Asian enough in Asian spaces. One moment, a white student fluently spoke Korean and understood more about Korean culture, teaching Kitty a thing or two about a culture she should have inherited but through cultural assimilation in America, she didn’t.
For other Asian Americans who may have visited abroad or to their birth countries, Kitty’s culture shock may be very relatable. Why don’t we know the customs and the language of our ancestors instinctually? Why must we fumble between outwardly looking like those around us but feeling so blatantly different. Or in Kitty’s case, make a scene wherever she goes including knocking over a tower of cupcakes on the first day. Yet when we return to America, our identity is solely reliant on our race in many ways, defining us since we may be only one or two represented in our community.
The second observation was how this sense of impostor syndrome, marked by the loss of her Korean mother at a young age, stemmed from grief. How does losing our connection to our mother affect our ability to connect to a greater sense of ancestry? As an adoptee, we may not know any portion of our ancestry at all and are constantly feeling a sense of disorientation about where we came from and where we are today.
The Asian diaspora
On Kitty’s first day at the Korean Independent School of Seoul (KISS), she runs into a young teacher on the stairs who also seems to be equally lost navigating in a new country. It is obvious from this first interaction that Professor Alex Finnerty, played by a Korean adoptee Peter Thurnwald, is going to have more screen time. With his Australian accent, this character is already challenging even Kitty’s held stereotypes about what other Asians should sound like.
As Kitty continues to research her mother’s life in Seoul, she discovers a baby bracelet with her mom’s name on it and the birth year of 1993. I instantly knew that there would be an adoption plot point. By this point, Kitty is on detective mode, trying to figure out where this baby could be that her mother had in 1993. She spends time talking to Professor Alex Finnerty who reveals that he was adopted by (white) Australians. At this point, she believes that Alex is her half-brother. This conclusion may only make sense in a fifteen-year-old mind.
We learn more that Alex Finnerty is in Korea in attempt to find his birth parents. Part of me rolled my eyes at this because it seems that reunification seems to always be a centering plot point in adoption story lines. Will the reunification trope continue to play out in this series that is equal parts aesthetically pleasing and cringey?
The viewers find out alongside Kitty that Alex is in fact not her half brother but the half-brother of Yuri, Kitty’s friend turned enemy turned friend turned enemy turned friend again. Teenagers, am I right? We learn that Alex’s birth mother is actually Director Ji-na Lim who used Kitty’s mom’s name at the hospital. In another turn of events, we discover that Alex’s father is none other than the strict Professor Lee, who you can tell still has burning passion for Director Lim.
Director Lim has to confront these revelations with her husband who wants to pay off Alex in order for him to go away, as any scandal such as this would taint their public image. She also fights with her daughter Yuri over the truth, honor, and shame. In these moments we see the tugging of cultural, social, and economic strings within the Korean society though still relatable to a Western audience. The series ends with Alex and his birth family starting to reconnect. Kitty feels that there is still a little more to uncover when she learns of her mom’s first love, a foreshadowing to something that may be uncovered in a future season. The general audience may be left with a hollow feeling of completion, the family is reunited, the story ends here! But does it really?
The bottom line:
I honestly didn’t expect an adoption storyline in the show but also why am I somehow also not surprised? With the largest population of Korean adoptees located in my own state of Minnesota, perhaps it is sampling bias. It is clear that we need more adoption stories out there. That way, being adopted is not just a plot point for a feel-good reunification story but that we do get to see the ugly, messy, painful sides of adoption the media and white audiences are so uncomfortable with. Maybe then, will transnational and transracial adoptees be able to see themselves not as plot points but as people.