A feature by Euny Hong
My most stressful moviegoing experience last year was not the mushroom cloud in “Oppenheimer” or the murder trial scenes in “Anatomy of a Fall,” but watching the story of a love triangle among a Korean American woman, a Korean guy and a white guy in the Oscar-nominated “Past Lives.” In the film, Nora, our 30-something heroine, and Arthur, her white husband, are living happily in New York when Nora is contacted by Hae Sung, her childhood sweetheart in South Korea, with whom she had reconnected online as a young adult.
He tells her he’s planning to visit the city. When he arrives, it’s clear he still has feelings for her. Given this situation, I knew at least one person would be very upset by the end of the movie. For most of the film, I felt that person was going to be me.
On the one hand, as a Korean woman, I really wanted Nora to pick the Korean guy. As Arthur says to Nora, “If this was a story someone was telling, I’d be the evil white American husband keeping you two apart!” Every Asian American woman is aware of a longstanding Hollywood trope: The white male savior who sweeps in to save an “exotic” Asian woman, a scenario that goes back at least as far as Anna May Wong’s roles in the 1920s.
The maddening corollary to the white savior trope is that the Asian guy never gets the girl. I still recall the incredulity my friends and I felt coming out of a theater in 1998 having just watched “The Replacement Killers,” a movie in which the dreamy Chow Yun-fat saves the gorgeous Mira Sorvino, yet it doesn’t even occur to them to hook up.
On the other hand, I was having these thoughts while watching “Past Lives” in a movie theater sitting next to my boyfriend, who is white.
As an Asian woman living in the West, I learned long ago that every dating choice I make becomes a referendum: on race, on feminism — you know, just some of the most explosive issues of our day. If you happen to be dating a white guy, well, your relationship feels as if it’s being policed by loved ones and strangers alike. Some of them will accuse you of being psychologically damaged or of plotting to extinguish your people. You may even internalize some of these beliefs.
Before I was old enough to know how babies were made, I was taught by my whole extended family that marrying a white guy would damn my descendants and that an Asian couple was the correct, harmonious order of things. (It also made for a tidier Christmas card photo, or so I was told.)
The first time I watched “Past Lives,” I had this kind of policing in mind. I was fixated on Hollywood’s historical depictions of Asian women and recalling how the very first time I ever saw two Asian characters kissing in a Hollywood film wasn’t until 2018, with “Crazy Rich Asians.” (I think I audibly gasped.)
Of course I hoped for Nora to get together with Hae Sung: I could view the love triangle story line only through a lens that presumed that one outcome was necessarily good while the other was necessarily bad. I dutifully rooted for the good one, although it contradicted my real-life experience, as personified by the man sitting in the theater next to me.