‘To All the Boys I've Loved Before’ Isn’t Revolutionary—& That’s What Makes It Revolutionary

The Netflix adaptation of Jenny Han’s YA novel To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before has been highly anticipated for featuring an Asian-American character as a romantic and comedic lead. Lana Condor stars as Lara Jean Covey, a half-Korean girl attempting to navigate love and life in high school—a journey that gets a lot harder once you throw in a fake boyfriend, a jealous ex-best friend and five secret love letters that were never supposed to be read. The movie is sweet and funny and at times cringeingly nostalgic (I don’t miss high school one bit), but what really struck me was the attention to detail in the portrayal of the Song-Covey family and their culture.

As one of the very few films starring an Asian-American woman, To All the Boys has a chance to walk the line between showing Lara Jean’s connection to her culture and its important place in her life, without placing too much importance on her race and making it an “Asian-American” movie instead of a movie with Asian-Americans. In doing so, it fills a gap in the industry that has been there for so long—because, yes, we’ve had films that focus on Asian and even Asian-American people, but I can’t think of any that didn’t center the film around their race.

Stories about those with marginalized identities have had to grapple with this before. For example, Love, Simon and Moonlight and all the others in the increasing amount of films focused on queer people are great, but why are so many LGBTQ+ movies coming-out stories? When can we have a film with an out-and-proud character who has a queer relationship without their “struggle” over their sexuality being at the forefront? In a similar vein, Netflix’s Insatiable recently faced backlash for featuring a plus-size woman (or, well, thin girl in a fatsuit playing a plus-size woman) who gets a “revenge” body and then tries to get back at the people who were mean to her when she was fat. As Cosmopolitan pointed out, putting a fat woman in the lead doesn’t do much good if she’s being told to hate herself and her fatness the whole time. When can we get a film about a plus-size woman whose fatness is just a part of her, not her whole identity?

And that’s what To All the Boys does so well. We never forget that the Covey family is mixed-race and Korean, but we don’t feel that their Asianness is a burden on them in some way, or that it is the focal point of their lives. They drink Korean yogurt smoothies, they call out the racism of Long Duk Dong’s character in Sixteen Candles, their white father attempts to cook the Korean food their mother used to for dinner. Author Jenny Han even requested that there be a rice cooker in the Covey kitchen, because, as she says, “Pretty much every Asian household has a rice cooker!”

But these are short moments, small aspects of the larger story of Lara Jean’s life. She isn’t a victim of racist bullying, she doesn’t struggle with her cultural identity. She’s more focused on her love letters getting sent out and her feelings for Josh vs. Peter. The details of her Asianness don’t actually make a huge difference in the story and, precisely for that reason, they do make a huge difference.

We’re so used to Asian characters being forced into the sidekick roles, where they play the smart geeks or the gothy characters (Asian hair streak, anyone?). Their complexity on the screen is limited, and more often than not, their portrayal becomes irresponsible—because you can have as many Asian characters in a show as you want, but if you don’t show them the respect of treating them as people first and Asian people second, how truly effective is your diversity?

So Lara Jean is Korean, yes, but she’s also hilarious and thoughtful and introverted. And her impact will be felt. Han says, "It’s important for Asian American kids to see themselves in stories and to feel seen. They need to know that their stories are universal too, that they too can fall in love in a teen movie. They don’t have to be the sidekick; they can be the hero. I’ve never seen an Asian American character like Lara Jean in a movie before—sweet, quirky, funny and just herself. She’s Asian, and that’s part of her identity, but it’s not the whole of her identity. There doesn’t need to be ‘a point’ to her being Asian. She just is."

“She just is” could be the gateway to a new era of film and television, one in which minority characters have access to romantic comedies and action films and all the other genres in the same way that white people do. Getting characters with marginalized identities on screen at all was the first step, and I’m not denying the importance of stories that focus on that marginalization. But now we have the opportunity to open the door for more stories, ones that showcase these same people in situations that go beyond the “struggle” or “burden” of having a certain identity.

I hope that, in the future, Asian characters are handled as caringly and responsibly as Lara Jean was. Han waited to tell the right story, and it paid off. “There was interest [in adapting the book for the screen] early on,” she says, “but it took almost five years to actually get made. One of the sticking points was people didn’t understand why the main character needed to be Asian. I explained to them that it wasn't that she needed to be Asian, it’s that she was.”

She just was.

You can stream To All the Boys I've Loved Before on Netflix starting August 17.