Life's Short, Talk Fast by Ann Hood

Author:Ann Hood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Hiding in the Floorboards

Sanjena Sathian

There’s an iconic moment early in the first season of Gilmore Girls when Rory Gilmore swings by her best friend Lane Kim’s house to borrow a CD. Lane, a spunky Korean American teen played by Keiko Agena, obliges by lifting up loose floorboards in her room to reveal a massive collection of the secular rock-and-roll albums her religious mother won’t allow her to consume.

I was not, myself, actually allowed to consume Gilmore Girls either, which has a mildly scandalous premise: it follows Rory and her thirtysomething single mom, Lorelai, who got pregnant as a teenager. Parenthood out of wedlock was not condoned in my Indian immigrant household—or in Lane’s. (As Lane tells Lorelai, Mrs. Kim “doesn’t trust unmarried women.”) Nevertheless, I watched Gilmore Girls surreptitiously, and instinctually loved Lane’s rebellious hijinks. She contrives elaborate codes and alibis to finagle a single phone call with a boy. She plans a KGB-worthy covert drop to have Rory deliver the new Belle and Sebastian single when she gets grounded for dating. She tries to “come out” to her mother as a rebel a few times—once memorably dyeing her hair purple and then redyeing it black in terror; another time calling Mrs. Kim while drunk and declaring her intoxication.

When I was in graduate school, a white guy once read my fiction and noted that my characters—second-generation South Asian teens growing up in a socially conservative immigrant bubble—engaged in “contained debauchery,” as though they should have been a little harder-core. Lane’s debauchery might have seemed contained to an outsider, but I know it was plenty serious for her.

In Lane’s scheming, I recognize an exaggerated version of the code-switching that some children of immigrants cultivate as a survival strategy, and in Mrs. Kim’s unbending responses, I see a familiar portrait of a mother intent on protecting her child from the unholy American trifecta of drinking, drugs, and dating. Like Lane, I loved art, often art the adults in my community disapproved of; like Lane, I sequestered my tastes beneath the proverbial floorboards.

Like Mrs. Kim, who eventually (and heartbreakingly) discovers Lane’s secret stash and unravels years of lies—and, hurt and afraid, fears she has lost her daughter—my parents got wise to my various misbehaviors and shoddy cover-ups. And finally, like the Kims, who find a tenuous peace as Lane enters her twenties, my family and I started to learn how our occasionally diverging values can coexist now that I’m an adult.

And yet I had none of this language when I was watching Gilmore Girls when it first aired in the early 2000s. As a teenager, I wasn’t seeing myself in Lane. I didn’t even think of myself as “Asian American,” except when I had to check a box on a standardized form. Then, I reentered the Gilmore Girls’ utopian setting of Stars Hollow, Connecticut, in the spring of 2021, coming off a year of anti-Asian sentiment, including the spa shooting that killed eight people, most of them Asian women. Turning to the show

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