“Main Character Syndrome: When someone thinks they are the main character of their life. Usually comes with a side of individuality complex, quirky style and a self-centered point of view” (Urban Dictionary, 2023).

Edna was a respectable Catholic housewife and mother, a Creole woman in high society in late-1800s New Orleans, and she was in love with and had secret desires for a man who wasn't her husband. She also wasn't crazy about her children. But she kept it all a secret, away from judging eyes. Her tortured journey of confusion and repression of her sexuality and her true feelings to awakening is one that almost every female reader can identify with, but it's also one that was historically denied to women, denied to Edna. It's an epiphany that awakens her desire and her right as a woman to be the main character of her own story, and it's a powerful epiphany, that Kate Chopin encaptures, that is a rite of passage for the oppressed.

Identifying as Korean American, it should be relatively easy to find your identity, to find “yourself” and the boxes you fit into. Especially when considering the friends I’d made and the people I’d met in Southern California, especially when considering my sophomore year suitemate Kara who had a white dad and a Chinese mom, especially considering the middle ground she balanced, not knowing whether she was white or Asian, considering all of that I should have had it relatively easy with two Asian parents. Despite coming from Hawaii, a state where everyone was or at least knew someone who was Asian, where everyone had an intimate understanding of the vast diaspora that constituted “Asia,” Kara often didn’t know where or how she fit into the two opposing genes she was born with. Considering my friends who, like Kara, didn’t know what they belonged to, I was born with only one possibility, with one straightforward path to follow.

And for a while, while growing up in mainly majority-white schools, in majority white neighborhoods, in majority white social circles, I believed and, almost as if naturally, took upon the role of the activist and was looked upon as the spokesperson of the entire Asian American community to efficiently package an entire population’s struggles and desires for the convenience of a certain class of people who couldn’t be bothered and moreover, weren’t incentivized to listen.

Obviously, being the minority in any sense, not belonging to the conventional, intrinsically places you on the sidelines and makes you second choice. Rejected by potential friends, rejected by potential mentors who would rather guide students who look like them, rejected by the boys you bravely give your heart to, it’s not only being told that you’re not the “main character,” but also being told that you can never be, forever cursed to the sidelines, to serve, to provide fluff, to move the plot – all because you were born with the wrong features, the wrong body type, the wrong hair, the wrong color.

Today, it’s not that dramatic. The above description is more of an in-depth version that seems more damning, self-pitying and foreboding than today’s reality, or at least, than my own reality. But the sharp prick of realization that comes with each racially-motivated rejection isn’t any less painful, because each realization comes with the force of having to come face to face with the accusation of simply not being enough. And growing up, being seen and defined as an undesired minority almost inevitably leads to a sorrowful and painful resentment of your own enriching background, of all the things that make someone uniquely special. No matter how many coming-of-age films or throwback 2000s movies or romantic comedies try to convey the message that weirdness is attractive, desirable, hot and manic pixie, it is still delivered in the medium of a conventionally attractive, white woman.

It’s crucial to admit the certain privilege “awarded” to Asian Americans, especially East Asian Americans, not only because of our lighter skin but also because of our representation as the model minority – quiet, hardworking, obedient and consequently, easily controllable. But what most of our older Asian parents and relatives who revel in this “privilege” fail to realize is that in their pride is the acceptance of white supremacist views, the willingness to be blind to the injustices committed against us, to support and progress the oppression of fellow minorities, to fulfill that secondary character role that never initiates but follows. It is weaponized against us to place us in stagnation, to define us as the Lane Kim to Rory Gilmore, the Mr. Yunioshi to Holly Golightly and the Kim to the Engineer and nothing more.

Moving to Southern California, especially to Los Angeles, where over 10% of the population was Asian, South LA seemed to be a utopia where the people who looked like me made up the majority and the food and media I grew up consuming dominated social and academic conversations. It was a place where Asian families had settled for generations, where my peers were fourth and fifth-generation, from an established legacy that I didn’t know was possible for our community. They were children who had forgotten their mother tongue and children who had the audacity and confidence of the white people I grew up with, because now, they were the majority. They were what my parents would have considered completely “American.”

In these newly, completely foreign settings, in the Korean cultural clubs and even in my different classes, in my various Asian social circles, where I was part of a desired majority, I had finally found the space where I felt confident and attractive, where I could fully explore what my interests and passions lied and what my desires and fears were, just simply as a teenage girl, completely unburdened by the weight of her racial and cultural identity. But even in these environments where, on paper, I should’ve felt entirely unrestrained in, I couldn’t help but notice the differences and discrepancies in the thought processes and emotional reactions I had compared to my Asian friends who were native to Los Angeles and San Francisco. These discrepancies are what I still continue to explore, wondering if they’re the result of the differences between a first-generation and fourth-generation Korean American, or if they’re diasporic differences, or if they’re simply regional differences. But along this exploration, is the discovery of myself as a person who wasn’t placed with the responsibility of an entire community, but instead, a person who had the right and the duty of being the main character of my own story.

But sitting on the sand of Grand Isle where Edna dared to love someone she couldn’t, where she went through all the tumultuous motions of a budding, forbidden and secret romance, through an experience that strips raw and bare mothers, wives and naive young girls alike, I had inhabited Edna, and even better yet, had felt as if I had become the main character. Walking along the path where the water broke the sand, against the wind that filled all of the senses, I was reminded of the times when I, like Edna, was overcome with an all-consuming love, with the emotions and desires she herself couldn’t identify. With a story, with a character that so deeply experienced feelings and thoughts that are both so universal yet deeply personal, I had felt the emotions I experienced every time I loved so deeply, so hopelessly, being represented through Edna, united through 100 years by the innately human and feminine capability to love. Edna represented, for me, all of the trials and tribulations of simply being a young woman, unbridled by the considerations of race and socioeconomics.

Although identity plays an undeniable role in someone’s story and in the development of someone’s personal thoughts and emotions, growing up carrying out the role of representing your identity, growing up where all the facets of your life are defined as simply “Asian,” I wanted less, I craved seeing my people simply happy. The portrayals of my identity in media have largely been heavy and serious, depriving the people who looked like me of all the visceral joys and fears of life, all the deeply visceral human emotions that are usually portrayed in the bodies of white actors and artists and subsequently, seem reserved for those bodies.

Not knowing, I was subconsciously tired of bodies and faces like mine being solely reserved to represent our plight of misrepresentation, to represent the burden of fighting for racial equality, obediently following the model minority myth, when I had been yearning to see my people, girls who looked like me full of the virality, silliness, depth of emotion and life like I knew my friends and mother to be, like I knew I was. I wanted the Ingrid Yun’s, the Lara Jean’s, the Kitty’s, the Rachel Chu’s and Nick Young’s. And reading atop of that wooden balcony, under the same beating sun, at that same magical period of dusk, swimming against the same waves, felt as though I were reaching Edna, as if the cameras and writers had turned their attention on me, validating my own story and feelings, in just the same way as Kate Chopin did for Edna.