Just a note here on the story Uniform… The character of Kyung, unusual (or unbelievable) as he might seem, is actually based on a very good friend of mine who was born in Korea and immigrated to the U.S. at age 13. Now, as “bad” as my friend can be sometimes, we nevertheless all love him and revel in his company, despite the sometimes, uhm, atrocious things he might say (and often because of them, too), no matter how jaw-droppingly prejudiced or sexist. Some of it he says merely TO get our jaws to drop, just before we give him a quick verbal backhand. Thus, he makes our conversations all the more lively, and as a result he is one of those people in our lives who’ll we’ll remember all our lives.
I’m writing this because I didn’t want anyone thinking his character was meant to be yet another denigrating portrayal of an Asian male, something that rears its ugly head all too often in Hollywood and other venues. Not that Asian females have gotten much better treatment over the years. For instance, imagining the limitations that, say, Anna May Wong, the first Asian superstar in Hollywood, faced because of her race (like her losing the lead in 1937’s The Good Earth, which she’d fought so hard for, to the very white Luise Rainer, not to mention the loathsome anti-miscegenation laws she was up against at the time) makes for pretty sad reading.
So that’s why I thought I’d jot this down, to say that Kyung’s character could have been any ethnicity, white, black, purple, plaid. I only kept him Korean because that’s what my friend is, and it would have been just as dishonest to have put him in another body as it would’ve been to abjectly create an imaginary Asian character and fill him with lamentable stereotypes. I also didn’t want to “convert” him to “caucasian-ness” since a certain Mr. Bunker is already quite the cultural icon in this area. Plus, my friend’s idiosyncrasies and mannerisms in real life offered a wealth of rich character detail that I felt might bring his character to life, right down to his catchphrases like “Bumskull” (which he uses on me all the time – pinhead).
Nor is he alone in this story, either… The character of Paul is modeled after another friend of mine, while Ryza is based on a lovely and feisty young woman I know in Turkey. They are good people, fascinating people, and people I love, and so it was a treat for me to gather them all together under one big literary roof and let them have at it, making the story—thanks to their unique personalities—far richer than I could have ever done on my own.
You’ve stopped reading already haven’t you? Aw, I was afraid of that…
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MM
The Theater of the Midnight Sun
www.theaterofthemidnightsun.com
