By Jeong
Published 8/16/2022 7:30am PST
Warning: Some episode one spoilers!
Watching Never Have I Ever feels like injecting yourself into every American teen rom-com of the late 90s/early 2000s at once. Over the past two seasons, the series has taken us through the most quintessential teen movie tropes: the nerd crushing on the popular kid, the goal of losing your virginity before college, and, of course, disobeying your parents. Through the eyes of Devi Vishuwakumar, an Indian American teen girl growing up in Sherman Oaks, these familiar motifs feel fresh and exciting. We’ve both heard her story a thousand times and never heard it before. Unlike other retellings of Americana, Mindy Kaling expertly generates nostalgia without rewriting history - instead, making it. It’s not revisionary; it’s subtly revolutionary.
What’s invigorating about Never Have I Ever is that the series focuses on an Asian American teen girl for the first time since Margaret Cho’s 1994 sitcom All-American Girl, which was the very first to do so. Cho’s series, too ahead of its time, got canceled after a single season. Therefore, NHIE is also the longest-running television series about an Asian American teen girl of all time.
With Mindy Kaling, the queen of romantic comedy, at the helm, the show corrects outdated depictions of suburban American teenagehood to more accurately reflect our diverse reality, and reassures Asian American girls that they deserve to be front and center too, even if they don’t look or dance like Jennie or Jisoo.
Season three opens with the triumphant in-school debut of “Daxton,” cemented in last season’s finale when Paxton surprises Devi by showing up at the school dance and finally officially declaring himself her boyfriend, after initially turning down her invitation. Naturally, they’re the talk of the town, even gracing the school gossip Lady Whistleboy’s social media updates as the “latest odd couple at Sherman Oaks High.”
As adults predict but teens don’t expect, dating the hottest boy at school does not fill our beloved, nerdy antihero Devi with confidence, and she struggles to navigate her newfound social status.
Meanwhile, her best friends Eleanor and Fabiola are tending the flames of their own hearts. Eleanor is now romantically involved with Paxton’s best friend Trent, and Fabiola continues her exploration of lesbian romance. Aneesa and Ben are still dating, but their relationship is strained due to Ben being, well, himself.
Back at home, Devi’s paternal grandmother has moved in, cousin Kamala is pondering the future that she sees with Prashant, and Dr. Vishwakumar attempts to expand her circle of friends.
Never Have I Ever gives space for Asian American girls to exist, explore, and express this experience. It reaffirms what we have known all along: we deserve a seat at the table too. Like many Millennial femmes of color in the suburbs, I grew up consuming American cinema and noted a distinct lack of my presence reflected in media culture. As an Asian American then, I was absent from Hollywood’s high school landscapes. And perhaps because I was transracially adopted into a white family, I didn’t think of this as wrong or unfair. But what I understood from this was that joy, romance, and playing the main character was not meant for people like me. And neither was frivolity or bliss. Yet I yearned to occupy joyful, romantic, frivolous, blissful, and expansive space.
But even as I type this, I am aware of the irony. Even our (women of color’s) teen rom-coms depict racism and grief. If art reflects life, then it is only natural for our stories to include these things. We must swiftly learn how to transcend grief, how to transmute pain into joy, and how to heal “better than new.” And maybe that’s why hearing from us is so damn important.
Jeong (Lynn Stransky) is a Korean American artist and activist based in Los Angeles. An interracial adoptee, she explores how racial identity and perceived ethnographies shape our collective consciousness and intersect with our innate human desire for belonging through her work.
