what the Half of It really shows is that there’s more than one way to do a story about queer coming-of-age, while also being a brilliant reminder that sexuality will always be intersecting with other identities when you’re young teen of colour.
in the margins of this film, there is an extremely quiet but very overt storyline about the loneliness of being a second generation immigrant in a small town that doesn’t have a prominent diaspora community. In contrast to To All the Boys, for example, where we’re shown how the Covery sisters interact with their diaspora friends and other Korean diaspora families, and how having that community (and sharing that common history with someone) is an essential part of your social life and emotional wellbeing, Ellie and her father are more or less alone in a white, conservative town.
As Ellie mentions, the closest Asian grocery store is 2 hours by bike, and to be separated from all assurance of your heritage and identity is an extremely specific kind of loneliness. In this town, they will always be the Other, and Ellie is not only extremely disconnected from her peers and her classmates, but also from herself. She’s trying to grow up in the image of her father, because it’s the only connection she has to that part of her identity, and that’s kept her detached and self-isolated.
It is crushing, which is why seeing Ellie overcome that loneliness is an equally important part of her character arc. She learns to be herself, and her sexuality, but an equally big triumph is her growing out of her self-isolation. Her friendship with Paul, being accepted by her classmates, and her longing for Aster are all equal parts of her coming-of-age.
This was a specific story told by a Chinese director, with a Chinese protagonist finding her sense of self in a town that has more or less worn away her identity. if you’re white and LGBTQ+, i am going to please ask you to stop whining about how The Half of It is not ~quEeER eNoUgh~ for you, because the movie itself has already broken the mold of how many stories about how Asian diaspora are told.
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