Alice

           

           Alice, my favorite character and Ben’s best friend, is the complete opposite of him.  She is more optimistic and humorous Korean lesbian with a slight temper. 

           Alice uses her outgoing personality and social skills in order to talk to women and get laid.  She hooks up with a couple people and is known to make a pass at anything in a skirt.  However, her temper and bluntness causes her romantic relationships to remain short, but not always sweet.  For instance, when she hooked up with the waitress at the diner and began avoiding her because she was getting a little too attached. Or when she got into an argument with a girl at a party and got into a fight with her school, which results in a suspension.

            Alice also hides her sexual orientation from her parents and conforms to their wishes by going to grad school.  She brings Ben to church with her so that she can make them believe that she has a boyfriend.  Alice puts on a show for her parents by bringing Ben around, but rebels against their expectations of her when they are not around. In Understanding Asian American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Experiences from a Poststructural Perspective, Mitsu Narui argues that people decide to reveal their sexual orientation based on the relationships that they form within certain discourses.  This shows especially when Alice moves to New York and has an epiphany in which she decides not to go back to school and stay in New York to build a relationship with Meredith.  In Striving For Comfort: “Positive” Construction of Dating Cultures Among Second Generation Chinese American Youths, Luo Boazhen’s research shows that youths “cope with discomfort and attempt to present a “positive” image of themselves.” Alice does this when she moves to New York, and this becomes her way of growing and her way of escaping the lifestyle that she was held down to because of her parents.

Bibliography

Baozhen Luo. "Striving for Comfort: "Positive" Construction of Dating Cultures among Second-generation Chinese American Youths." Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 25.6 (2008): 867-88. Print.

Liu, James H., Susan Miller Campbell, and Heather Condie. "Ethnocentrism in Dating Preferences for an American Sample: The Ingroup Bias in Social Context."European Journal of Social Psychology 25.1 (1995): 95-115. Print.

Narui, Mitsu. "Understanding Asian/American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Experiences from a Poststructural Perspective." Journal of Homosexuality 58.9 (2011): 1211-234. Print


Rich, Melissa K., and Thomas F. Cash. "The American Image of Beauty: Media Representations of Hair Color for Four Decades." Sex Roles 29.1-2 (1993): 113-24. Print.