A wife (Vera Farmiga) becomes a whore to become a mother? Both her husband and lover are Koreans, and they’re not played by white guys in yellowface? The world’s done gone crazy!
From an interview with Gina Kim, regarding her film Never Forever :The race element was definitely one of the jumping-off points for Never Forever. The story came along when I started to teach at Harvard University. I had never lived on the East Coast before and was struck by how Boston lacks ethnic diversity. I became more conscious of my own race then ever before (having been born and raised in Korea, I had very little awareness of race). I became intrigued by how Asian people are perceived in the mainstream culture. I was always aware by how Asian women are overtly sexualized in American pop culture, but had very little knowledge about how Asian men were perceived. Most of them are completely de-sexualized, and are very rarely portrayed as subjects of desire. But of course there are exceptions, who often “happen” to be good-looking, successful professionals (lawyers, doctors, etc.) who went to ivy league schools. When I investigated the distinction, I realized that it is a class issue more than anything else. Asian working-class men, who are poor first-generation immigrants, are often completely de-sexualized — unlike, say, Latino laborers. On the other end of the spectrum, the upper-class Asian men are the ones who are desirable enough to get Caucasian women. I wanted to subvert this stereotype.
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