Woman of the Month: Claudia Kishi

Claudia Kishi from The Babysitter's Club

Growing up with The Babysitter’s Club, I was aware on some level that the profound differences in the girls – their backgrounds, personalities, interests – was a way to connect with a wider pool of readers. Just as today we ask Harry Potter fans what Hogwarts House they belong to, kids of the nineties would ask each other: “are you a Kirsty or a Mary Anne?”

I was a Claudia. It’s not that I didn’t connect with Kirsty’s tomboyish nature or Mary Anne’s shyness or Mallory's love of books, but Claudia was the one that pinged my deepest interests: junk food, Nancy Drew mysteries, and artistic endeavours. I didn’t have the difficulties at school or the overbearing parents/older sister, but I had my own version of Mimi, and will if not the courage to dress in a way that reflected my creative side.

Of course, there’s one big difference between myself and Claudia, and that’s that I’m not Asian-American. There is a fifteen-minute documentary on Netflix at the moment called The Claudia Kishi Club that features various writers, artists and creators of Asian-American descent that hold her up as a profound influence in their childhoods, at a time in which representation for Asians was borderline non-existent.

Of course, Claudia Kishi was invented and written by the very-white Ann M. Martin, and so the books contain little to nothing about Japanese-American culture (unless you want to argue that her overachieving sister and tiger parents are meant to be a specifically Asian problem). As far as I can recall, there’s no mention of Asian culinary dishes or family traditions – and certainly no indication that anyone’s shoes have to come off at the front door (this is particularly glaring in any cover art that depict the babysitters in Claudia’s room).

To my memory, only one book in the series ever overtly deals with Claudia’s race, and that’s Keep Out Claudia, the infamous “very special episode” anti-racism story, in which Claudia babysits for a new family and is confused as to why the children are so unpleasant to her (especially after Stacey reported having no difficulties from them). It’s heavy-handed, though there’s still something deeply poignant about seeing the girls wrack their brains trying to figure out what Claudia did wrong, and wondering if it was perhaps her outrageous fashion sense.

The recently-dropped Netflix show takes the opportunity to rectify some of these problems: people who visit Claudia’s house clearly put their shoes on a rack at the door before coming inside, the family eat meals with chopsticks and occasionally speak Japanese to each other, and Mimi’s stroke dredges up painful memories of how she was interred at the Manzanar Japanese American prison camp, where she had to sleep in a horse stall.

But Claudia herself, as played by Momona Tamada, is allowed to retain all the traits that make the character so beloved: her love of art, her hidden stashes of junk food, her struggles at school, her experiments with fashion…

You could make the argument that Martin’s ignorance concerning Japanese-American culture was what gave her the freedom to simply write Claudia as character, whose ethnicity was largely irrelevant to who she was as a person, neatly bypassing all the clichés and stereotypes that were usually attributed to Asian characters throughout the eighties and nineties. But by 2020, we’re aware that a person doesn’t (or shouldn’t) have to give up their cultural roots just because they don’t want to be defined by them, and the Netflix show does a beautiful job of letting Claudia be herself and the product of Asian-American culture. We can have the best of both worlds.