‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’s’ Belly Wasn’t Perfect. But She Was The Perfect Teen TV Character

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‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’s’ Belly Wasn’t Perfect. But She Was The Perfect Teen TV Character


Lola Tung has played Belly with the depth and nuance characters of color often don’t get on teen shows like this. While The Summer I Turned Pretty is still very white, Tung and her TV family (including Sean Kaufman as Belly’s brother Steven and Jackie Chung as mom Laurel) brought a dynamic that felt deeply real and aggressively normal, which, again, for Asian American characters onscreen, this kind of representation is still rare and a welcome change. And it means that Tung’s Belly means a lot to a lot of people. Last weekend at the Emmys, I spoke to Sarah Bock, the 19-year-old who plays Miss Huang on Severance and when I asked her the first time she felt truly seen on TV, she said it was watching Tung on The Summer I Turned Pretty and that she was firmly “Team Belly.” Yes, this character has been polarizing, but I think that’s what makes her great. And in the series finale, Belly’s complexity was on full display. If you are, like Bock and me, less concerned with the love triangle between the Fisher boys (don’t get me wrong, I was still deeply invested) and more interested in watching our girl grow up and choose herself, Season 3 episode 11 was for us.  



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