‘The Simple Life’
April 29, 2005
The NBA games tonight on ESPN were meaningless since the playoff match-ups were already locked up. After watching the first quarter of the inconsequential game between the Phoenix Suns and the Sacramento Kings, I channel-surfed onto the shores of The Simple Life.
Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are staying with a white family in Atlanta, Georgia and have adopted a 9-year-old Korean girl named Gi. The girl has unfortunately inherited three crude, obnoxious brothers but no friends, and Paris and Nicole take it upon themselves to rescue poor Gi from loneliness while at the same time fulfilling a Fire Department internship.
After screwing up every possible internship duty, Paris and Nicole post bulletins all over town, advertising for a best friend to console Gi. They even get local radio station WPR to broadcast ads for friends.
Paris and Nicole then go about interviewing girls. Gi has no say in the process. She watches from the sidelines, her fate in the hands of a skeletal blond with a soba noodle for a brain.
But why doesn’t Gi have any friends? Is she struggling with the cultural issues that come with being an adoptee? Adjusting to new family, school, city? Or is there some kind of race thing happening where her schoolmates avoid her? What’s her story?
Doesn’t matter.
Paris and Nicole pick out the only two black girls who applied for the friendship job as Gi’s new buddies.
What if Paris asked Gi what it feels like to be a Korean adoptee, to live with a white family, to be Asian in Atlanta? Why did all the white kids Paris and Nicole interviewed fail the test?
What if Nicole asked Gi’s parents what it’s like to adopt Gi, and how they feel about their adopted daughter having no friends?
Doesn’t matter.
At the end of the day, the two bimbo zombies check into a ritzy hotel with a Jacuzzi, because they don’t want to deal with Gi’s raucous and annoying dirty-blonde-haired older “brothers.”
The glamour girls lie to Gi’s adopted parents in the morning, and tell them that they couldn’t make it back to the house last night because they were rescuing people all night. They walk together with the family. But they walk out in front of the family, with the arrogance only glorified white trash can muster, projecting themselves above and beyond the realities of Gi’s life and her family dynamic. Gi walks off to the side a bit, askew from her family, estranged from the rich redneck duo of Paris and Nicole. Gi’s coat is buttoned up to her chin.
I worry for her.
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