What inspired my teacher’s pop cultural metaphor and how am I like my plush doll friend? What qualities allow Hello Kitty (and I) to exemplify a “star pupil”? Was my teacher praising my performance of Hello Kitty’s mouthlessness by reading quietly to myself? This Hello Kitty memory, its messy entanglement in classroom disciplinary politics and histories of gendered Asiatic racialization, has inspired my own scholarly interest in Hello Kitty and the kawaii (“cute”) political aesthetics she embodies. Now that is a Hello Kitty star pupil.” I remember a moment of stunned surprise from being conflated with my beloved Sanrio character. The teacher must have been impressed because she exclaimed, “Look at Sharon, everyone. In elementary school when class still began with a “Do-Now,” I remember finishing the assignment before my fellow peers and pulling out a book to read quietly. My second tangible memory of Hello Kitty is one that I still struggle to untangle and make sense of even now. I remember pleading with my parents until they finally broke down and how I played with her and took her everywhere with me for a whole month-a lifetime in the attention span of a child. I remember spying a small plush Hello Kitty in a shop in New York’s Chinatown that I simply had to have. My first tangible memory of Sanrio’s anthropomorphic white cat is rather unremarkable.
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