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The Baby-Sitters Club is more than just a hit Netflix show or popular series of books. It’s also a beacon for legions of young women and men who spent their formative years looking up to the can-do members of the BSC. No other character represents this more than Claudia Kishi. Played by Momona Tamada in Netflix’s version of The Baby-Sitters Club, the Claudia Kishi of the books gave Asian-American readers a much-needed heroine. To honor Claudia’s legacy, Netflix is launching a new doc called The Claudia Kishi Club today. But what exactly is The Claudia Kishi Club on Netflix? (And if it’s a club, can we join? No? It’s a turn of phrase? Okay, then.)
The Claudia Kishi Club is a 17 minute-long documentary directed by Sue Ding about the profound impact the fictional character Claudia Kishi had on a generation of Asian-American Baby-Sitters Club readers. When Ann M. Martin wrote the original Baby-Sitters Club books in the 1980s, there was precious little representation for Asian-American characters that didn’t veer into stereotypes. Claudia not only defied the nerdy Asian girl cliché by being hopeless at school, but insanely talented as an artist, but she got to star in her own POV-driven books. In these Claudia-centric stories, she was the leading lady. And when she was a supporting character in books focused on other members of the BSC, she got to keep her unique personality.
The Netflix documentary The Claudia Kishi Club uses a combination of interviews and stop motion animation to explain just how inspirational the character was for young readers in the 1980s and 1990s. Talented Asian-Americans like Yumi Sakugawa, Sarah Kuhn, and Phil Yu share how Claudia helped them not only see themselves in popular culture, but feel valued as Asian-Americans.
Even though The Claudia Kishi Club runs for a scant 17 minutes, it represents decades of positive impact. As is often mentioned in the doc, Claudia Kishi wasn’t the character young Asian-American kids had to settle for; she was the coolest character in the series and the one girl everyone who read The Baby-Sitter Club books wanted to be. Fun, stylish, talented, imperfect, and a wonderful friend, she became a standard bearer for Asian-Americans by being so much more than just “Asian-American” on the page. Claudia Kishi was a fully-formed heroine and extremely real girl.
