Author丨Michelle No
When I grew up, I never saw any physical contact with my Korean parents. They don't hug or kiss, or even pat each other on the back. This is not a by-product of a loveless marriage, but the consequence of a life-centered life -that endless, non-sexy housework encroaches on life. In my thirty years of life, I have never admitted to similar details in my family because I feel that accepting the nuances of my life will make me never able to enter the mainstream American culture.
"Minari" challenges this assumption. I saw my parents and all their platonic behavior on the big screen for the first time-I felt that my life was seen. But when I watched and felt this gentle movie about a Korean-American family striving for a better life in rural Arkansas, I also felt sad.
Because "Minari" is neither a movie about emotionally supporting families, nor a movie about East Asian parents deliberately inheriting traditions, but also a movie about wives and husbands that are influential in family decision-making—just like myself Life is the same, I think.
These omissions reminded me of the realities that immigrants have accepted in the pursuit of the American dream, and that we rarely see a complete and uncomfortable picture of the immigration experience on the screen.
Because "Minari" does not present immigrant stereotypes, some of the subtle differences may be more difficult to notice. As in reality, hope and suffering occupy the same life. The film’s lack of "supporting the family with emotion" makes me feel particularly acute, because it defines my own relationship.
In "Minari", the owners of this family are Korean-American immigrant parents Jacob and Monica. They do the tedious work of identifying the sex of chicks, classifying female chicks and male chicks. The couple took their primary school children Anne and David to a piece of land in rural Arkansas. Jacob hopes to turn this land into his own farm to grow Korean agricultural products and sell them to local vendors.
It is not easy to start a farm with limited funds while still having to do full-time work, and Jacob is quickly trapped by field farming. We can hardly see him as a caressing father or supporting husband. The few time he spends with his son occurs when he is working on the farm. In a scene at the end, the absence of Jacob and his family is expressed in a sharper way: Jacob and Monica drive David to check for a heart attack. They dragged a box of fresh produce, hoping to sign a new supplier on this road trip. When the family arrived at the doctor, Jacob hesitated whether to leave his produce in the car and let the family go first, so that he could find a cooler place to keep the produce fresh. A long time later, Jacob appeared again, holding the produce box in his hand—he put the safety of produce as a priority, not the illness of his son David.
As someone who grew up with my workaholic father, I know how this relationship works between scenes. I nervously tried to establish contact with my emotionally distant parents, and I needed to constantly restrain his anger. In the end, I felt that I had to do something really special to win his attention. But the director Steven Yeun's portrayal of Jacob is also very accurate, because I know that any of his faults are the result of his efforts to stabilize the family's economy-although sometimes wrong.
"Minari" also reminds us how much cultural heritage has never been mentioned, and eventually lost in the busy assimilation labor. Although most of the dialogue in the movie is in Korean, we have never seen Monica and Jacob pass their cultural traditions to Anne and David in any meaningful way. The Korean heritage inherited by the children comes in the form of food, and many times, David is repulsive of food.
David didn’t kiss his grandma at first, because she “has a Korean taste” and pushed her stewed soup away, (I feel sad. My relationship with grandma has never been close, and I have never had a chance to connect with my own culture. Come up, if I live in Korea, I might feel at home. "Minari" makes me seem to see the origin story of my Korean-American identity crisis.)
To understand this family, it is necessary to recognize their traditional gender roles as a Korean family when they started a new life in the United States. Although Monica has strong opinions and a clear sense of self, as a wife and mother, she has no autonomy after all : where she lives, how to deal with their land, or how to spend money, it is not Monica, but Jacob is making a decision. And watching him strictly implement the determination of his own decision, we understand that Monica's opinion has little influence. As a Korean American, I am not shocked by this imbalance of power-South Korea is a typical patriarchal society. When many immigrant families move abroad, they import the gender inequality that builds their lives. Concept. This is true almost everywhere, and in times of crisis—such as the current COVID-19 pandemic—women tend to take on more housework.
Of course, whether it is a helpless mother or is not clear about their origins, Anne and David are aware that there are missing parts in their lives. Or at least at some point in their adulthood, they will realize this.
Many immigrants know that these struggles will be inherited by the children of immigrants, and their trauma is revealed in a less poetic way: continuing to believe in conditional love, and a broken sense of identity (neither Asian nor American enough) ), and an awkward and outdated understanding of gender roles.
"Minari" is a powerful movie because it dared to show nakedly the opposites of pain that contribute to our happiness.
"Immigration stories are family stories," the film director said in an interview with NPR. "In this story, what is often overlooked is that many things happen out of a feeling of love, the feeling of eagerness to sacrifice for the other person. "
In "Minari", those daily sacrifices are manifested through things that are not shown, through things that the family has learned not to do. And in the end, in the process of making a Korean-American family not actually defined by this kind of suffering, the film reached to some extent an incredibly honest description of the life of new immigrants.
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