I finally got around to watching Minari. I didn’t watch it because of all the Academy Award acclaim it was getting, nor did I watch it solely because it was a film about Koreans, starring Koreans and was produced by mostly Koreans. I’ve been wanting to watch Minari because based on the premise of the film, it was something that I knew was probably going to hit home to a Korean-American person like me, and I went in knowing that there were probably going to be a lot of moments of reflection, reminiscing, comparing and probably shit that was going to make me cry.
Without giving anything away, the basic plot is a Korean family moves from California to Arkansas, primarily so that dad (Steven Yeun) can chase his dream of starting up a farm. Naturally, this is a cause of culture shock for Koreans to move into rural middle America, and the struggles and rigors of surviving and adapting at the same time.
What was endlessly amusing to me is that I feel like Steven Yeun, since rising as a star from The Walking Dead, I feel like took his appearance in David Chang’s Ugly Delicious to heart a little bit, where Chang’s circle-jerk of celebrity friends was giving him a little bit of shit for being able to make it as a big-time American star in spite of being Korean, and almost since then, has been doing a lot of roles that inject him into his Korean heritage. Despite the fact that his Korean sounds a lot like most Korean kids who did a lot of their growing up in America, it’s his attempts to sound like fresh-off-the-boat English that had me cracking up.
But if there’s anything that was truly right about the entire film, it was undeniably Youn Yuh-Jung’s role in the film, playing grandma Soonja. Obviously her performance was justly recognized seeing as how she was a shoe-in to win best supporting actress and did such, becoming the first Korean actor or actress to win an Academy Award. But she shines from the moment she shows up in the film, and it makes me reminisce to my own childhood, where my grandma often stayed at my home to fulfill the same role as Soonja did, being the free babysitter for primarily me since I was the baby of the generation. My grandma wasn’t nearly as hands-on, or quite nearly as sassy or show as much personality as Soonja did, nor was I nearly the shithead to her as David was to Soonja, but it definitely gets the memories flooding through the gates.
Frankly, there’s a lot of parallels to the film I could feel with my own life, seeing as how both my parents were also chicken sexers growing up, and how my family grew up in rural Virginia, which wasn’t nearly as remote as Arkansas, but was still similar in the sense that there probably were like 15 Koreans in the entire town, with some of them being relatives. And I imagine just about every Korean family in America could probably feel some sort of kinship to the film as I did, and just about everyone in my own family has stated similar feelings themselves.
There’s a lot of subtle symbolism and interpretation necessary in the plot and its happenings throughout the film, and at first blush I was kind of perplexed at the way the film concluded, but when I lay in bed thinking about it, most of it kind of falls into place, and it makes me admire the film even more than I did while watching it.
Bottom line is that the film really is like chicken soup for the Korean-American soul, and although it’s nowhere near as critically acclaimed or attention-getting as Crazy Rich Asians or Parasite, but in my opinion, is still a tremendously important film for Korean or other Asian cultures to try and watch sometime.
