“I have never felt this seen before in my life,” I texted my boyfriend last September after watching the trailer for Minari; the slip into cliché underlined the extent of my excitement. The dialogue and details in the scenes carried a certain poignance that emanated even through a two-minute teaser, and I anticipated the movie not only for its promises of “representation” but also because it felt personal.
If you’re a second-generation Korean American, parts of Minari’s premise might sound familiar to you: a Korean American family moves from California to Arkansas during the 1980s to pursue the father’s dream of starting a farm to ensure his family’s financial stability.
Partially based on director Lee Isaac Chung’s own childhood, the filmconveys itself primarily through the perspective of seven-year-old David, who absorbs the complicated relationship dynamics swirling around him with wide-eyed innocence. His mother Monica, frustrated with the demands of farm life and reluctant to endorse her husband Jacob’s farming fantasies, sends for her mother, Soon-ja, whose arrival creates an added wrinkle in the family’s already-tenuous dynamic.
David and his older sister Anne struggle to communicate with their grandmother, whose Korean idiosyncrasies don’t align with their preconceived notions of what “real” American grandparents are like. In the meantime, their parents clash with increasing frequency over the viability of the farm as support for their family. As we watch all of them struggle to adjust, to the Arkansas town where they now live and also to each another, the stakes rise, inch by inch, through each setback and quiet moment of pause. We wonder: Is the farm a true livelihood or a half-baked pipe dream? Are we watching the assemblage of a family legacy or its disintegration?
I began watching Minari with the hope that I’d feel represented and ended it with the idea of representation completely absent from my mind. In its place, instead, was a subliminal sense of triumph I couldn’t define until a few days later. My ideal movie-watching experience involves allowing the story to reel me in until it wholly absorbs everything I’m thinking about in the present moment, a purity of mindset that I realized I hadn’t quite achieved when I’d watched Crazy Rich Asians or The Farewell. Even though I enjoyed both films, questions like “Is this good enough? Is this true of us? Is this true of me?” ran in the background of my mind when I saw them — a tentative, irrational fear that the films wouldn’t be good enough, that it wouldn’t represent “us” well to the non-Asian public. This was, at the time, how I saw the idea of representation: the necessity of performance, of showcase, of explanation to the box office and, by proximity, the outside world.
But the pull of Minari’s story drew me most into the idea of what it means to be unselfconscious about oneself. David and Anne call their grandmother Halmoni and drink Mountain Dew for breakfast and speak in alternating English and Korean to their parents without, seemingly, thinking anything of it. There’s no sense of explanation, no “this is what it is because this is who we are.” They simply are.
Even now, as the train of Asian-American cinema and culture surges forward full steam ahead, with essays about the boba generation passing through Twitter and Subtle Asian Traits posts clogging up my Facebook timeline, the idea of “celebrating Asian culture” so publicly often feels disingenuous to me because all I really have ever done is just exist. If someone asked me what it’s like to be Korean American, I’d tell them that probably the biggest part of my life experience is that I forget that I’m Korean American most of the time. Obviously it’s nice to see faces like mine on-screen, but Minari relieved me of the idea that I even needed to be represented — an experience that proved liberating in that it granted the space to simply state what is.
Both Chung and Steven Yeun, who plays Jacob, pointed out this lack of a need for overt demonstration in an interview with Deadline. “We’re not just telling a story that is meant to explain who we are to white people basically,” Chung said. “But I wanted the film to shift away from those ideas and to be more about themselves and the barriers that they have within their own families…It’s not assimilation to the culture, but to each other, in a way.”
“It feels this generation and on is really more about the space that we occupy ourselves, and less about being trapped by anything,” Yeun said. “We’re not trying to ignore our culture, or where we came from, or who we are now, but rather just to plant a flag in some way, at least for me, about where we’re at and what we are now.”
It’s an unselfconsciousness that translates to the relationship between faith and art as well. Chung, who’s identified himself as a Christian in interviews, previously directed the award-winning Munyurangabo, about two boys in Rwanda dealing with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide; it was inspired by his wife’s work with the Christian organization YWAM (Youth with a Mission). Minari seems to build on his own experiences of going to Methodist and Southern Baptist churches growing up.
In an attempt to make friends and integrate themselves within the town, the Yis attends church every Sunday, where they encounter both casual racism and genuine community. Jacob hires a white Pentecostal man named Paul, who helps him out on the farm and lugs a wooden cross down the main road every Sunday as his form of church. But the explicit religious references don’t function as overtures; they’re simply there because they add to the narrative. This keen sense of quiet integration seems to be one that Chung involves in his own creative lifestyle.
“When I’m making films,” he said in a 2009 interview with Christianity Today, “I really draw from this idea––what Bonhoeffer references, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Cinema feels like a medium in which I’m wrestling with that…It’s not a medium in which I want to evangelize or to be didactic.” Indeed, the “dark night of the soul”––the emotional climax of Minari, the moment which most makes viewers feel as if all things are futile––burns brighter and hotter than any other scene.
(Editor’s Note: There are slight spoilers in this paragraph.) Other scenes almost feel like call-and-responses, or answered prayers. Near the beginning, shortly after the family moves into their new home, Jacob wishes aloud that they could all sleep together in the living room — a first act of togetherness, he probably thinks, as a family living on its own terms. Towards the end of the movie, they all lie side-by-side on the carpet in the dark, breaths commingling in the depths of slumber: his wish, finally granted. Another scene depicts Halmoni teaching David how to plant minari down by the river, espousing to him the extent of its usefulness in cooking and medicine; the film ends with Jacob teaching him how to harvest it.
We watch as the family grapples with the idea of sowing and not knowing whether they’ll be able to reap. We see Jacob treat life as a series of gambles, each decision a pair of dice tossed with the faith that the numbers earned might deal kindly with the family’s fate. But we also see that even though each gamble might be made in good faith, every dice roll risks losing something he might not know he’s lost until it’s gone.
Similarly, I didn’t know the specificity of what I’d gained from watching the film until after it was over. Within Minari lies inherent a marked lack of demonstration, and as I meander through a world in which “performance” is necessary — the performance of Asian American identity, the performance of Christianity — to legitimize one’s identity and sense of belonging, I’ve begun to realize how nice it is to draw closer to works that feel least like they have something to prove; they tend to be the ones, I think, that simultaneously demand the least from me.
My only imperatives now: Let the story compel me. Help me forget that I even need to be so aware of who I am. Allow me to stand in the middle of the grassy Arkansas fields with characters I care about — Jacob and Monica, Anne and David and Soon-ja — for a moment. And in my care for them, let me lose myself, too.
Minari is playing in select theaters on February 12 and is available on-demand starting February 26.