When my plane from Chennai touched down at Newark airport, I was greeted by some of my mother’s childhood friends whom I’d never met, after a long flight to a country I’d never seen. Looking out of the car in the evening light, as they drove me to their home in a Jersey suburb, I listened to their American English accents mixed with the more familiar Malayalam and Tamil words of the world I had just left behind. We drove down a mostly empty stretch of highway, which eventually gave way to a cul-de-sac dotted with houses set at discreet distances from each other, separated by their lush green lawns. After a lifetime lived in cramped apartments drowning in city noise, the eerie quiet of the dead-end street seemed like the edge of a world, populated by no one but us. The memory of experiencing this well-kept suburb of New Jersey as a wild and empty place is now tinged with the embarrassment of recognizing my naivete, but at that moment I needed it to survive the inarticulate terror of having left behind everything I’d ever known for the hope of something slightly better.
Isaac Lee Chung’s new film, Minari (2020), dragged these hazy memories of arrival and the attendant fears of unbelonging out of me as I watched the Yi family navigate their own entry into the shell game of middle-class America. Within its first few minutes, the feature evokes the ambivalence of new beginnings as Monica Yi (Yeri Han) drives her children, David (Alan Kim) and Anne (Noel Kate Cho), in their car. The trio follows close behind Monica’s husband, Jacob (Steven Yeun), who guides his truck toward their new life in rural Arkansas. Jacob’s truck bears a logo that reads, “Cather Rentals,” perhaps in reference to the American novelist, Willa Cather, whose narratives of pastoral life on the Great Plains have provided some inspiration for this film.1 For Jacob, who has spent a decade working in chicken factories in California, their new beginning holds the possibility of middle-class comforts, including a plot of land to call his own—hence the move to this unidentified bit of land in the Ozarks, which he describes as the “best dirt in America.” Jacob begins the film echoing Cather’s dream of a “cosmopolitan” rural heartland in the United States, a hopeful vision of prosperity fueled by immigrant labor.2 However, the reality for the Yis is that this dream is a rental, one that doesn’t fit the shape of their collective needs.
In Jacob’s view, Koreans will soon be moving to Arkansas, and he will be there to greet them with homegrown Korean vegetables for sale. Monica’s dreams about their future are less explicitly stated, but they certainly didn’t include what she’s faced with when they arrive at their destination: a shabby mobile home propped up by cinderblocks. While Jacob can only see a potential garden of Eden when he looks out at the empty field that they’ve poured their savings into, Monica faces the derelict shelter with exasperation that turns into simmering anger. As the narrative progresses, these fissures between Jacob’s and Monica’s realities continue to grow into heavy silences and gestures of thwarted intimacy, erupting in nightly fights that circle the drain of their rapidly emptying bank account. Yet the jagged edges of these emotional conflicts appear a little softer in the cozy home they manage to build together, and the earth-shattering tragedy they endure at the end appears to dissipate a little as they fall asleep on the living room floor in the aftermath.
[T]he reality for the Yis is that this dream is a rental, one that doesn’t fit the shape of their collective needs.
Minari, Chung’s fifth feature, draws inspiration from his own childhood in rural Arkansas, and he is careful to build a world that is peppered with closely observed details of life in a Korean immigrant household without the didacticism of trying to make it a representative story. It is, of course, hard to draw any generalizations about Korean life in rural Arkansas from this film because there isn’t such community to be found for the Yis. Yet they are indelibly marked by the specificity of national origins, because much of the dialogue is in Korean. This fact had already led to some controversy before the film’s release, because it was only allowed to compete in the Best Foreign Language Film category at this year’s Golden Globes (which it won). The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is a notoriously secretive collective3, with a small, scandal-ridden membership4, many of whom appear to be quite out of touch with contemporary media journalism. So it is unsurprising that they hold some very myopic views about “American” cinema and that Minari, with its bilingual script and mostly Asian and Asian American cast, is only legible to them as a “foreign film.” But that whole debate has once again drawn attention to a banal yet violent truth: that language is a boundary of racial difference and national belonging.
Chung—and the Yis—already know this about life in America. And the film reminds us of this lived reality when the Yis arrive at a church service about halfway through the film. A series of vignettes reveal racially fraught exchanges with the locals: David makes friends with one of the white boys, whose first words to him are, “Why is your face so flat?” Meanwhile, Anne patiently responds to a young white girl spewing racist gibberish who hopes to inadvertently utter a word of Korean. These moments are distinctly unremarkable, framed mostly in medium-wide shots using a long-focus lens that evoke a politely distanced observational aesthetic, in lieu of the conventional close-ups and quick cuts often used to depict interpersonal conflict. Chung deploys this careful visual grammar to capture many of the daily horrors that bubble and blister throughout the film.
