On March 1st, Lee Isaac Chung’s ‘Minari’ won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes— a kind of pyrrhic victory that saw Asian-Americans once again awarded a meritocratic star of white approval. Some two weeks later, eight people, six of whom were women of East Asian descent, were murdered by a white mass shooter in three Atlanta-area spas: Daoyou Feng; Hyun Jung Grant; Suncha Kim; Paul Andre Michels; Soon Chung Park; Xiaojie Tan; Delaina Ashley Yaun; Yong Ae Yue. The proximity of these events firmly demarcate the poles of the Asian diasporic experience— a constant oscillation between the exalted stature of ‘honorary whites’ and that of perpetual foreigners travailing at the margins of society. 

Since the start of the coronavirus- which has been grossly construed as the “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu” amongst other bigoted terms- there’s been a significant uptick in Anti-Asian racism worldwide. The organisation Stop AAPI Hate has reported 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian racism over the past year in the United States alone, depicting an unrelenting everyday reality that is only exacerbated when we take into account the increasingly normalized encounters that go unreported. Against this harrowing backdrop, ‘Minari’, a multigenerational portrayal of Asian-American life, was barred from competing in the best-motion-picture category at this year’s Golden Globes, instead taking home what felt like the award equivalent to the backhanded compliment of “your English is so good!”. Herein lies the paradox: we’re contenders for the “best” in Western cultural production whilst simultaneously being scapegoated, dehumanised and murdered. It’s a dualism that’s not lost on me, having sown my own seeds of white desire only to find they reap few rewards. They’re the moments when, at four, I surrendered 丹凝 for Dan-Ning, then for Danni; at 11, when I began using whitening creams religiously, a calculated concoction of bleach and dysphoria to wash this brown off me; at 20, when I grieve a culture not lost so much as fetishized, plundered and dispossessed. I understood, long before I could articulate it, that the hypervisible Asian body (mis)speaks for itself— it reads “disgust” and “lust” at once, saddled with the compounded weight of historical and current danger.

The representational silence that has traversed this litany of hate crimes— poor media coverage, performative allyship, and carceral “solutions”— reverberates far across the Atlantic, growing even quieter on British soil. It seems the revered Special Relationship of the brothers in arms extends to a shared disregard of Asian lives, a sentiment whose seeds run deep in their history of racialized colonial wars- those waged on the land and in the psyche. Our old collective wounds— from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s— continue to fester, all while new gashes are torn as Yellow Peril-level virulence re-enters the Anglo-white vernacular. Here in London, there’s been a 300 percent increase in hate crimes toward people of East and Southeast Asian heritage since the start of the pandemic. So when, last April, a driver swerved in front of me to shout “Coronavirus”, the queasy drop in my stomach would be offset by the numbness of being perpetually subject to such aggressions. Alone, the accumulative force of these micro and macro-aggressions rises up in me like a hot oil, bubbling over at its own volition and flattening me in the most unexpected of moments. I don't think any of us know what to do with this humiliation and hurt, but we mustn't misdirect it; in the process of momentarily satiating our hunger for white acceptance, we forgo the most vulnerable of us, including the women who died in Atlanta.

To say that Minari is a quintessentially American film that deserves to be an equal contender to white productions is not to suggest that it’s an assimilation success story, but quite the opposite: when contextualized, it reminds us that to live in America is to incessantly attempt to grow life in soil that is riddled with death. It is to blame the dead for their own deaths, not the country that created the conditions that killed them, wondering, as Alok Vaid-Menon put it, “how many ghosts does it take for a cemetery to call itself a country?”.

grief and solace conjured aromatically: 'crying in h mart' review

SOBBING NEAR THE DRY GOODS, I ASK MYSELF, "AM I EVEN KOREAN ANYMORE IF THERE'S NO ONE LEFT IN MY LIFE TO CALL AND ASK WHICH BRAND OF SEAWEED WE USED TO BUY?"

In the first chapter of Crying in H Mart, we find Michelle Zauner mourning her mother, Chongmi, amid the aisles of H Mart brimming with banchan and rice cakes. Her grief is both summoned and solaced by the aromatics of Korean cuisine that emanate from either side- on one hand, soothed by the familiar pungency of fermented black beans, and on the other, inflamed upon remembering there’s no one left to consult on “which brand of seaweed we used to buy”. Among humdrum shoppers, we witness a poignant moment that cuts deep into the diaspora, capturing the predicament of accessing one’s estranged cultural roots when the only lifeline has been severed.

Crying in H Mart sees Zauner, who is best known for her musical venture Japanese Breakfast, trading in her synths and keys for equally atmospheric prose in a memoir. Emotionally processed yet tender, Zauner dishes into the joys and pains of food through the fertile narrative terrain of grief. Born to a Caucasian father and a Korean umma, Zauner recalls her childhood as a biracial girl living between two worlds- too Asian for the rugged outskirts of Eugene, Oregon, and too white for the cohesive cityscape of Seoul. Without resorting to easy pathos, she relays the ruptures and reconciliations of these cultural plate tectonics; in Double Eyelid, she recalls earning the praise of “aigo yep-peu”- with its twofold meaning of “pretty” and “well-behaved”- for the double eyelid and pale skin she’d inherited from her father. It would be the same reward she’d reap from well-meaning aunts at dinner for dutifully sweeping her plate clean. The aversion she’d eventually develop toward this conflation of moral and aesthetic value mounts tactfully- episodic anecdotes of clashes with her beauty-obsessed mother creep up to a crescendo, a rupturing whose seeds run deep in their cultural differences. Throughout the memoir, we witness how the stability of her Korean heritage was offset by “a complicated desire for whiteness,” a potent force all-too-familiar to those of us born in the diaspora. 

For Zauner and fellow halfies alike, food becomes the love language to be harnessed in resistance to this partial death of cultural identity, hand-in-hand with the death of a loved one. Eschewing heavy-handed facts as well as palliative fictions, the memoir quilts together a candid patchwork of Zauner’s fraught relationship with Chongmi: the joys of a shared penchant for late-night refrigerator scavenging; the severity of their eventual estrangement; the unutterable of cancer, dying and death. She is unsparing and meticulous in her depictions of the indignities involved in Chongmi’s succumbing to cancer. Her final breaths, she writes, bear semblance to “a horrible sucking like the last sputtering of a coffee pot”. Her inability to stomach the more pungent of foods they once gorged on together, “managing only a few bites”. The latter is particularly painful as Zauner, in an attempt to buoy their bonds, begins to decode the once cryptic measurements of umma’s dishes, serving up hearty tteokguk and well-established sick meal, gyeranjjim, only for it all to be “vomited later that night” in a tragically ironic turn of events.

The maturity of Crying in H Mart emerges from a liminal interstice, interweaving two worlds to offer up a Konglish subjectivity that testifies to a childhood in which a mix of English and Korean was ricocheted between family members. Korean words aren’t italicized, and footnotes aren’t offered for every morsel of food. And to insist that this is harnessed as a consciously subversive act to turn cultural hegemony on its head would be to sell short the day-to-day minutiae of diasporic life. Zauner resists privileging one culture over the other, her bilingual introspections glimmering with a dynamic wholeness that is being forged through and in spite of her cultural schizophrenia. 

A viscerally immersive read, Crying in H Mart spurs within us all, in the eye of the storm, a self-reflection that transcends geographic and cultural boundaries. We are urged to cede the comfortable excuses and evasions of ego, to locate solace among the wreckage of a familial fracturing, and to do so with grace, vastness and resilience. Reading the memoir against a backdrop of rising Anti-Asian sentiment, however, we are again shaken by the seismic force of a collective grief whose five stages take on a cyclical formation, where anger becomes overlaid with depression before we ever get the chance to deny. What Zauner reminds us is that even in this absence of touch, unable to hold one another and grieve, we will be found alone together, one arm full of groceries, hungering for a morsel of the homeland. 

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is out on August 5th 2021 in the UK through Picador.

a tender tale of asian-american travails and resilience: 'minari' review

An immigrant’s heart is a battlefront. Torn between past and present, the home that once was and the home that is now, we are above all most homesick for a place we have never known: a place of stability. It’s the hunger that beckons the uprooting of the Yis, the Korean-American family at the forefront of Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. With the hazy focus of a memory, the film traces the travails and resilience of immigrants in the lure of America’s ill-defined promises. Indeed, the Korean herb from which the film takes its name is capable of flourishing on the most unforgiving of terrains, its verdant sprouts brimming with hope- the question is whether the same will prove true for the Yis.

It’s the 1980s and Jacob (Steven Yeun) has uprooted his family from the West Coast to rural Arkansas, looking to start afresh. His wife Monica (Yeri Han) hesitantly slipstreaming behind, the Yis pull up at the new home that’s depleted their meagre savings: a remote patch of Ozarks farmland with a trailer perched atop cinder blocks. In a plan equal parts American Dream and Korean crop, Jacob’s convinced he’ll transform this cleared acreage into a lucrative Korean vegetable business. It’s not all that far-fetched, it seems. With languorous, buttery shots of the surrounding foliage, Chung palpably conjures the hope that’s propelled Jacob to this “Garden of Eden”, as he calls it. But in the dim interior of the mobile home, we find Monica less than thrilled to be living out in the boondocks, seeing Jacob’s endeavor as a selfish folly that puts their youngest at risk- seven-year-old David (Alan Kim), who suffers from a heart condition. Her trust wanes one compromise after another, and like David’s heart murmur, it doesn’t register as brutal in a single moment; rather, it accrues gradually into an accumulative force that reveals itself in a restrained muttering of words that cut far deeper. Somewhere in the middle of this simmering tension are their two American-born kids, who are, for now, too entranced by the vats of Mountain Dew in the fridge to take notice of their transitive becomings as cultural hybrids.

Chung is a patient filmmaker- he reveals the Asian-American experience in the quieter interludes, infused with a lived-in quality: supersized bottles of Mountain Dew guzzled for their purported health benefits; racial microaggressions from a white boy at church, asking why David’s “face is so flat”; Jacob’s mockery of the pseudoscience of water divining, boasting that “Korean people use their heads''. Among these vignettes, it’s the arrival of Monica’s cantankerous mother, Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung), which heralds a chain of events that have immigrant audiences lunged back into their younger selves, grappling with a cultural dissonance that becomes intelligible only in hindsight. What cannot be described of diasporic life, Chung understands, must be conjured in the interstice between multiple gazes. Upon Soonja’s entrance, we see Monica strenuously warding off the tears, uttering that primal “ma”. Then there's David, whose Americanised ideals of a cookie-baking granny have him complaining that “Grandma smells like Korea!”. Youn is a scene-stealer as the foul-mouthed force of unmitigated Old Country that eventually wins over David, a reconciliation that isn’t at the expense of her individual identity. If Minari’s final tragedy registers as uncharacteristically extreme for a film that’s otherwise subtle in its observations, it’s held together by Chung’s capacity to return to those quiet yet expressive notes of the Yis’ familial bond.

It’s a rare sight in American cinema- bicultural depictions of immigrant life that resort neither to a rags-to-riches narrative nor a cautionary tale. And that’s why the Golden Globes’ relegation of Minari to a foreign language film stings; it’s a kind of life-imitates-art moment that reproduces the very counter-currents the Yis endured to assimilate. And so it must be asked: how many signifiers of the promised land- the family’s home in rural Arkansas, Jacob’s dreams of being a self-made man, Monica’s longing to assimilate- will it take for Minari and the Yis to be understood as quintessentially American? Chung’s deceptively gentle storytelling, for one, bathes the minutiae of sowing and reaping with a timeless grandeur that resists this Othering.

Minari is released on 2 April on digital platforms.