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.
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