by Eleanor Zhang
The same evening as I was writing this article, Keira Knightley announced on the Chanel Connects podcast that she will no longer appear in nude scenes directed by men. “I feel very uncomfortable now trying to portray the male gaze." Her latest decision spoke to a recurring thought I have that may either be a legitimate stance or unjustified bias: that some artists aren’t exactly eligible for making their art.
Moments like this occur often for me when viewing artworks portraying the experience of immigration. With specific regard to films, central spotlights for immigrant characters are scanty, while storylines that mould them into supposedly funny caricatures are legion. Between the extremities are the ones that many immigrants of racial minorities find hardly relatable. A typical example would be the much-praised Brooklyn - in the stand-up comedian’s memoir, Ali Wong recalls that her mother commented at the time: “That white lady going through Ellis Island was like a country club compared to my experience trying to get by in America.”
Were it a story about a young Korean immigrant couple struggling to build a new life in Arkansas, I would argue that Minari could easily fall into the same category as the one about an Irish girl moving to New York – unrelatable not because their journey is not tough enough, but that such toughness is too concrete, as their adversity could in a large part be attributed to the stubborn husband’s obsession with farming his 20 acres of land in the middle of nowhere. What enables the film to strike a chord with immigrants of any race and ambition of any kind - and thus elevates it from a plain tale of surviving the American wilderness, to a moving one that captures the essence of being adrift in a new environment - is its inclusion of not one but three generations.
The same house on wheels accommodates Jacob and Monica, the first generation of immigrants; their children, David and Anne; and grandmother Soon-ja, who travels from her home in Korea to take care of her grandchildren. Following the family’s interactions with each other but also with the outside world, it’s hard not to pick up on a “progression” of adaptability along the three generations. This manifests itself most starkly in their use of languages: Soon-ja hardly seems capable of using English at all, which invites occasional side-eyes and mocking from her grandkids; Jacob and Monica, having lived in America for some years, speak passable English but are more confident in Korean; David and Anne communicate in Korean with their families in daily conversations, and speak flawless English with each other. More generally observed, stages of such a progression show various degrees of compatibility with America: the Yi children are the American-borns who still get asked why their faces are flat, but can mingle with local peers effortlessly; their young parents are the newly-landed, the ones that stay quiet at church gatherings and plant only Korean vegetables on American soil; compared to the rest of the family, Soon-ja the grandmother barely has any contact with the American society at all, and appears to have transposed her previous life in Korea down to the last detail across the Atlantic. Their cohabitation under the same roof is the process of immigration condensed into one miniature: from complete foreigners to what even their own grandma calls “American kids”, all it takes is three generations.
Soon-ja’s part in the Yi family’s life is what makes their Asian origin undeniable and, with her bagfuls of traditional Korean medicine and lack of knowledge on cookie baking, brings upon her entry a sense of intrusion rather than the expected familiarity. Everything about her screams foreignness to the sensitive David, who at first refuses to share a room with Soon-ja because “she smells like Korea”, despite not having even been to the country. Yet as time passes, her existence becomes indispensable: not only does she grant Jacob and Monica a reprieve from their non-ending fights, a rapport also starts to form between her and her grandchildren. In the most pivotal scene of the film, she encourages David to venture into the forest, leading him to a creek that she thinks is perfect for growing minari, a common Korean wild herb. “Minari is truly the best,” she says, “it grows anywhere, like weeds, so anyone can pick and eat it. Rich or poor, anyone can enjoy it and be healthy. Minari can be put in kimchi, put in stew, put in soup. It can be medicine if you’re sick.” So much about minari the plant reflects the American dream of Jacob and Monica, who have decided to come across the ocean to “save each other”: hope-lending and exuberant, unbiased and all-welcoming, generous and restorative. But the above qualities are nowhere to be found once they arrive. As Soon-ja preaches to David about minari, was it not her tentative attempt to reconnect her grandchild with South Korean culture - which is much older than America - and point the second-generation immigrant towards the fundamental layer of their multifold identity, one that’s hidden deep in the woods and therefore warned against as threatening and dangerous, but is in fact full of life, nourishing and healing and, as their improvised silly song goes – just “wonderful, wonderful”?
The film starts with Jacob’s clear vision of his private garden of Eden. The ending, however, douses his American dream with undiluted violence: Soon-ja, with both her movement and speech limited by a stroke, accidentally sets fire to the garbage, a fire that eventually engulfs the farm in flames. Knowing that Soon-ja is the character that channels Koreanness into the family’s American living, the scene’s relentless candour in acknowledging not only the grandmother’s love, but also her potential to destroy lifts Minari instantly into the top tier of immigration films, turning the story into a cautionary tale about the danger of neglecting one’s weakened provenance.
The immigration experience Minari paints out for us is three generations imbricated; and in their symbiotic existence, what stands for foundation – the grandma figure that antedates the two later generations - can nurture as well as demolish. This abstract imagery of a three-layer conflation reminds me of what André Aciman describes as “irrealis”, “a time in the future when the past will have become an everlasting present”. The combined immigrant experience woven by the three generations in Minari is exactly the “melding of past, present, and future tenses” he speaks of, a state that is “no longer time”, but “eternity”, “afterlife”, “heaven” - and, in the end, “death”. “The Garden of Eden is big,” muses Jacob at the start of the film. Perhaps Soon-ja’s final act of destruction is what completes this circle of irrealis. And by giving the now scorched farmland a chance to reflect and start anew, death in truth serves as the beginning of a Terrestrial Paradise.
