The Universal and Unique of MINARI (Patreon)

Everything about us is both universal and unique.

For there is no experience you can have on this planet that someone else has not had before you. You are a part of a tradition that goes back for thousands and thousands of years. And yet… at the same exact time, there is no human being on the planet who has had the same exact combination of those experiences that you have had. There is no one who has ever been quite like you. And this duality is at the center of everything in the human experience.

It also affects us in such a myriad of ways. When we are hit by hardship, loss, and change, it often helps to look to those who have been in those experiences before us, or even alongside us, to better understand the plight within ourselves. But when it comes to the actual expression of our lives and how we reach outward? It is critical to communicate the exact ways those disparate elements have piled up and affected us in a way that is likely true for no other person. Because in the end, your story is your own. But in telling it? You help build bridges between the two extremes. You create a relationship through the universal and the unique.

This is why there is so much power to specificity. I know all the screenwriting gurus love to tell you that you want a likable everyman protagonist that “the audience can see themselves in,” but that just usually turns characters into milquetoast blob-cakes AKA the endless litany of boring white guy who seem to deserve to be the hero just for fucking existing (WONDER IF THAT’S HAD ANY NEGATIVE IMPACTS ON US. HMMMMM). But by going into specificity? You are articulating a character in a way where the audience can understand what makes their experience different from yours. And at the same exact time, it allows you to better connect to those who share in your specificity.

Look no further than a film like Minari. For a year now I’ve been seeing people talk about the power of the specificity of this movie when it comes to the Korean and AAPI experience - along with their powerful emotional connection to the portrayals within. I think about pieces like Karen Han’s, which examines the way the film effortlessly takes down the way “monolithic experience” stereotype through its very existence. Or Angie Han’s piece on the push / pull of Korean language being spoken in the home and how it plays into self-definition. Or maybe you heard about the way the film rightfully led to criticism of the Golden Globes when they designated it as a “foreign language film” even though half of it is in english its very American-ness is one of the central damn points of the film. But that crisis of misunderstanding brings us right into the crux of how “we” relate to the film.

(Note: there’s a good chance I’m going to get something wrong in the next two paragraphs - and, like, everywhere all the time - because I’m trying to reiterate a lot of things I’ve been learning, so please let me know if so). Now, we talk so much about the importance of representation, but I’ve learned to worry anytime “representation” is seen as the be all end all. If anything, it’s just a starting point to overhauling systems in radical need of change. Which means it’s not just about getting “in the room,” it’s about having the larger power to create those rooms and new power structures with those people already in it. Similarly, it’s not just about having good year for representation, it’s about creating consistency thereafter. It’s nominating two female directors EVERY year. Or, gasp! Maybe even three!?!?  A majority, you say!? What about FOUR??? Whatever will happen if there’s ALL FIVE!?!?! You know, like almost every single year before that? Where five men were nominated and no one ever blinked an eye??? What then!?!!??

Glibness aside, I mean it. There’s so many aspects of this for which are so far away when it comes to the grander system. Award shows patted themselves on the back for nominating cis-het white people to play trans characters, but heavens to betsy what would happen if a trans actor actually got nominated instead? And what happens when non-binary actor challenges the male / female split of category designations? What then!?!? Besides, award shows are so just the surface-level bellwether for these issues. For so many people, this is about dismantling of these white power structures under it. And for so many white Americans, this is ultimately about removing yourself as the focus of the conversation.

Which is why challenging the “default white protagonist” is so critical to ongoing media portrayals. Where everyone else in America has had endless hours of being saturated by white media, white people simply have not. Which means they have a critical lack of hours of watching things that aren’t “for” them. Even when white people do consume films with “minority subject matter,” most of the portrayals that were championed by white audiences were about us having sympathy for “the other” on screen (particularly because of their pain). But empathy-grounded films instead focus on the interiority of their subjects as whole and complete people, not mere objects of sympathy. In turn, they strike you on a much deeper level of relation. For instance, it’s looking at an Asian protagonist in this film and having some critical, humane part of you go “that’s me!” And yet at the same exact time, it’s acknowledging the ways that they are also not you at all. It’s seeing the ways that it has been so very different for you, whether it be trials of immigration or forms of discrimination that we could not pretend to understand. In fact, it’s realizing that discrimination is something you could have created for them in ways you didn’t even realize. Why, you watch the interactions with townsfolk or the scenes in church and you realize how easily you can be part of an omnipresent tension, even if you just thought you were trying to “help.”

These are the things that great storytelling can help you realize. And the point is that this “portrayal of the universal and unique” is not a contradiction. The alteration and overlaps “that’s me!” and “that’s not me!” are the very essence of EVERY narrative experience. And while taking it in, it’s important to explore all those differing feelings at once. So let’s start with ways we relate, because while watching Minari? I was struck by how many deeply personal memories the film evoked (warning: general spoilers for character developments to follow).

The setting made me think about certain hallmarks of growing up. I too was a kid in the 80’s and during “Reagan’s America” and it’s hard to explain, but it really felt like there was this suffocating, willful naivety in the air. I would get the historical context for much of it later, but I felt like literally everyone around me was trying to forget the late 70’s. But even then, it’s more than a simple matter of time and place. Minari evoked so many feelings of being a child, like the feeling of being in the other room as you hear your parents argue (I’d always be up the stairs and have my head pressed against the banisters). Or the feeling of being confined to all these spaces in your own home as other people tried to have these small sections of life within the space. It was the way you could see every bit of the divisions between the people around you. It’s the way you feel it seep into every bit of space in your life. Which is why…

The portrayal of Jacob and Monica also made me think so much about my own parents. Maybe it started with that realization that Steve Yeun is younger than me, which just gives way to the realization that “oh god, my parents were so much younger than I am now.” It’s one thing to know it. It’s another thing to really feel it. And this film so squarely puts me into their shoes. I keep thinking about how much pressure was on them. How they had to make such tough choices and how they fought over the lines of morality within them. I remember when my dad quit his job over one of those very lines of morality. I think about the power of the reasons why, but I also can’t help but think of the way the endless stress over finances just impacted every single thing in our lives. I think there’s a lot of people who had childhoods like that? There was food on the table. They worked to get me everything I needed. But when the trouble hit, you could feel them dealing with the stress of finances like it was the ever-dangling sword of Damocles. And if something didn’t work out as all the debt was piling up, then yes, any day now it could all go so wrong. And I think about everything my mom did, how hard she worked, and how many jobs she had to stop that from happening.

The incredible story of grandma Soonja made me think about my own grandma and how I have so few memories of her “before stage.” By all accounts, my mother’s mother was spritely, funny, and joyous. Literally everyone talked about how full of life she was. But she was diagnosed with Alzheimers when I was five. And for the next four years, I slowly watched this woman lose her mind. And that’s the way that phrase SHOULD be used. Just a mind becoming slowly lost… I was just a kid. How I wish I didn’t remember so much of the end in comparison to the beginning, but that’s what I remember. Those final, silent, helpless days. And for so much of the middle? I think about how she relied on routine. I remember her being alone in a house as she just went about cleaning. But it was the same routine over and over and over again. As part of that I remember how we were finding things that she put away in the weirdest of spots, even years later. Then I remember right when she stopped recognizing her own name. But as a kid, I didn’t know what to do with this experience. It was somehow scary and benign all at once. The most harrowing thing was almost how much it was emotionally-impacting everyone around me, mostly because they had so much more of her “before times.” But I internalized so much of this. And thus, in Minari I watching of the relationship between young David and his grandmother, with that devastating shift of going from “you’re not a real grandma” to the notion of having to help take care of someone who just a moment ago was taking care of you… often just by guiding them in the right direction, literally and figuratively. And it hit me so damn hard.

All their trips to the southern church made me think about how different these experiences were from my own. I grew up in Boston Irish Catholic, which meant stepping into all these musty, tall cathedrals and getting yelled at as no one, repeat NO ONE ever read from the bible. Instead of smiling faces trying to win you over, almost everything was built around the fact it was supposed to be an unfriendly experience. It was about fear and judgement and looking down on your sinful nature. It was about guilting you about EVERYTHING and if you didn’t do what they said you were a bad person. It was about how important it is that you just GO and say confession and that’s the only thing that matters. And if you didn’t? Well, then I think about how judgmental they were of my mom for getting a divorce (that she didn’t ask for) and saying she couldn’t get communion. But even if it was different, I think about all the ways these feelings must have played into Lee Isaac Chung’s experience, too.

There’s the moment where young David faces punishing for the prank on grandma makes me think about the range of discipline in my own town growing up. How most of the Italian American households I know had wooden sticks or spoons or whatever else that was used for disciplinary action, as if a regimented practice. And I think about how, by comparison, so many Irish households didn’t have anything so organized. Kids getting hit were often momentary reactions out of anger, or honestly, whenever some adult felt like it. It makes me think about how my house didn’t do anything like that. I had other friends whose houses didn’t do that either (and I’m realizing the one commonality of those houses is that we all had parents who were teachers?). I remember being scared of half of my friends' parents. Like REALLY scared. But never saying anything. Which is why I think about how much we didn’t think too hard about it. Like so much of those days, all these things just sat in silent acceptance. Which is something that makes me so much more empathetic to the way Soonja disarms that scene, cresting into the all-timer line “so I drank a little pee?”

Then there's a moment where young David stood there internalizing the overheard conversation that “his heart could stop at any moment” made me think about the way death just hung over so much of my life. I feel like I knew about death immediately because my grandpa died somewhere around my first memories? Then I watched my aforementioned grandma with Alzheimers slowly deteriorate and then pass away when I was 9. I watched as my other grandpa battled cancer on and off for my entire childhood until I was 14. I think about how cancer felt like it was everywhere, even my mom getting skin cancer, or the family having other scares. Keep in mind we even grew up right near the place where the poisoning from “A Civil Action” happened, so death was literally in the water. Even then it was more on the roads because I feel like I knew so many kids in town were hit and killed by cars, often while riding bikes (this was just before the helmet era). And I don’t even have time to go over the way these high profile murders hit the area later on. But I think about how the very thought of death often paralyzed me in a way where I had to push it so deep in the vault. All so that on the surface, it felt like blind acceptance. Since death was so omnipresent and yet the only two ways it was dealt with were suppression and humor. There’s a reason the obituaries were called “The Irish Sports Page'' and I learned a penchant for constantly making dark jokes about mortality. In a way it was normalization. And in another way there was nothing normal about it at all. And it makes me think about the way young David lies there in bed, contemplating the specter of death, unsure how to express the very magnitude of the dread he is experiencing.

The film’s many beautiful scenes of farming made me think about the best job I had in high school. In some ways, it was my favorite job to this day. It was up north on a campground right near the coastline and I was doing “the shit jobs” as they called it. Mowing grass, weed whacking, cleaning toilets, literally shoveling shit with the fertilizer, washing out showers people had pooped in, getting poison ivy, getting stung by wasps, and drinking a ton of sprite and peanut butter sandwiches (what I packed for lunch every day). But there was one job at that place that wasn’t a shit job, even though I was literally walking in it. When Steve Yeun’s character said “farm / garden, what’s the difference?” I had this sudden Ratatouille-moment because I remember the owner of the campground saying the exact same thing to his wife when he set up this GIANT spread on their land to start growing food. Why? Because he too absolutely had the desire to have a little farm. It genuinely became his favorite thing in the world. Which means I got to go right along with it. Every afternoon, I’d finish my shit jobs and go right into the gardens. I learned about growing cucumbers, potatoes, lettuce, bok choy, tomatoes, shallots, corn, and basically every fucking thing he wanted to throw in there and “just see how it grew.” I already had a burgeoning love of cooking, but suddenly I had a first hand lesson in seasonality and produce and what those things really mean to the food you eat. It was some of the most joyous summers I ever had in my life. And it was populated by some of the most interesting people.

For instance, when I watched the scenes with Will Patton’s character, Paul, it made me think of an older man that I worked with at the campground. He lived there and helped out with odd jobs. He had a really bad injury in the past that left him with broken hips and epilepsy and a bike helmet he had to wear during the day. Honestly, I was told it was mostly my job to “watch out for him,” which is something he hated the idea of, but begrudgingly knew he had to go along with. Still, he was kind to me in his own surly way. He stood there smoking marlboros like a damn chimney as he loosely taught me how to do basic electrician work and plumbing from three feet away. Somehow, I still think about him all the time. Like Patton and Yeun’s pairing, it’s part of the way people just end up lumped together through work, sometimes spending hours and hours beside each other in ways they never would otherwise. But honestly, both of these experiences were some of the most fundamental bits of education of my entire life.

So when Steve Yeun’s character says “working outdoors makes me feel alive” even when he is in tremendous pain, I know in some small way what he means. The summer before those campground ones, I was working in a mall at a repetitive, boring job and I literally felt my brain turning to mush every day. And then suddenly I was outside. Sure, it was incredibly hard work. The kind of grinding physical labor that doesn’t build you up, but breaks you down. Hell, I couldn’t imagine trying to do half of that stuff when I wasn’t 17 years old and in the best shape of my life. But being outside and staring at all this beautiful land felt like this absurd blessing. And maybe it’s just that it’s a time that’s long since past that allows me to look back with adoration for that period, for it’s all part of the insane privilege of not having to have continued doing it. But I know in some small part what Jacob meant in that moment, even if I couldn’t imagine the full scope of how it truly felt for him to throw his life into it so completely.

Lastly, the entire movie made me think about the very few east asian kids who grew up in my town. It made me think about my friend whose mother was still in Korea and how he never went into detail as to why, even when asked. I think about how he rightfully made fun of us for not knowing how to use a rice cooker. I think about how we’d go up into his attic and literally just eat bowls of delicious rice and play with the swords that his older brother owned (I have no idea how someone wasn’t cut up to shit). He was the kind of kid who was incredibly well-liked, but I think about how he must have felt when hit with the deluge of casual racism from so many kids around him, especially that which came from his friends. I think about how much he probably had to disarm during his lifetime. And I think about the way years later he was the ONLY kid I knew who was full-on arrested for selling weed despite the litany of white kids who did it and were caught (granted, other kids went to jail for selling harder stuff). And now I think about how he’s gone now and how incredibly sad that makes me.

I also think about a young boy who immigrated here in middle school and how he barely spoke a word english, but we all got by mostly through hand gestures. I think about how one time he wanted to come with us to my friend Mark’s backyard because that’s where we sometimes box on half-days (when I grew up it was surprising to me there were parts of the country that DIDN’T put on boxing gloves after school and go hit each other). I remember how excited this kid was to join and how he then beat a lot of up, even if he kept forgetting that you couldn’t kick. But mostly I wonder what he was thinking about during all that. Language barriers unfortunately come with all sorts of emotional ones. And I think about how he and the other East Asian immigrant kids must have felt because they were placed into math classes with kids who were two years older, simply because they come from a region’s school system that was so much more ahead of us. Mostly, I think about how much of their lives I didn’t know. And how much I now wished I asked. But like so many people at the time, I was probably too busy gazing at my shoes.

I’ve shared all this not to center the film on my own experiences, but to find those overlaps and differences and reflect between them. Minari stoked the fires of all the ways I remembered it so clearly. And even the ways I saw some of it in a new light. Maybe you shared in some of these experiences, too. Maybe so much of the film’s powerful specificity brought up feelings and realizations in your own heart. But even if that’s part of this film’s modus operandi, movies aren’t just a space for reflection. They’re artful contractions that take care, focus, and know-how…

And the construction of Minari is downright masterful.

I cannot overstate how proficiently Lee Isaac Chung goes about storytelling in all those invisible ways I adore. He perfectly understands how to set up that baseline tension by creating those incredibly personal stakes for each character. Nearly twenty minutes in you so feel the weight of pressure on them and thus wish in your heart, “I HOPE THEIR FARM WILL BE OKAY.” You so desperately want them to succeed not merely because of “likability,” no no. But because you empathize so succinctly with the pressure that is on them. These things are the very fundamentals of dramatic writing and they’re what allow the small-yet-heartbreaking and harrowing events of the film’s climax to take shape. Just as it sets up the arcs of the relationships between all the characters in pitch perfect fashion, too. Something perhaps most noticeable in where young David starts with his grandmother and where they end. And all the while, the film finds such space for characterization with every single one of them.

Steve Yeun plays the father, Jacob, with this delicate mix of humility and quiet desperation. I specifically think about that moment where he’s talking about the male chicks being incinerated due to their lack of use and gently notes to his son, “so you and I should try to be useful.” He carries stoicism of his character not with a blankness, but this quiet pain that’s always subtly draped across his face. But that just means when the breakdowns come, they hit so damn hard.

There’s the young Alan Kim, already a rightful interview sensation, but it’s the performance that hits me so hard. In this film he takes in so much of the world around him with these absorbing, open eyes and quiet internalization. Without it, the film collapses.

Meanwhile I watch Will Patton play the downtrodden Paul with this open mix of haunted eyes and thankful spirit. All part of something that makes me realize that he’s a beloved actor we clearly aren’t using enough.

And of course, there’s Youn Yuh-jung’s incredible performance as grandma Soonja, which is being rightly cherished for all it’s humor, heart, and heartbreak. I say this lovingly, but it’s a proper “showy role,” which I feel like is always necessary in good narrative (hell, Shakespeare always had a few per play). That’s because they imbibe a movie with life and joy and a sense of delight from the audience. In fact, the ONLY problem with these roles is they always get the most attention. And meanwhile there other less-notice roles which the film utterly depends on in order to function… Which means there is one role in Minari that is absolutely not getting enough attention.

What Yeri Han does with Monica is incredible. She practically has to carry the tension of the damn entire movie. But she’s not “the villain” in any sense of the word. In fact, she's the heart of the entire emotional experience. An equal party to the narrative thrust, but the one who is actually concerned and looking out for everyone as they try to navigate the day-to-day difficulties of their new life. Yes, we can see the strain this creates on their marriage, but the film beautifully recognizes that it’s so much harder to be the parent who cares more about the details of the moment. And we can also see the way internalizes the pain of this experience, along with the ways it affects her children - and her in turn (when her mother has a stroke and she says “this happened because i was selfish,” I was gutted). You can see the instinct for cohesion that she is constantly looking for because, no, it doesn’t matter if someone claims they are doing something “for” you (especially if it’s not even what you’re asking for). Really, it’s just for them and how they believe they are seen by others. You feel all of this tension articulated so cleanly between the writing and her performance. But you also have just as much empathy for the plight of what Jacob is trying to do for them in turn. These two bits of empathy crash together, then crest right into the deep ethical questions of the film like, “we can’t save each other, but money can?” For Monica, it’s about looking for faith from the people right in front of you - and in turn, I see so much of my own mother’s struggle to keep things together for us.

But if the performances and dramatic arcs of the story weren’t enough to get it by, it is a film that completely knows how to land its metaphors. Every single one of them feels so organic, yet so vivid, whether it be the snake, the broken drawer, or the various crosses being carried. And of course there is titular minari, where Chung is not only drawing a clean line about the perseverance of his characters (and by extension, his community), but how that relates to deeper realizations between the parents. For it is that which we still have, even when we lose the things we’re after.

In so many ways, I’m left speechless. What Lee Isaac Chung has created with Minari is everything a film can be. It’s my favorite movie I’ve seen this year. But thrusting such superlatives feel so damn trivial. Because it’s more than that. It’s something crafted in the most universal sense imaginable. And at the same exact time, communicated a specificity of experience that I and so many others will never have, either. Just one told so well that we can take it in, absorb it, and only have the deepest empathy for in the process.

Along with a deep thankfulness to those who share their stories.

… This essay should have ended there... But I found out about the cruel, gutting news from Atlanta literally right after I watched the film. I’m so angry, upset, and heartbroken for friends and the AAPI community at large. I’ve spent all week reading and learning and trying to help spread the thoughts of so many voices on this matter on social media - and also trying to talk to family about the intersections of what’s happening. But for this moment, and given the spirit of the film, please, please join me if you're able to in donating to Heart of Dinner https://www.heartofdinner.org/, a charity recommended by a friend, which serves “to combat food insecurity and isolation within NYC’s elderly Asian American community. We do this by delivering care packages of hot lunches and fresh produce every Wednesday, lovingly paired with a handwritten and illustrated letter in Chinese or Korean.”

<3HULK