I first heard about the film months before it was released in South Korea, before there was much talk about the film in South Korean media, before Youn Yuh-jung rose to prominence in the Western hemisphere. Struggling to adapt to the country that claimed its legal rights over me, I’d been busily exploring the Seoul way of life, the way in which I might be able to utilize my multicultural background to my advantage rather than as an obstacle in the one-size-fit-all job market, when a close friend from my grad school days messaged me on social media, suggesting that it might be a worthwhile watch for me as the setting was in Arkansas, the first American state I’d ever lived in.
Usually, when I tell people that I used to live in Arkansas, I don’t see a lot of people’s faces light up with recognition. Talking with Korean Koreans and Korean Americans hailing from the greater Chicago area, California, New England, and the rest of the urban residencial areas popular among immigrants, I’ve met very few people who say that they’ve felt the kinds of emotions that I’d fel in the deep South. In fact, Hillbilly Elegy and the sensation it caused was the first time I felt like a piece of my memory was substantiated. I’ve found it hard to meet people who recognized my eighth-grade memories as their own, the weird memories of life as an East Asian alien in an economically unstable southern town.
The immigrant jobs I saw in Arkansas, for one, felt weird to me. Sexing chickens is portrayed as a legitimate job for immigrants in Minari. This is the first time I’ve seen this job publicized in the media as a career that Korean American immigrants pursue, though it was a career paththat I’d personally seen many of the Korean adults around me in Siloam Springs pursue. This path had seemed weird to me when I was in eighth grade, when I first went to live in the United States, because I just didn’t expect the Koreans there to be sexing chickens as a career when they had immigrated in search of a better way of life. I’m not trying to belittle the job or be classist in any way, but I hadn’t expected this type of job to be the type of job that Koreans going to America in search of a better life were ultimately looking for, leaving behind their home country that was rapidly advancing economically. To be fair, perhaps it wasn’t their ultimate choice but simply a midpoint, as Steven Yeun so brilliantly acts out the ambitions of the American dream in Minari. But the film is realistic in that it doesn’t end by giving Yeun an alternative career path.
One difference between the chicken sexers in Minari and the chicken sexers I met in Arkansas is the difference in time. While the movie seems to set around the 70s or the 80s, I was in Arkansas in 2007. The mode of life shown in the film didn’t seem at all outdated.
The Christian theme also resonates with me, and I think that this one more than the geographical setting probably resonates with a larger South Korean immigrant audience. The level of religious superstition also seems largely unchanged.
While Minari is Lee Isaac Chung’s memory of Arkansas decades ago, mine is fairly recent. I wouldn’t be surprised if much hasn’t changed — from immigrant job opportunities and religious life — in post-covid Siloam Springs.
Starkly missing from the film, I think, is the theme of racism, though the young boy and the young girl both encounter a degree of microaggression at the white church. But this is not the central theme. Racism was one word through which I was able to reflect on my own experiences while attending public school in Arkansas, but it was the one I chose not because it felt the most representative but because it seemed to be the word that other Asians better recognized than my memories of Korean immigrant poverty and religious superstition.
Youn’s success in the Academy Awards sure seems to have boosted South Korean ego, similar to Parasite’s success. I applaud her for her performance as well. But if a South Korean actress’ success in the Academy Awards and the Korean ethnicity of the film director are all that South Koreans are proud of, I can’t help but feel that they’re missing invaluable voice it’s added to the host of other marginalized voices. Or, perhaps, it’s really my own subjective experiences of living in Arkansas that makes me focus on the themes of Christianity and sexing chickens more than the overarching representation of Asians in film — like Crazy Rich Asians — that Asian Americans seem proud of and the overarching representation of Korean movies in the West — like Parasite — that Korean Koreans seem proud of.