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Minari opens with the Yi family moving from their home in California to a five-acre piece of farmland in rural Arkansas. The beautiful, leafy grounds are void of crops, with a sitting caravan house crouching in the middle. As the family get out of the car, Monica (the mother of the family, played by Yeri Han) realizes that this house – this life – is not what she signed up for.
The step-free entrance to the house is so far from the ground that she has to rush through it – the first of many sacrifices she makes for her husband Jacob’s (Steven Yeun) dream of starting his own farm. His plan is to cultivate Korean cultures, in hopes of serving as a supplier to Americans of Korean descent looking to cook familiar dishes. Once this farm is successful, he argues, he and Monica will never have to go back to work as chicken sex workers, like they did in California.
Director Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film sets American Dream fictions aside – let work consume you and you might find a path to upward mobility. With enough work you can find a job that gives you more freedom of personal action, the stability of your family and your children a legacy. Or at least the opportunity to not work so hard.
Realizing this dream was, of course, particularly difficult for working-class Korean American immigrants in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. Starting a farm offers only the illusion of control. To avoid building a well or paying for the county’s water, Jacob hand-shovels the land until he finds his own supply. (He tells his son to never pay for anything he can get for free). But the water pipe eventually dries up. The order for produce, from the grocer the family was supposed to supply, fails. At one point, Jacob is so physically exhausted that Monica has to bathe him. Without a supportive community or close friendship, she eventually turns to pity and superstition, believing that her struggles with her husband made her son, David (Alan S. Kim), and the family’s grandmother, Soonja ( Youn Yuh-jung), sick.
But Threatening is also a soft-hearted film, less interested in the generic vitriol of racism or displacement than inviting us into a home of people doing their best with the hand they’ve been given.
It surprised me at first, then delighted. While watching films about Asian American immigrant families, I often alternate between two impulses: the pressure to find a universal experience, or at the very least identifiable, knowing that the story is of course only one. ‘a version. I have become so used to the story of immigrants organized around trauma, nostalgia and alienation. More recently I think of Alan Yang Tiger tail, a beautifully filmed Netflix original where all the happiest moments take place in a nostalgic past, with the modern timeline shown indented, in dark tones.
Instead, Threatening takes an intimate look at life’s interstitial moments and makes a story that could plausibly be read as a tragedy more like a slice of life. The film invites us into a family’s house, and the familiar little blunders that come from cultural barriers. The family thinks Mountain Dew is mountain water, and the kids drink it from cups for breakfast. My own mother has recounted, many times, the mundane struggle of overcoming the language barrier when shopping for groceries after her family emigrated from Taiwan to Kentucky, from all places. Buying with limited fluency in the language is a great way to pick up salt when you want flour, or be misled into thinking of a brand of sugary kid’s cereal as a healthy food.
The themes of the diaspora films are all treated with privacy and care. Mother and grandmother reunite after years of being apart. Soonja packs her bags full of house spices and gently berates Monica for not crying for the anchovies “yet”. The youngest son, David, struggles to get along with the grandmother who is absolutely foreign to him. Soonja eventually teaches him minari grass, the film’s namesake, which can grow and thrive in any climate. They plant it along a stream bed, on the outskirts of the farm, on land that was otherwise unused.
“The survival of the minari is a powerful metaphor for life as an Asian American immigrant …“
All the while, Jacob is focusing myopic on his farm, increasingly at the expense of his family. Monica practices chicken sexing when she’s at home, so she can do it more effectively at work. Soonja insists on helping with household chores, even after having a stroke. Ironically, the impulse of constant toil is what ravages the family’s first harvest.
But the minari is spared. The survival of the minari is a powerful metaphor for life as an Asian-American immigrant – it can be interpreted as resilience regardless of the climate or the value of using the parcel of land that no one else. would not think of cultivating. But above all, the grass reminds me of the sheer chance of survival and the cost of always looking ahead. When the struggle for the future becomes the language of everyday life, it is not so difficult to lose sight of what this sacrifice was for. Sacrifice, on the contrary, becomes an undercurrent – diverting all attention to that ultimate victory of realizing the “American Dream,” after which a new and better kind of life can truly begin.
But life arrives despite everything, stubbornly, as over time. Life is David’s cowboy boots slapping in the green grass, and his grandmother calls him a bastard for a game of cards. He sees Korean culture as a sign of pride, and Soonja boasts, “He’s not like that, he’s a Korean kid.” The movie may not tell us what Jacob plans to do with the minari, or how the family will recoup their financial losses. But it ends as Jacob finally prioritizes them, and remembers why he dreamed of a farm in the first place.
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