Written by Meg Aki, Image sourced from A24
“Minari can grow anywhere,” the eccentric Soonja tells her grandson, “Rich or poor, anyone can eat it.”
Like the Korean vegetable minari, the American Dream is rooted in the fact that it is able to be achieved by anyone, but for many years we saw only one version of it. Hollywood has a tendency to whitewash the real America in favor of what they believe will make money, but the success of Isaac Lee Chung’s semi-autobiographical “Minari” is a monument to changing that idea.
“Minari” tells the story of the Korean-American Yi family that moves from their stable life in California to a small farm in Arkansas in search of their own American Dream. Set in the 1980s, they attempt to navigate this change as their grandmother moves in with them, resulting in each family member needing to make even more adjustments to their new life.
Like any great drama, there are both happy and sad moments, funny moments and even frightening moments, but that’s not entirely what makes “Minari” great. This film is great because of how real these moments are.
In the post-screening Q&A with writer and director Isaac Lee Chung and actor Steven Yeun, we learned that the origins of this film came from Chung’s childhood memories, but the story is not told from his perspective. To bring authenticity to the film, he left a lot of room for the cast to fill their characters’ narratives from people in their own lives.
“Jacob had pieces of me. Pieces of Isaac. Pieces of our fathers,” Yeun said.
As the son of Korean immigrants himself, Chung’s life story is most represented in Jacob’s son, David. However, his aim was never to make the film about him. He realized he needed to view the characters of Jacob and his wife Monica as human beings rather than as his parents.
“I needed to distance myself from the material so that I was no longer caught up in the narrative we form of our parents,” Chung said.
I saw “Minari” back in October when it premiered at the 2020 SCAD Savannah Film Festival. I saw myself and my family in this film not because I’m Asian-American, but because the story being told is an incredibly authentic one. We see reflections of our own life in this story because these characters aren’t perfect. Nobody is. Each and every one of us is trying to live our own truths. Sometimes those truths are selfish and can even prevent us from realizing how we hurt others. From “Minari,” we learn that it might even take an entire barn to burn down for us to see how we truly misunderstand one another, even the people we love.
I saw myself in “Minari,” and you will, too.
