'Minari' portrays strong Korean women
By Nadia Kim
Nadia Kim, professor of sociology at Loyola Marymount University / Courtesy of Nadia Kim
Although there are so many charming and poignant layers in “Minari,” the critically acclaimed film by Lee Isaac Chung about a Korean immigrant farming family, most describe it as an American Dream story. While
others have rightly argued that it's not
(spoiler alert: think lost lifelines, lost marriages, lost identities), one tagline that seems to have garnered less attention is the gender conflicts that, in my view, are the real story.
Minari revolves around the tensions between the traditional masculinity of Jacob Yi ― the farming husband and father played exquisitely by Steven Yeun ― and the resistant womanhood of Monica Yi ― the wife and mother brought brilliantly to life by Han Ye-ri.
It's Jacob's status as patriarch that forces the family to a place in which none of them wants to be. His lofty dreams and gritty resolve to grow a successful farm on a “cursed” Arkansas plot forces the entire family out of California, where Monica was content and longed to stay.
At least there were Korean immigrants, Korean churches and Korean food there. In the opening scene we witness in the station wagon's rearview mirror her eyes dart with dismay and anxiety as she drives towards her (and their) new life. While Jacob swaggers like a king, her finely acted facial expressions betray her internal dialogue: 'What is this?'
She most certainly did not want the jaundiced mobile home sagging over concrete blocks that made up for its missing stairs with fake wood paneling, slumped furniture and enough cracks to lose badly to a tornado.
Monica's disgust is most palpable when Jacob hadn't anticipated how Arkansas' unforgiving columns of air could destroy them in a matter of seconds. She glares at her husband and throws down the rags that she desperately used to mop up the water flooding in through rickety walls. Was this what she gave up her own dreams for? Did Jacob even care about what she wanted?
She asks the questions that
many Korean immigrant wives and mothers were forced to ask
. This, I believe, is at the heart of “Minari.”
Despite all the cash and hours Jacob was pouring into the farm, Monica still had to do paid work with her husband, the same job they were doing in California but without the added burden of the farm. Now on a plot that caused the previous farmer to kill himself and far from the hospital that David's heart needed, they sorted chickens by sex while their kids looked on, separating out females for their egg-making and the males for killing (even the couple's job in “Minari” involves gender!).
A still of Lee Isaac Chung's movie “Minari” / Courtesy of Pancinema
During a brief work break, Jacob tells little David that the smokestack bellowing black smoke in the sky is the aftermath of the male chicks being thrown into kilns, being sure to impart that men like them had to be “useful,” lest they too went down in flames. Although the view that men must be productive is the most defining feature of a standard masculine ideology, one that transcends race and nation, the difference now for Jacob is that he has become a man of color on the white man's land.
“Making it,” then, was even more dire. For instance, he declines to hire a white male water douser ― someone who uses a stick to feel the vibrations of the water underground ― because Jacob finds it ridiculous that Arkansians pay big money for something one could figure out for free. He teaches David that “Koreans use their minds,” not the white man's gadgets that verge on mystical garbage, and hugs David for figuring out that water is always where the trees are (notice that he never teaches his daughter Anne any such lessons).
Of course, it's also Jacob's male and ethnic pride that lands him in trouble, as the water he sought to find with his mind was, in fact, nowhere to be found in the ground. And later, when he might lose everything in his life, he still refuses to accept prayers for God's help from his eccentric hired hand, Paul. That was tantamount to admitting failure as a man and having to do so in front of a white man. Perhaps he even extricated himself from California's Korean immigrant community because he did not want to fail in front of them either. Failure was not an option.
Actress Han Ye-ri played Monica in “Minari.” Korea Times file
It is precisely this quixotic obsession with a pressurized ideal of manhood that emboldens Monica to stand her ground. Although she resents the farm, the house on wheels, the tornados and a lost Korean community, these were just byproducts of the ultimate truth, that Jacob placed the farm's success above the success of his marriage and family. To be fair, Jacob's refusal to return to California with them was also his need to model to the children that fathers make something of themselves.
Yet, she refuses to accept this prioritization of (immigrant) male productivity above loving each other as an intact family. Jacob even hints that she and the kids are less important than the farm and grants her permission to leave him (and, of course, be responsible for David and Anne). Most women in Monica's position, with enduring love for her partner, few economic prospects, non-English fluency, little family in the country and an early 1980s culture less accepting of Korean American divorce, likely would have relented. Yet, Monica's feminist/womanist strength in the face of incredible heartbreak is a leitmotif of the film, one that should be discussed and celebrated more.
Furthermore, from a wholly different, real-life gender angle, South Korea's Han Yeri should have garnered similar awards recognition as Korean American Steven Yeun for her embodiment of Monica Yi. Make no mistake: Yeun's performance is breathtaking, as it was in “
,” and deserves more nominations than it has earned (and, as a U.S.-made film, Minari should have won
Best Motion Picture-Drama at the Golden Globes
; race-biased categories are backwards). But the praise heaped on Yeun does not negate Han's gripping portrayal of Monica's struggle to keep her family together while Jacob's male privilege threatens to rip it apart. That is, Monica's struggle with patriarchy carries the film just as much as Jacob's internal struggle with it does.
When audiences and critics characterize this movie as about the American Dream, the American nightmare, immigrant generations and race, I hope they will grant gender center stage as well. In every way, from the marital dynamics to David's disrespect for his grandmother (would he have fed the grandfather-patriarch urine?) to the questionable real-life exclusion of Han from awards recognition, we can't appreciate Minari without appreciating what it tells us about gender ― strong Korean women in particular.
Nadia Young-na Kim is professor of sociology at Loyola Marymount University and author of the award-winning book, “Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA” (Stanford, 2008), and of “Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA” (Stanford, June 2021).