Jacob Yi, the bright-eyed émigré portrayed with steadfast determination by Steven Yeun in Lee Isaac Chung’s outstanding film Minari, faces one of the earth’s oldest problems. He’s relocated his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri), daughter Anne (Noel Cho), and little son David (Alan Kim) from a Korean enclave of California to rural Arkansas, funneled every dime to their name into a farming concern that’s supposed to bring them the prosperity of his dreams, but nothing’s growing. By the sweat of his own brow, he’s hoed and tilled and seeded and done everything he thought he had to do, all to no avail. His crops won’t take to the soil, an assimilation metaphor that would be too perfect if it wasn’t lifted right from Chung’s own childhood experiences. Whether it’s people or vegetables, uprooting is done in a single, decisive motion. The more fragile art of transplanting and taking new root requires time, patience and constant care.
The nuclear Yi quartet, their number later expanded to five with the arrival of the coarse yet wise grandmother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung), heads for the heartland in pursuit of the self-sufficiency and success we like to refer to as the American dream. Their life in California was comfortable, if arduous; the parents made a stable, humble living sorting chicks by gender at a poultry farm with other Asian-Americans, and though Monica appreciates the sense of community, Jacob would rather not spend his best years inspecting bird genitals. He engineers the big move, an ambition that threatens to curdle into selfishness as his loved ones question how much better their new life really is with Dad turned farmer. Monica forlornly shakes her head when she first sees the mobile home they’ll be living in, a far cry from the freedom and luxury she had been sold in her husband’s pitch. The big elevated box doesn’t even have stairs for its new inhabitants to reach the entry door, but as is the Yi way, they climb and get where they need to be.
Though the film rises and falls with the fortunes of the mother and father of the house, precocious David fills the role of protagonist as he struggles in his own way to get settled. Without memories of Korea, he adapts to life in the States more quickly and seamlessly than the others, eager to make new friends and fit in. At school, however, his heritage pegs him as different and marks him for the curious, often unwitting racism of his fellow children. And at home, his mother chides him for losing touch with a crucial component of his identity, disappointed to see her own kin complain of grandma’s “Korean smell”. That doesn’t stop him and Soon-ja from establishing a close bond in turns gruff and playful, linking him to tradition and nourishing both of their souls at a lonely time.
She’s the one who shows David how to cultivate minari, a water dropwort plant that flowers in Asia as naturally as in North America, in a nearby riverbed for a moving scene that sets the stunning finale in motion. The piercing poignancy of Chung’s concluding moments comes from the intimate hindsight of his perspective, as he reflects with affection and compassion on the loving grown-ups he didn’t always know how to appreciate in the moment. Every adult eventually comes to realize that their parents were real people with aspirations and fears like anyone else, and in Chung’s case, that weight gets compounded by the pressures and challenges they faced as American pioneers. He looks back with clear eyes, and sees the path they fought to clear for him.
