Until it streams online, it’s new to me. I just recently watched on Netflix, the film Seoul Searching, apparently released back in 2015. Long story short, it’s basically Breakfast Club for Koreans, and there’s no mistaking the immense John Hughes influences throughout the entire film.
Instead of in-school Saturday suspension, the story takes place in 1986, where a bunch of Korean teenagers who grew up outside of Korea are brought to Seoul to participate in a government-sponsored summer camp where foreign-born Koreans have the opportunity to learn about the cultures of their parents’ native land. The tropes are broad and prevalent, but there’s still a diverse cast of characters from the misfits, the jarhead, the adoptee, the tomboy, and the most mind-blowing to me, the Koreans from countries such as Mexico and Germany.
Now I know that quite a few of them exist in the world, but it really isn’t until you hear the accents and behaviors does it really sink in that Koreans did in fact immigrate to countries other than America, seeing Koreans ripping perfect German or Spanish with names like Sergio and Klaus.
Ultimately, it’s a film that obviously hits home pretty hard for me, given my circumstances as an American-born Korean. I feel like if when I was a teenager, I probably would have rolled my eyes and loathed the opportunity to go to Korea to learn about my heritage, much like most of the characters of this film were like. But as an adult, it’s all too easy for me to say that I wished that such a government-sanctioned and probably extremely affordable opportunity to go visit Korea still existed, for adults, like me, and that I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to be all over it.
It really a shame that teenagers lived up to the reputation of teenagers and basically brought the whole program to a crashing halt in the long-run because they were too volatile, too rebellious, and well, too not-Korean for Korean government to want to continue doing this, and I think it’s kind of a tragedy for all foreign-born Koreans after the last year they did this, because there probably are a bunch that really would actually like and appreciate the opportunities to learn about their heritage.
As for the storylines that the film revolved around, in spite of the teenage hijinx that occasionally occurred, were some extremely heavy and hard-hitting tropes that I feel like many Koreans like them and myself could relate to. Personally, I grew up with a workaholic dad that wasn’t quite as callously cold to his children, but was undeniably absent for a lot of my upbringing, and the fact that several of the characters tended to have some similar father stories, it kind of goes to exemplify how common of a thing it is that Korean dads are notoriously neglectful, whether it’s inadvertent or not.
And then there’s the storyline of girl with the American name, who was given up for adoption at a young age and raised by a white family, seeking out her birth mother while in Korea. It’s not just sad what happens when they inevitably meet, it’s a full-blown tragedy to me in the simple fact that they’re completely incapable of communicating with one another as one speaks no Korean and the other speaks no English. It’s a moment where I feel luckier than Las Vegas that my parents sent me to Korean language school as a kid to where we can at least communicate, as tough as it occasionally might be, and I couldn’t imagine the sheer pain between child and parent at being unable to do such.
Full disclosure: I cried. Not quite to Leave Britney Alone standards, but definitely erupted the feels department and made me really fucking sad and miserable at the thought that this could very easily have been me had I not learned a little Korean and my parents didn’t learn a little English.
As a whole, the movie wasn’t the greatest movie in the world, but it’s also the greatest movie in the world – to me. It most certainly feels like one of the more important films that I’ve ever seen, because of the sheer home-hitting Korean story. And to probably most other Koreans like them, like me, who were born in countries outside of Korea and grew up with a lot of the same circumstances that seem to be common in Koreans like all of us. It’s probably also loosely relatable to any other Asians or non-American cultures that have similar circumstances or values that are easily adaptable to their own culture’s tropes.
I highly recommend it to all Koreans not born in Korea, as well as to most other Asians or cultures whose parents also immigrated to other countries before birthing them, forcing them to grow up in a land that’s different than their cultures. Or anyone else with an open mind and can handle watching a film that features zero white people or black people, and doesn’t sugar coat or apologize for it.
