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.
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