{"id":45923,"date":"2018-06-05T16:54:03","date_gmt":"2018-06-05T20:54:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=45923"},"modified":"2020-08-07T16:54:13","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T20:54:13","slug":"i-wish-i-could-have-seoul-searched-in-seoul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=45923","title":{"rendered":"I wish I could have Seoul searched in Seoul"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Until it streams online, it\u2019s new to me.\u00a0 I just recently watched on Netflix, the film Seoul Searching<\/em>, apparently released back in 2015.\u00a0 Long story short, it\u2019s basically Breakfast Club<\/em> for Koreans, and there\u2019s no mistaking the immense John Hughes influences throughout the entire film.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019 native land.\u00a0 The tropes are broad and prevalent, but there\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now I know that quite a few of them exist in the world, but it really isn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ultimately, it\u2019s a film that obviously hits home pretty hard for me, given my circumstances as an American-born Korean.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But as an adult, it\u2019s 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\u2019t hesitate for a moment to be all over it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Personally, I grew up with a workaholic dad that wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s inadvertent or not.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just sad what happens when they inevitably meet, it\u2019s a full-blown tragedy to me in the simple fact that they\u2019re completely incapable of communicating with one another as one speaks no Korean and the other speaks no English.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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\u2019t imagine the sheer pain between child and parent at being unable to do such.<\/span><\/p>\n

Full disclosure: I cried.\u00a0 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\u2019t learn a little English.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a whole, the movie wasn\u2019t the greatest movie in the world, but it\u2019s also the greatest movie in the world \u2013 to me.\u00a0 It most certainly feels like one of the more important films that I\u2019ve ever seen, because of the sheer home-hitting Korean story.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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\u2019s tropes.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s different than their cultures.\u00a0 Or anyone else with an open mind and can handle watching a film that features zero white people or black people, and doesn\u2019t sugar coat or apologize for it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Until it streams online, it\u2019s new to me.\u00a0 I just recently watched on Netflix, the film Seoul Searching, apparently released back in 2015.\u00a0 Long story short, it\u2019s basically Breakfast Club for Koreans, and there\u2019s no mistaking the immense John Hughes influences throughout the entire film. Instead of in-school Saturday suspension, the story takes place in … Continue reading I wish I could have Seoul searched in Seoul<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103,149,91,77],"class_list":["post-45923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-motherland","tag-movie","tag-pf","tag-ronery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45925,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45923\/revisions\/45925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}