![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/minari_soonja.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I finally got around to watching <\/span>Minari<\/em>.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t watch it because of all the Academy Award acclaim it was getting, nor did I watch it solely because it was a film about Koreans, starring Koreans and was produced by mostly Koreans.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been wanting to watch Minari because based on the premise of the film, it was something that I knew was probably going to hit home to a Korean-American person like me, and I went in knowing that there were probably going to be a lot of moments of reflection, reminiscing, comparing and probably shit that was going to make me cry.<\/span><\/p>\n Without giving anything away, the basic plot is a Korean family moves from California to Arkansas, primarily so that dad (Steven Yeun) can chase his dream of starting up a farm.\u00a0 Naturally, this is a cause of culture shock for Koreans to move into rural middle America, and the struggles and rigors of surviving and adapting at the same time.<\/span><\/p>\n What was endlessly amusing to me is that I feel like Steven Yeun, since rising as a star from <\/span>The Walking Dead<\/em>, I feel like took his appearance in David Chang\u2019s <\/span>Ugly Delicious<\/em> to heart a little bit, where Chang\u2019s circle-jerk of celebrity friends was giving him a little bit of shit for being able to make it as a big-time American star in spite of being Korean, and almost since then, has been doing a lot of roles that inject him into his Korean heritage.\u00a0 Despite the fact that his Korean sounds a lot like most Korean kids who did a lot of their growing up in America, it\u2019s his attempts to sound like fresh-off-the-boat English that had me cracking up.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But if there\u2019s anything that was truly right about the entire film, it was undeniably Youn Yuh-Jung\u2019s role in the film, playing grandma Soonja.\u00a0 Obviously her performance was justly recognized seeing as how she was a shoe-in to win best supporting actress and did such, becoming the first Korean actor or actress to win an Academy Award.\u00a0 But she shines from the moment she shows up in the film, and it makes me reminisce to my own childhood, where my grandma often stayed at my home to fulfill the same role as Soonja did, being the free babysitter for primarily me since I was the baby of the generation.\u00a0 My grandma wasn\u2019t nearly as hands-on, or quite nearly as sassy or show as much personality as Soonja did, nor was I nearly the shithead to her as David was to Soonja, but it definitely gets the memories flooding through the gates.<\/span><\/p>\n Frankly, there\u2019s a lot of parallels to the film I could feel with my own life, seeing as how both my parents were also chicken sexers growing up, and how my family grew up in rural Virginia, which wasn\u2019t nearly as remote as Arkansas, but was still similar in the sense that there probably were like 15 Koreans in the entire town, with some of them being relatives.\u00a0 And I imagine just about every Korean family in America could probably feel some sort of kinship to the film as I did, and just about everyone in my own family has stated similar feelings themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot of subtle symbolism and interpretation necessary in the plot and its happenings throughout the film, and at first blush I was kind of perplexed at the way the film concluded, but when I lay in bed thinking about it, most of it kind of falls into place, and it makes me admire the film even more than I did while watching it.<\/span><\/p>\n Bottom line is that the film really is like chicken soup for the Korean-American soul, and although it\u2019s nowhere near as critically acclaimed or attention-getting as <\/span>Crazy Rich Asians <\/em>or<\/span> Parasite<\/em>, but in my opinion, is still a tremendously important film for Korean or other Asian cultures to try and watch sometime.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I finally got around to watching Minari.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t watch it because of all the Academy Award acclaim it was getting, nor did I watch it solely because it was a film about Koreans, starring Koreans and was produced by mostly Koreans.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been wanting to watch Minari because based on the premise of the … Continue reading Minari: chicken soup for the Korean-American soul<\/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":[100,71,103,41,129,99],"class_list":["post-47870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-comparison","tag-famiry","tag-motherland","tag-movies","tag-nostalgia","tag-reminiscing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47870","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=47870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47872,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47870\/revisions\/47872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}