![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/happycleaners.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
My sister made a recommendation to our family group chat about a film she saw; Happy Cleaners<\/em> on Amazon Prime Video.\u00a0 Just from the title alone and given the context of my very Korean family, I knew that this was definitely going to be about the Korean Story<\/a>, and that it was going to fuck with my emotions.\u00a0 I watched the trailer and yup, it was about the Korean Story and the trailer alone did succeed at fucking with my emotions.<\/span><\/p>\n Make no mistake, in spite of the title of the film, this was going to be anything but happy.\u00a0 I anticipated that like so many Korean stories, this was going to be depressing, thought-provoking, probably relatable and leave me feeling like I\u2019ll probably want to cry from having my emotional heartstrings yanked around.\u00a0 Sounds like a great idea to watch right?<\/span><\/p>\n But because I\u2019m a sucker for my nationality, I went ahead and watched it anyway, in spite of all the red flags of getting aboard an emotional roller coaster.<\/span><\/p>\n And of course, Happy Cleaners was everything I anticipated it would be, and I ended the film in a lower emotional state than which I started at.\u00a0 Not only was it about an entirely too relatable Korean family much like my own, the plot of the film doesn\u2019t really have much lateral movement, and unsurprisingly starts depressing, and ends in a more depressing state than the beginning.<\/span><\/p>\n To make matters worse, there\u2019s a character in the film who\u2019s named Danny, and he\u2019s a Korean-American who has the weight of the world on his shoulders to the point where he can\u2019t achieve any objectives and is working two menial jobs in order to survive.\u00a0 He\u2019s a classic underachiever, and I\u2019m triggered because after just watching Beef<\/a>, whose main character is also an underachieving struggling Korean-American named Danny, I feel like the world is trying to tell me something unpleasant.<\/span><\/p>\n Frankly, as much as I want to support Asians and specifically Korean or Korean-American filmmakers and storytellers, I\u2019m just kind of over everyone\u2019s rendition of the Korean Story.\u00a0 Yes, Korean immigrants have historically had it really poor throughout the passage of time, but in most cases in everywhere in the world, when people immigrate to other countries, they\u2019re usually going to struggle unless they learn the native language and\/or get the education of the country they\u2019re moving to.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In most cases of the Korean Story, Korean immigrants get straight to work after arrival, seldom really try to become fluent in English, don\u2019t bother getting an American education, and put all of their eggs and pressure onto their kids to succeed, and there just ain\u2019t that much need for one million Korean doctors or lawyers and there aren\u2019t that many scholarships to be had at all of the Ivy League schools combined.\u00a0 Instead we\u2019ve got hundreds to thousands of Korean storytellers all telling the same stories of their family\u2019s struggles of surviving in America, with minimal variation.<\/span><\/p>\n So I\u2019ll tell you all how I\u2019m going to make my fortune: by writing the Korean story that isn\u2019t the <\/em>Korean Story.\u00a0 Even if it\u2019s fictitious and unrelatable to the 1.7 million Koreans in America, maybe it can just be a good exercise in escapism for all of us instead of needing yet another film of book or television special about how Korean lives suck in America.\u00a0 It won\u2019t be as exploitatively parodying like fucking Kim\u2019s Convenience<\/em>, and it wouldn\u2019t be mentioned in the same breath as Happy Cleaners or Beef.<\/span><\/p>\n It can just be a story about a Korean family that succeeds at coming to America, embarking on and succeeding at achieving their American dream.\u00a0 By learning English, re-learning an American education, and breaking out of the mold of working at liquor stores or dry cleaners or shitty food franchises, they become contributing members of society not completely insulated in their cultural silo.\u00a0 Their kids grow up without the pressures of their entire bloodline on their shoulders, and they too become successful adults who are both well-cultured and well-educated and succeed in life.<\/span><\/p>\n Surely this narrative has happened somewhere in the culture, but without the angst of feeling cursed by the Korean Story, those that live it probably just haven\u2019t gotten around to writing it out to where it could become a piece of Korean media that doesn\u2019t make me want to jump off a bridge.<\/span><\/p>\n So I should just do it myself.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure I\u2019d become filthy rich from all the Koreans who want to seek that escapism, and I\u2019ll know I really made it if I could then get all the white guilters to get on board with it and ingest my story so that they can seem tolerant of foreigners, and then the rest will follow suite like dominoes.<\/span><\/p>\n Just got to have time away from parenting to get right on that though, so I guess in about 5-6 years I can pursue my destiny, hopefully.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My sister made a recommendation to our family group chat about a film she saw; Happy Cleaners on Amazon Prime Video.\u00a0 Just from the title alone and given the context of my very Korean family, I knew that this was definitely going to be about the Korean Story, and that it was going to fuck … Continue reading I\u2019ll tell you how I\u2019m going to become rich<\/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":[36,71,103,41,83],"class_list":["post-49351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-angst","tag-famiry","tag-motherland","tag-movies","tag-observations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49351","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=49351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49353,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49351\/revisions\/49353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}