Minari’s Daring Hope

[Spoiler Alert]

Years ago, one of my Korean-American friends told me how exasperated she was with Korean-American stories. “They’re so depressing. They’re always about loss. What are we supposed to do with all that sadness?”

It’s almost as if writer/director Lee Issac Chung were eavesdropping on our conversation when he made Minari, as if he came along years later to answer that question for us.

In Minari, Jacob relocates his family from from LA’s Korean community to rural Arkansas where he sets out to grow Korean produce on the side while he and his wife Monica work as chicken sexers during the day. It is, as they find out, where other Koreans have landed to escape the Korean church. They are exiled not only from Korea, but from the Korean-American community as well. They are outliers among outliers.

Jacob’s move is not only a reverse gold rush, but a repudiation of the idea of luck itself, as he derides the water dowser. It was the pursuit of better fortune that landed the couple as chicken sexers for the past decade. This move to Arkansas is simultaneously more inspired, more cynical, and more defiant. For Jacob, the church and the community of others offer no possibilities. All we have are our own dogged determination and arduous labor — and our ability to reason, Jacob teaches his son.