June 3 (Lunar calendar: April 16), 2023 Saturday | Dawnxisoul393art
How can new immigrants reconcile family conflicts?
the unity of a family,
the deeper love,
the stronger love,
the wiser love,
the more faith-based love,
the deeper connection to the society
Today, we watched the film《Minari》directed by Le Isaac Chung. Minari is the English word for watercress, a must-have side dish in Korean cuisine, which can be grown anywhere and grows well without special care. There is much sadness, longing and inspiring beauty in "Minari". It is the story of a Korean family trying to make a living through farming and animal husbandry in the early 1980s in Arkansas. Subtle and vivid, "Minari" focuses on the struggles of one family. Much of the film is presented from the perspective of a child. This perspective adds a wonderful sense of fantasy to the whole film, enough to immerse us in the world it builds. The film tells a gentle, true, and touching story of a family. The story is filled with kind people who try as hard as they can to love each other. The film is also universal in its insight into the resilience of the human spirit. When people are uprooted, they take root again. Though the land may be strange, the seeds of hope will sprout tomorrow. Everyone can grow like minutes anywhere.
Director Lee Isaac Chung grew up on a small farm in rural Arkansas. He was accepted to Yale University, where he majored in ecology. He dropped out of medical school during his senior year and transferred to the University of Utah as a filmmaking major. He received his MFA in 2004. "Minari" is based on the director's childhood experience. The director uses heartfelt writing and scenes to tell the story of his parents' struggles, bitterness, and joy as first-generation immigrants. Set in the Reagan era, "Minari" is soft, warm and has a positive, vibrant tone. East Asian immigrants came from their impoverished homeland to the United States across the ocean. They longed for a new life and did their best for it. The sadness of belonging to East Asia does not dissipate with the relocation of geographical space. Minari tells the heartbreaking and heartwarming story of a family, Jacob and Monica, a couple who immigrated to the United States from Korea in the 1980s and moved from California on the West Coast to Arkansas in the middle of the country.
Jacob is determined to run a farm and grow crops on the land he bought. Wife Monica is not used to life in Arkansas. When Monica arrives at the farm, she looks stunned. Obviously, it is far from her expected life. The new home they want to live in is not even traditional real estate, but an RV parked on the farm. This is really hard for people with Asian cultural backgrounds to accept. Obviously, Monica doesn't know about this arrangement. In California, the couple made a living by identifying the sex of chickens. The work was cumbersome and the income was not high, but it was relatively stable. His wife Monica had her own friends. There were convenient medical conditions in the city to provide health support for her son with heart disease. Moving to Arkansas, Jacob has the opportunity to run his own farm, grow Korean agricultural products and sell them, which is his ideal. But in Arkansas, it was inconvenient for his son to see a doctor, and his wife Monica had no friends.
They are in financial difficulties and need to make more efforts to identify the sex of chickens to make a living and provide funds for the construction of farms. When the construction and operation of the farm have faced difficulties many times, the contradiction between husband and wife has gradually enlarged. Monica's mother Soonja moved from Korea to live with her in their RV. Soonja took his grandson David with congenital heart disease to plant Minari by a stream not far from home. Seeing that the crops were harvested and about to be sold, the elderly Soonja had a stroke. The couple's marriage is also on the verge of collapse due to the accumulation of various contradictions - Jacob focuses more on the farm and ignores the needs of his family. Jacob put the farm before his family and thought that the temporary solution to the farm crisis was equivalent to the solution of the family crisis. In fact, Monica's material and spiritual needs have not been solved. Life itself is enough to tear apart two people who want to live a good life.
Illustrated by dawnxisoul393
No one is right or wrong, but the difficulties of life have made both sides unhappy. The powerlessness of reality defeated the male and female protagonists and passed it on to us. Both the protagonists and heroines want to pursue happiness, but they can't think of each other, because they have different definitions of happiness. One wants to achieve ambitious ideals and give the family long-term prosperity but neglects the present, and the other wants to live the present well and not live in straitened circumstances. Perhaps if there were no life difficulties, Jacob and Monica's conflict would not be irreconcilable. When the film presents the love without bread in front of us, the fragility of emotion really makes us uncomfortable. However, after an unexpected fire burned the farm to ashes, the surviving couple began to rebuild their lives.
Director Lee Isaac Chung tries to understand the sadness of parents as a generation of immigrants and convey it to the audience in the form of images. There are many paragraphs in Minari through the "confluence" of the characters on the screen and the camera, that is, while the characters move towards the camera, the camera slowly approaches the characters. This way of lens movement creates a positive sense of affinity. We seem to be invited to have a close dialogue with the characters. This closeness between us and the characters on the screen through scene scheduling gives Minari a richer space for empathy. What's more impressive is that in the early morning after the fire, a family of four snuggled up to each other and slept on the floor, with their tearful grandmother staring at them. The film transitions to the last scene in a sad and hopeful mood. Jacob decides to dig a well again. This time, the couple dig it together. If we substitute ourselves into the situation of male and female protagonists, we really dare not guarantee that we can make a better choice than the male and female protagonists in the film.
Illustrated by dawnxisoul393
The same dilemma is not limited to immigrants and foreign students，everyone who leaves his hometown to work should resonate. Living in a strange city will inevitably face the bottleneck of work, the needs of children, the dilemma of parents' pension, the pressure of housing, and so on. There is no standard answer to the balance between emotion and career, the balance between individual and family. The only clear thing is to maintain it with deeper love, stronger love, more faith love, and more wisdom love. Minari once again proves to us that the most personal experience contains the most universal power，it is simple and moving. Those immigrants who came to the United States all over the ocean fought hard and almost stubbornly for their American dream. The ballad without melody will also be sung in immigrant families for generations: "wonderful, Minari, Minari, wonderful!" immigrants know Minari's survival philosophy well. Even if Minari is planted randomly in foreign streams, it will still grow stubbornly.
Illustrated by dawnxisoul393
Minari is reassuring because it has a soothing ending after setbacks. This ending has universal values and is in line with the mainstream values of the United States and East Asia： As long as the family is united and connected with society, their dreams will come true sooner or later, the story atmosphere has a wonderful sense of fantasy, and the whole picture is lively, sweet and interesting. It reflects the classic struggle experience of Korean families in pursuing the American dream. When we leave this familiar land and enter a new world to pursue our dreams, we will have hesitation, panic, and fear, but we will be like Minari. Although we will leave our roots, we will plant it again, and then try our best to love it, continue to hope, move forward, and grow wantonly. In the film, a family is facing all kinds of difficulties and hard life, but they still don't give up their yearning for a better life. In reality, no matter how hard life is, we will continue to work hard, and may each of us thrive in our own immigrant land.
Original by dawnxisoul393,
Comments
Post a Comment