Our Korean Immigrant Story: What Watching Minari With My Parents Taught Me About Belonging and Survival

The three of us sit around a tablet, my mother, father and I, to watch the newly-released movie, Minari, depicting a Korean immigrant family seeking to establish familial, social and financial roots in America and enduring the labor-intensive work of both farm work and survival.

With the familiar melodic blend of Korean and English seamlessly pulsing between parent and child and across culture and generation, we instantly identify that harmony as our own. The natural symphony of communication is so engrained in the tapestry of our family story and hearing it reflected in another immigrant family is a beautiful reminder that our stories are interwoven.

Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Han Ye-ri) have moved from California to a small mobile home on a large plot of land in Arkansas with their two children. Jacob hopes to develop the land to sell produce while Monica is frustrated with the anxiety and threat of financial crisis. In that terrain of exhaustion and uncertainty, Jacob and Monica intensely scream at each other with the children near to hear, in a scene minutes into the movie. The tones, cadences, shrill, and reverberating fury create another familiar song I recognize.

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I feel exposed and vulnerable watching such an intimate moment with my parents. It is a scene I have seen countless times in my life and it instantly transports me to my more fragile years. But as I sit next to my parents now, I imagine what it must have been like for them to be constantly preoccupied with sustaining their livelihood, providing for the needs and desires of their children, and finding their identity in a new country.

I now understand that my parents' impassioned exchanges were less driven by anger, but more so by fear. They were not only weighed down by the heavy burden of financial insecurity, but by the prospect of losing what they had come here to find. In what I remember as a carefree childhood, there is also a weight I have internalized from my parents but did not recognize until now. The ongoing distress of a multitude of demands without the resources to meet them, whether language, money or opportunity, and being so close to everything falling apart. The burden of the uncertainty of the future even greater with the awareness that they left so much behind- family, dreams, belonging.

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The three of us, my mother, father and I, watch the rest of the movie which provides a rich ground for us to discuss the complexity of our shared experience. They share about the history of migration of Koreans to rural areas of the United States and I tell them about my similar experience with the children in the film of being simultaneously teased and accepted by other children when they attend a church service.

My dad explains to me at the end of the movie that the minari plant grows abundantly even when it is not intentionally planted and I consider it a fitting symbol of our own family journey.

Our endeavor to understand each other and determination to endure has cultivated a yield of unconditional love for each other. This love is rooted by the shared toil and triumph of survival and belonging. The credits roll and my father lightly squeezes my mother’s knees, a reflection of the affection and tenderness that has grown between them in their most recent years – a harvest.

Grace Esther Lee is the founder and writer of the OverflowingwithGrace blog. She is also an attorney working in New York City and a passionate advocate for social justice and uplifting Asian American voices in civic discourse and the arts.