How ‘Minari’ changed my understanding of my own Korean language skills

At some point in my first viewing of Minari, it dawned on me: I hadn’t needed the subtitles. Not really, anyway. There had been moments here and there when they’d come in handy — I don’t think I could have told you the English term for “chicken sexing,” let alone the Korean one — but for the most part, I’d been able to understand the characters intuitively and automatically, no translation needed. 

For me, this was a novel experience. Technically, I know Korean. I’ve spoken it all my life, and still use it regularly to chat with my mom, make small talk with my Koreatown hairdresser, or order food at Korean restaurants. (Or rather, I did in the before times.) But I’ve long since accepted that my grasp of the language isn’t very good. I might register a few common phrases while watching Burning or Parasite, but to get the full picture, I’m as reliant on that one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles as any monolingual American might be.

Minari didn’t improve my grasp of the Korean language. It did, however, offer me a new way of looking at it.

Minari, however, was different. The film centers around the Yi family, who’ve moved to Arkansas sometime in the 1980s; the parents, Jacob and Monica, are Koreans who came to the U.S. as adults, while the elementary-school-aged kids, Anne and David, were either born here or moved early enough to be spared the culture shock. The language primarily spoken in the film is Korean — to the point that it was disqualified for the Best Picture categories for this Sunday’s Golden Globes, and is instead competing in Best Foreign Language Film.

Yet I’d understood these characters, in a way I rarely do other Korean-speaking ones, because they were speaking my personal language — by which I don’t just mean Korean, but the very specific version of Korean that would have been spoken in a Korean-American household in the 1980s, taught by adults who’d immigrated a decade earlier to the small children they were raising now in the States. That kind of Korean, it turns out, I’m totally fluent in. 

The vocabulary and rhythms of Minari‘s dialogue are rooted in a version of family life that feels familiar to me, myself having been a kid raised in 1980s America by Korean parents who’d recently emigrated. The Yis talked of food and church and bedtime routines, bickered over bills and household repairs, and mused on the differences between Koreans and Americans (“Korean people use their heads,” David tells his son proudly). And I understood all of it.

To some extent, that was simply my luck. Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung based Minari on his own childhood memories, which just so happened to coincide with some of mine. And between the sun-dappled cinematography, the dreamy score, the naturalistic performances, and the lived-in specificity of its world, I suspect Minari will provoke bittersweet nostalgia even in viewers who don’t recognize the language or the food or the very Korean props, like an earwax remover or a bag of dried anchovies.

But I can’t deny how validating it felt to hear my own first language onscreen, in a form I could actually comprehend. For so much of my life, I’ve believed on some level that my being bad at Korean has to do with my being bad at being Korean. If only I were more authentically Korean, I tell myself, I’d be able to understand Korean recipes and follow Korean news reports and understand Korean films without subtitles. The fact that I can’t do any of those things means I’m not Korean enough, that I’m too American.

It’s a conundrum that hasn’t quite overtaken the younger Yis in Minari, though you can see it on the horizon. Even as Monica assures her mother that 7-year-old David is a Korean kid, and therefore not like American kids, there are indications — like his aversion to Grandma’s “Korean smells,” his suspicion of the Korean foods she’s brought them, and his disdain for her inability to live up to his Westernized assumptions of how a grandmother should behave — that he’s internalized plenty of American culture already.

David’s around the age when I stopped making progress on my Korean language skills in any meaningful sense, and occasionally I still regret what I lost by turning more and more frequently to English. Yet while watching David switch seamlessly between languages, learning to navigate rural white American culture even as he comes to appreciate Grandma’s Korean habits, I didn’t see a zero-sum game between his Korean and American sides. I saw a boy living his fullest life, carving out his own identity from the different cultures that have shaped him. 

Minari didn’t improve my grasp of the Korean language. It did, however, offer me a new way of looking at it. By echoing my own personal language back to me, in the context of a film so specifically rooted in a particular time and place, Minari reminded me that my understanding of Korean, too, is a reflection of the life I’ve lived. Don’t get me wrong — I’m still terrible at Korean. I speak with the vocabulary of a third-grader and have to sound out words as I read them. But I think I’m ready now to define my relationship to the language not just by the words I believe I’m missing, but the ones I know I have.

Minari starts streaming Friday, Feb. 26 on iTunes, Google Play, and more.