(Image Credit: Rotten Tomatoes)
“American kids don’t want to room with their grandmas”
“He’s not like that. He’s a Korean kid”
Through this conversation between Monica, a Korean immigrant, and her visiting mother, Minari illustrates the many struggles of Third Culture Kids (TCKs) by posing its viewers a deceptively simple question: Is Monica’s son David more American or Korean? While it offers this question no definite answer, the film very intelligently uses the Yi family’s journey of chasing their own “American Dream” to portray the unique disposition of TCKs in a way that has hitherto not been explored.
Before diving deeper into the film’s depiction of TCKs, let’s clear up what the term actually means. Simply put, it refers to people who have spent, or are spending, their growing years following their parents in a country that is not that of their own nationality. The ‘Third Culture’ here refers to this community’s worldview and way of life, which aligns with neither the culture of their homeland nor that of the host country.
The character of David (and at times his sister Anne) presents a perfect example of various hallmarks that distinguish TCKs from others. David doesn’t exclusively speak Korean at home and English in public. His American friend’s way of life proves to be just as foreign to him as the Korean word for “discarded”. David would rather drink Mountain Dew than take his grandma’s Korean herbal soup, but prefers playing “Hwatu”, a Korean fishing card game, to whatever the boys at the local church enjoy doing.
Unlike his parents - Monica and Jacob Yi - who grew up in Korea before immigrating to the US, David, as a TCK, spent his growing years in California and Arkansas and is thus an intersection of various social factors and cultural environments. Director and Writer Lee Isaac Chung initially understates these differences by blanketing it with the family’s struggles and conflicts that stem from their attempts at fulfilling the “American Dream”. However, by the end of the film, we realise that Minari is not one of those films that coast on the overdone plot line of finding one’s roots or learning to assimilate. Where its heart lies is in shedding light on the lives of TCKs which are (almost awkwardly) nuanced by the amalgamation of vastly different experiences.
(Image Credit: A24)
So what does Minari reveal about the Third Culture? It shows us that it is precisely because TCKs feel like they don’t belong to a single homogenous culture, that they are able to come up with their own ways of belonging and connecting with people.
For most, the idea of “home” is synonymous with the phrase “passport country” or the like, which doesn’t really apply for TCKs. Such a distinction for them has more implications than just having to differentiate between labels. It means that they have to draw lines and create boundaries in areas of their life where many others don’t - and such compartmentalising ends up isolating them in their own little space they’ve drawn out for only themselves.
Whenever people encounter TCKs, no matter whether it is people from the birth or host country, they see them as being part of “the other culture”. They see that TCKs are different but then proceed to assume that this is by virtue of the fact that they belong to a different community. However, TCKs actually face alienation from all sides, as we see through David and Anne’s struggles both at home and in church.
This is why we ought to care about the condition of TCKs: their sense of belonging may seem like first world problems, but, if you think about it, it’s quite a crisis to never feel like you are at home no matter where you are on the planet. The issues that arise from the seclusion they face should not be ignored just because it doesn’t manifest in the way behaviours like racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination do. Chung uses Minari to show us that the desire for attachment is something that permeates their day-to-day interactions with others and affects them greatly. The incoherent conversations David and Anne have with the other children at church mirror the apprehension they have towards their grandma.
Throughout the film, we see how David’s parents are able to camouflage amongst the Americans in public, before quickly switching back to their Korean selves at home. The way they are able to adapt and integrate definitely comes with their maturity and age, but it also comes from how they grew up in a community back in Korea before migrating to a foreign land. We see how feeling like they belong somewhere has made it easy for them to distinguish where they are the majority and where they are the minority, and their instinct is always to act in the way required for survival.
On the other hand, the feeling which TCKs have of being disoriented no matter where they are is perfectly embodied in David, who can’t quite find someone, be it an adult or child, who is ‘just like him’ other than his own sister. In fact, this sense of confusion and lack of integration causes young David to feel insecure even in his own home. This instability David feels leads him to associate all the family’s problems he sees (especially Jacob and Monica’s quarrelling) with the only change he notices, which is that his grandma from Korea is now staying with them in their American house. Yet, Minari shows us that this conflict within David is not something that necessarily needs to be resolved. Rather, the key to combating the issues TCKs face actually lies in recognising their own particular strengths. Where TCKs find it difficult to adapt and integrate, they make up for it with their ability to communicate with others on a more authentic level.
Chung pushes the envelope of what it means to belong by showing us how TCKs interact with others without cultural boundaries - so much so that by the time the credits roll, one wonders whether David was the only one who saw and interacted with his grandma for who she truly was, and not just as a fragment of the family’s Korean home. The pair may not have had a rosy relationship, but Minari uses their dynamics to show us what it means to open up to someone in a raw manner.
(Image Credit: A24)
David has never had the privilege of using culture to mark out where he belongs; TCKs find their own sense of belonging from people with whom they can connect and who see them for who they are. And perhaps this realisation shouldn’t be exclusive to TCKs but something we should all take away from the film. We can find belonging wherever we are, as long as there are people who can accept us for our intrinsically messy selves. Flip it around - let’s start seeing people for who they are as people, and not for how similar or different they are in comparison to ourselves, so that we can start fostering a climate of acceptance. Instead of treating TCKs like museum artefacts and suffocating them behind imaginary glass panels, we ought to include them in our definition of who our communities are made up of. It takes two hands to clap, so let us be like the character of David’s grandmother, who also approached David as his own person, not simply seeing him as either an American or a Korean.
Going back to the question of whether David is more American or Korean, Minari may not have given us an explicit answer, but it definitely gave us enough insight into David’s life to make our own informed guess. Maybe the best way to sum up everything is to hear from the film’s leading man, Steven Yeun himself: “There’s Korea. And then there’s the West...And which one are you? Are you both? Or are you between them? I’m just my own thing. I’m my own third culture.”
Here’s to what is hopefully the birth of more mature representations of migrants like TCKs in literature and films from now on. Perhaps in time we’ll see their manifold ways of understanding and interacting with the world being appreciated as the springboards for difficult conversations that they are rather than being ostensibly resolved through blanket narratives of assimilation and homecoming.
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