Minari and feeding a diaspora
The Oscars are this Sunday and, while I’ve given it the old college try in terms of watching as many of the nominated films as I can, as in previous years I have run out of steam. There are still a few I’m going to try and watch this week, but I’ll probably wait until most of them are available on HBO Max or Hulu or whatever. My willingness to pay $20 (or more) to watch a movie by myself at home has its limits.
But one movie I splurged on because I’d heard so many good things about it was Minari. If you know anything about me, you know I’m a sucker for stories that center immigrants’ pursuit of the American dream. Minari is the story, set in the 1980s, of a Korean family who moves from California to Arkansas to start a farm. Specifically, the father wants to grow Korean vegetables in anticipation of a sustained influx of Korean immigrants to the American south. While this dream is what animates Jacob, the rest of the family is simply along for the ride, with varying degrees of buy-in.
Jacob’s argument, as he woos potential clients in Oklahoma and Dallas, is that they don’t want to get their produce all the way from California when his fresh vegetables are less than a day’s drive away. He is confident both in his product and the market demand. And Jacob, the avatar for filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung’s own father, isn’t wrong.
I haven’t done the research about the United States as a whole, but the history of Koreans in Texas is fairly short. In 1970, there were 2,090 Koreans in the state (which had a population of 11.2 million), and those can be attributed primarily to war brides and a slow trickle of immigrants resulting from the liberal Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which lifted restrictive quotas that had depressed Asian migration to the states for decades. In 2016, there were nearly 71,000 Koreans residing in Texas (out of a population of 27.91 million), with the highest concentration located in Harris County (Houston).
A good chunk of my dissertation research centered on migrant Asian women in fiction and how they used food and cooking to negotiate their identities in a new country. As we see in Minari, the food of home signifies the absence created by migration, and a bag of impossible-to-get beans or anchovies can inspire big feelings. I wrote about how women in novels like Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake “author a diasporic cuisine as [they] negotiate the trauma of migration via the kitchen.” That authoring is dependent upon substitutions and shortcuts in order to replicate the foods of home as closely as possible. But the dish with something missing ends up being a viable substitute within the migrant context, creating what Salman Rushdie has termed an “imaginary homeland” from their kitchens.
But one thing that didn’t occur to me was the role of Asian groceries and what that authoring looked like once stores like 99 Ranch, which opened in California in 1984, and H Mart, which opened in New York in 1980, were more accessible. Is it possible to recreate the dishes of home more accurately when you have the right ingredients, and if so, how does that inform one’s migrant or first-generation identity? Is the homeland less imaginary, are the connections stronger? If so, for whom are they stronger — the migrant or her children?
All that being said, Minari isn’t a story about navigating the pitfalls of migrant identity; indeed only two very brief scenes hint at the tension of being Other in the Ozarks in the 1980s, but they are benign and remarkably un-fraught. While it speaks to the isolation of being an immigrant, it also underscores the hope baked in to building a bridge out of that lonely state of being.
Recommended reading:
What Minari Means to Me (Medium)
The Specificity of Minari (The Ringer)
The Story Behind the Vegetable that Gave Minari Its Name (Slate)
All Hail the Asian Supermarket: An All-American Institution (Taste)