116 TIME March 15/March 22, 20217 Questions‘
MY DAD
STARTED
TO WATCH
WESTERNS
AT DOLLAR
CINEMAS IN
SEOUL AND
FELT LIKE
AMERICA WAS
A MIRACULOUS
PLACE
’
Isolation is a major undercurrent
of the fi lm. Was that something you
felt growing up? It was real. But from
my own perspective, I don’t know how
much of it is because of my Asian-
American identity and how much of
it is just teenage angst and loneliness.
Maybe that’s part of being Asian
American: you’re always questioning
that aspect of your own perception.Minari ties food very closely to
identity. How do you believe the two
are connected? I didn’t have much
of a taste for Korean food growing up.
I remember the fi rst time my sister
went to school, my mom made a lunch
box full of gimbap for her. Slowly, the
kids noticed what she was eating and
made fun of her, and she started to
throw this gimbap away and would not
tell my mom. I look back on that with
this feeling of sorrow. It must have
been tough for my parents, who went
through such pains to preserve Korean
food culture.What is your relationship to Korean
food now? Nowadays, Korean food
is the only thing that I can eat, and it
cheers me up. It’s inexpressible, really;
I don’t know how it’s tied to identity.
But when I eat it, I do feel as though
this is the food that has nourished my
ancestors and made this body.Minari won the Golden Globe for
best foreign-language fi lm, but was
ineligible for best picture because
half of the dialogue is not in English.
How do you feel about that rule?
Their category of “foreign” seems to be
set upon language and not geography,
and that seems strange to me given
our country. As a thought experiment,
I wonder, what if there was a Native
American story in which they’re speak-
ing in their language? How would that
be categorized? On the other hand, I’m
trying not to let the awards defi ne the
fi lm or why I want people to watch it.
—ANDREW R. CHOWD
id you initially believe that
a movie about a Korean-
American family farm in
Arkansas could resonate so widely?
I used to not trust that specifi city about
my own self: I didn’t think it would be
interesting to people. Having parents
who are chicken sexers—I had trouble
explaining that to kids at school! The
fact we were able to get the fi lm fi nanced
felt like a miracle. Now, to see the
reception of people in all walks of life
saying they see themselves in the story
somehow —it almost shrinks the world a
little bit. We all go through these specifi c
circumstances, but there’s something at
the heart of our lives that we’re all the
same in some way; we have the same pain
and the same joy.The fi lm is based on your parents’
story. Do you know why they moved
to the U.S.? When my dad was in junior
high, all these American fi lms started
to be introduced into Korea for the fi rst
time. My dad started to watch westerns
at dollar cinemas in Seoul and felt like
America was a miraculous place. His
family had lost a lot of land during the
Korean War and the Japanese occupation.
That aff ected him a lot as a kid. He always
felt like he needed to come to the U.S. and
get land. It’s an old Hollywood pioneer
story he was working on.The fi lm’s characters arrive in Arkan-
sas in the wake of the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965, which spurred
a huge increase in Asian- American im-
migration. Is that part of your family
history as well? I remember reading all
about that in college and realizing, “Oh,
this is how we were able to come.” Where
I lived, I think we started off with maybe
10 Koreans in that area, and they were all
chicken sexers. My dad started the fi rst
Korean church there. Year after year, the
numbers would just grow. The idea that it
was all caused by a law didn’t dawn on me
until much later. You never realize what
the geopolitical things are; you just live
through them.Lee Isaac Chung The director of the acclaimed
fi lm Minari talks about growing up in Arkansas, the
cultural power of food and the Golden Globes