Here is what I know about my father’s trip to the United States: When he was six, he traveled from Hong Kong to San Francisco by boat before boarding a train to New York City, where he and my grandfather settled -parents into a scarce residence with a gloomy view of the Long Island Expressway in Queens.
All the other details are MIA, like what it was like to go from speaking Cantonese to English, or how he became a natural citizen, or what he was like growing up as a Chinese child in Flushing in the 1960s. He doesn’t want to get homesick, and not every badger in the world will kill him. (I have tried.)
So when I looked Minari, now in theaters and streaming in the A24 screening room, I felt like I got a little glimpse of what it would have been like for him and me nainai and yehyeh when they arrived in New York City. The film follows a family originally from South Korea – Jacob, his wife Monica, and their children David and Anne – as they follow the American dream of starting a farm in Arkansas (technically) , it is Jacob ‘s dream), largely seen through David’ s eyes.
We see all the challenges from immigrant experience, but it’s what sparks the plot when Monica’s mother, Soonja, arrives. David meets her for the first time, and soon tells her not to be a “real” grandmother – she doesn’t bake biscuits, she swears, she wears men’s underwear .
It is a unique reflection of the disconnect between first-gen and second-gen immigrants, or those who immigrated and those born in the new country. My nainai she has never beaten the boiled dough of life; she cooks wontons and just wontons, and collect lightly used napkins from the dinner table to serve at the next meal. She ordered frog legs at low level and danced across the table. I, who grew up in New York with an Italian-American grandmother on my mother’s side, became acutely aware that this is not your typical American grandmother’s stuff.
