Haves, Have-nots, and Han in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite
by Padraig Shea Photo by LaToya Crittenden This essay contains spoilers for the film Parasite (2019), by Bong Joon-Ho. Han is often described as an untranslatable yet quintessentially Korean emotion, which is about half true. When King Sejong invented the Korean alphabet in the 16th century, the inscrutable syllable had a cognate: “Koreanness.” A century of colonization and partition has twisted han to mean a blood-deep Korean emotion of beautiful sorrow, which is still only partly true. Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” expresses the exquisite sorrow of han with such clarity it becomes understandable; with such particularity it becomes universal as the struggle against injustice. He teaches us to better understand han as a political idea; to understand han is to better understand “Parasite.” The century-old han story is romantic: King Sejong used the word as the Korean language’s etymological building block. It is the apparent foundation upon which the words for “one” (hana), “a Korean person (hankookin) and, literally, “the Korean language” (hangeul) are built. The Seine of Seoul is the Han River, as well as the setting of Bong’s third film, “The Host”, about a mutant fish eating hankookin along the Han. Han is a building block of Korean culture. “Pansori,” a 15th century dramatic form featuring female storyteller and drummers, manifests han, as does the unofficial national anthem “arirang.” To die by han overdose is known as hwabyong, according to Elaine H. Kim, professor in Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 I first tried to define it: “Han is a repressed despair buttressed by helplessness; one suffers han when one lacks agency to keep the cruel world at bay. It’s knowing that, in the end, the world will break your heart.” My first viewing of “Parasite” inspired me to dig deeper. Han, I discovered, is not merely an emotion; it is an idea of political resistance. Korea has since 1910 been either occupied by Japan, partitioned, or at war. Perversely, the word was coined in 1920 during the occupation by a Japanese writer named Yanagi Sōetsu. He imagined han was a distinctly Korean ethos, a blood-deep quality that imbues all Korean art with “the beauty of sorrow,” similar to the four humors thought to control human emotion in Shakespeare’s day. (Bardologists might equate han to cold, dry, earthy melancholy.) Rather than a mysterious mythology, we are left with a mistranslation. To King Sejong, han meant “Korean,” hence hankookin is a Korean person and hangeul the Korean language (Hana doesn’t include the han syllable, it’s ha-na.) We are tempted to dismiss han as a colonizer’s rationalization, a destructive stereotype. Yet generations of Korean artists and critics have reclaimed han, which “became popular in the 1970s, as Koreans advocated for a kind of cultural authenticity,” wrote Thessaly La Force in a New York Times review of “Parasite.” On the bright side, knowing han’s colonial history frees us to reckon with its universality. As we have dismissed the four-blood-humors theory of human behavior, so should we reject han as a uniquely Korean idea. This is the transgressive power of “Parasite”: Viewers the world over have connected with the sadness of alienation in the face of undeserving oppressors. Han appears as beautiful sorrow to one’s oppressor; for its object, han is a statement of Korean dignity; subtler than a raised fist, it holds a big hope, even if they’re always going to win. “Rather than dismissing han as nothing more than a social construct,” wrote Sandra So Hee Chi Kim in 2017, “I instead define han as an affect that encapsulates the grief of historical memory—the memory of past collective trauma—and that renders itself racialized/ethnicized and attached to the nation.” ____________________________________________________ Han’s expression in “Parasite” begins in the opening line: “We’re screwed.” The Kim family lives in a stink-bug-infested Seoul “semi-basement.” They dispense with pizza-box-folding poverty after an unexpected visit from Min, friend of son Kim Ki-woo. Min interrupts the Kims’ dinner–beers and a bag of chips–to offer the family a lucky landscape rock, or suseok. “Some food would have been better,” mutters mother Kim Chung-sook. Min also gifts Ki-woo a job tutoring a rich girl, Park Da-hye, because Ki-woo is a loser who won’t seduce her. Ki-woo protests he lacks the required college diploma; Min suggests his sister Ki-jung forge one. As Ki-woo leaves to snooker the Parks into giving him a job, father Kim Ki-taek reveals an ongoing obsession: “Oh, so you have a plan, my son?” The plan gives Ki-taek hope. After Ki-woo lands the tutor gig, the Kims exploit his foothold and the naivete of the Parks, especially Americophile mother Yeon-kyo. They insinuate themselves into the Parks stable of workers by deceit and framing innocent peons. Bong signals Korean caste stations through food. With three Kims leeching off the Parks, the Kims eat pizza at the shop that paid them pittances to fold delivery boxes. They conspire to get the Kims’ house-keeper Moon-gwang fired and replaced by Chung-sook; once all the Kims have Park jobs, they eat the rich folks’ food. The Kims take son Da-Song camping for his birthday, so the Parks move in for the weekend just as a storm rolls in. “Look at us,” gloats Ki-taek, “The rain falling on our lawn as we sip whiskey.” “What if Mrs. Park returns right now?” replies Chung-sook. “You’d all scatter like cockroaches.” Their reverie is shattered instead by maid Moon-gwang, mid-deluge, looking haggard after her dismissal. She married an unlucky man, Geun-se, who lost it all on a failed cake shop, and her lot was to toil for the Park family and keep him secretly alive in their bomb shelter. Geun-se embodies han. For 4 years, 3 months, and 17 days, he starved in a bomb shelter built, like those in many expensive South Korean homes, to protect the owners from “North Korea or the creditors.” Reunited, Moon-gwang grabs his bald, infantile head and shoves a bottle in his mouth. He is lack-of-agency embodied, but he specifies the sociopolitical origins of han. “I am
I Became Food on a Train, Wandering: Five Poems
By Dawn Angelicca Barcelona, ETA ’14-’17 Cake we grilled our own meat at restaurant 108 and drank beers and soju, sitting Korean-style. we spent too much time teaching our language to learn the language of this new country. we leaned on each other to pick from the few words sown inside our mouths. we were just kids wondering how to eat. 어떻게?. we planted a new alphabet to help us sprout through the soil of Sejong, in our new little neighborhood. with soft-spoken syllables, our courage boils up: 맞아요? back at home, we said “fork” and “spoon” or “please” and “thank you” now we only point and say “여기요, 이거 더 주세요” our tongues burn, digging for more words when we see a kitchen. we set the cake down next to our grill. here we sing 생일 축하합니다 instead of happy birthday. the song tastes like an expiration date another birthday I wish I could be home for, hoping after a year it will still be waiting for me in the fridge. Microaggressions I don’t like rice. It’s the core of what my mom and dad love. They eat it plainly, sometimes with their hands. It’s the food of their homeland. I wish I knew how to use my hands the way they do. When we go out for dinner, we eat with forks and knives. They leave behind traditional ways for dinner time. I’m not who my parents were at 23. They flew away from a familiar life to make a better one for me. I flew away to forget about New Jersey. In this second home I’ve come to know, I am asked why I am a teacher. Why I didn’t become a nurse. Why I’d rather write poems. Why my hometown isn’t Metro Manila or Cebu City, two places that didn’t raise me. I go to church to pray but instead get distracted. I hear people say, “America isn’t your real home.” In the winter, I flew away from Korea to feel less like a question and more like an answer. To be something definite, that ends. Yet a tourist shop cashier says, “you must be one of my people” and a hostel owner speaks in English to everyone else but never to me. In countries so foreign, I’m seen as familiar. Wherever I go, there are always assumptions to erode. It never fails to come: “So really, where are you from?” Upon Arrival The morning I landed in NYC I just wanted to curl up and crawl into a huge black bowl and burn. From one home to another in 14 hours. I am mixed up inside over what I didn’t say goodbye to enough times. I suggest Korean food for lunch. I miss being so good- mannered: tilting my bowl to have the last of my hot soup, using two hands to pass the com- munal kimchi dish and keeping my chopsticks out of the hardened rice I tried not to eat. I wish I could drink myself out of this bowl while I’m still scalding hot so I don’t feel me on the way down. I miss my tongue. How swollen it got from a soup burn. Re: Last night I dreamt of a poem I wrote to you on a plane a year ago Last January in Gangnam, at Oz board game cafe, we built train lines by playing Ticket to Ride until the owner said you’ve been playing the wrong way Before you my weekends were perfect successions of Americanos You said I had always wanted to travel I said I never wanted to leave America You asked me why do you work so hard I said I don’t know, I’m in love with being tired After you I bought fewer groceries we traded poems over dinner You wrote of every favor, I ask but one don’t forget me while you’re gone I wrote though I’m miles away I’m not really gone you’ll see me every day, in each rising sun Twelve months later I moved across America Upon landing I hit send I wonder what you’re doing now You replied steady and smooth I miss you. Guro Station, Line 1 In another dream, I’m bundled up in the warmth of fish-shaped bread. A treat in the winter. The smoke from a chestnut stand beckons me back to my apartment. I choose the subway instead. The ten-minute walk rings in my eardrum. It always sounds like this: “Teacher, where are you going? Where is your home?” 출입문 닫겠습니다. Track two sends me uptown to Gwanghwamun, where I walk journal-in-hand past palaces and stop to eat street food. I’ve had every taste in every season. I try to hold them all in my too-small palms. Track three drags me downtown with the sunset. After two years: two placements, a different alphabet, hundreds of students’ faces I wonder if it is possible to love another city or two different countries so tightly. 이 역은 타는 곳과 전동차 사이가 넓습니다. Guro held nine roads, all leading me home. I tried to pick out the words I knew in the poems painted on the glass doors, feeling the breath of each train car’s mouth swallowing me and the rest of the crowd. I would do anything to go back. 내리실 때 조심하시기 바랍니다. I still use the same alarm. I wake up on time, after the subway car halts in my sleep. I miss the way I became food on the trains entering Guro Station, leaving crumbs in my splintering. Dawn Angelicca Barcelona was a 2014-2016 ETA at Yangji Elementary School in Sejong City and Sinmirim Elementary School in Seoul. She currently works on the talent and recruitment team at MuleSoft in San Francisco
Hungry Ghosts: Part 3
by Leigh Hellman, ETA This is part 3 of a 3 part series, published here on Infusion’s website. hungry ghosts Historians remain hesitant to conclusively label the assassination of Park Chung-hee as a coup d’état. For the two months following it, Park’s prime minister stepped into the role of acting president and Major General Chun Doo-hwan—Park’s commander of the Defense Security Command—went about ostensibly rooting out political and military traitors. On December 12th, 1979, Chun ordered the arrest of the ROK Army Chief of Staff and—along with his supporters—violently consolidated his control of the Korean military. This, historians agree, was undoubtedly a coup d’état; it would not be Chun’s last. On May 17th, 1980, Chun strong-armed an extension of the nationwide martial law imposed after Park Chung-hee’s assassination—closing universities, banning political activities, ordering mass arrests, and further restricting the press—and dispatched troops to ensure “public order and safety” in the wake of multiple pro-democracy demonstrations around the country. Broadcasts went out assuring citizens that this was a natural transfer of power: Stay inside your homes as we pacify any anti-national insurgencies. Do not congregate. Do not protest. From the barbed wire fences slicing along the Demilitarized Zone to the tropical beaches of Jeju Island, across the sanded-down green mountain ranges that bisect the peninsula five times over, along the craggy coastlines that wind vicious and rocky, in industrializing cities and one-lane villages—everywhere doors closed, shuttered, locked down. Demonstrators reluctantly went home. Lights went out. Everywhere except Gwangju. — The first known fatality was a 29 year-old deaf man named Kim Gyeong-chul. He was clubbed to death by Special Forces paratroopers on May 18th as he passed by a swelling protest that had begun at the gates of Chonnam National University that morning, but had since pushed its way towards the streets of downtown and right up onto the steps of the Provincial Office. Witnesses recount that when Kim didn’t follow the paratroopers’ directive to get out of the way—a directive he couldn’t hear—they struck him to the ground and didn’t stop swinging until he was dead. The people of Gwangju and South Jeolla, infuriated by the surge of violence and simmering after decades of oppression, poured into the demonstrations en masse. On May 20th, the army began firing on civilians (whose numbers now exceeded 10,000). That same day citizens burned down a local news station, enraged by their misreporting of the escalating brutality. By the evening, hundreds of cars-motorcycles-taxis-trucks led a parade of buses toward the Provincial Office. Citizens climbed on the hoods and roofs and waved black-white-red-blue flags that, in their hands, dwarfed them. Over the next seven days, those flags would be used to wrap bodies as they lay in open pine boxes lining the floors of makeshift hospitals and headquarters. Even inside and out of the sunlight, the spring heat still got to them. On May 21st, the army fired into a crowd of protesters on the steps of the Provincial Office. In response, factional militias broke off from the unarmed citizens. They raided armories and police stations for M1 rifles and carbines. Gunfights between soldiers and militia members punctured the blood and sweat-thick air. The army finally began to retreat from the downtown area after the militias obtained two light machine guns. Gwangju was declared by its citizens to be a “liberated” city. — In Washington D.C., President Jimmy Carter and his national security team held an emergency meeting to determine the administration’s response to reports funneling in of a crisis unfolding in the southwestern province of Korea: “We have counseled moderation, but have not ruled out the use of force, should the Koreans need to employ it to restore order.” [1. Carter Administration, Policy Review Committee Meeting Minutes (May 22, 1980)] — It’s strange, but the thing that stays with me is the sound. Relatively few video feeds exist so audio tracks are usually run over grainy still photographs instead. A military stormtrooper—baton raised, black combat boots set, visor shut over his face. A cowering man—torn polyester button-up, arms braced over his head, streaks of something dark tracking down his pants. Unnatural puddles in the street. Flatbed trucks stacked high with arms and legs and skulls blown half-away. And in the background sobs, wails, shrieks like the end of the world is here—is now. Is on these streets. Cacophonies of anger, voices breaking at the pitch. The rat-tat-tat of gunfire, in short bursts rather than sustained, controlled commands. But it’s the singing—the flat, off-pitch, half shout-half melody. It’s the singing that bores into my sense memory and infects my synapses as they crack like club against skull. I don’t know what they’re saying. Between my own pitifully lacking vocabulary and the evolution of regional dialects from then until now, it might as well be a rally of nonsense. I don’t know what they are saying, but I feel it in the sink of my stomach still. Sometimes I watch documentaries in insulated rooms—in ergonomic chairs where I can reign as the always-disconnected, always-distanced, always-safe Other. Sometimes I watch and cry; I cry ugly and personal like a steel fire and crumble in real-time like an active shooter in a classroom like a jagged scar left on a place and on a collective soul from when history stabbed and tore and it healed up but not quite right again. I cry and I feel like a fraud. Like an appropriator, like a common thief. Like this is their pain and their trauma and theirs and how unbelievably white and American of me to remake it as all I mine me. — From May 22nd to May 25th, the repulsed troops hung back on the city fringes and waited for reinforcements. From there, they formed a blockade around the city’s perimeter as sporadic confrontations continued to increase the number of causalities. Within the city, settlement committees were formed to support the citizens and communities. Committee and militia leaders clashed over the former’s call for the latter’s disarmament.