The Minari of My Memory

That plant in a park in Rhode Island delivered the promise that there might be something familiar in this place where everything was new.

It was 1976. My mother and aunt searched the tall grass of a park in Rhode Island. The breadth of their A-line skirts, shin-length, held in one hand, prepared to hold the prize: a rare vegetable. With extended fingers of the other hand, opening and closing like a fan, my mother and aunt separated one green plant from another, reaching down the stem to just above the soil. If you reached too low on the stem, too close to the dirt, the shoot was tough and resisted your ability to snap it free.

“Careful not to crush it,” my mother said back on that day in the park.

We’d immigrated from South Korea six years earlier and lived in Jamestown, New York, but we drove five hundred miles every spring to Providence to visit my mother’s sister in the Ocean State. We didn’t have much money. On warm days, we filled the cooler with watermelon, gimbop, and barley tea. A paper bag held a frisbee, books, and a picnic blanket. We spent the afternoon in the park, in open fields under tall trees. There were nine of us: my parents, my two brothers, my aunt’s family with her two sons, and myself.

The day we discovered this vegetable growing in America, I remember the adults remarking on the freshness of the breeze, how the vastness of the field around us compared to the scarcity of such land in South Korea. Everyone was relaxed. There was no such thing as boredom or anywhere else we had to be. We spread out and threw the frisbee to each other over the distance or read books in the shade. The adults talked about what we’d eat for dinner when we returned to the house. There were no H Marts or Asian markets back then. Korean ingredients were few and far between. They had to be creative with the dishes they made.

At some point my mother and aunt started exploring. I thought they were looking for a restroom, but when they returned I noticed they were laughing and speaking in low tones.

“Here of all places?” my aunt said. “It’s considered a weed in the United States,” my mother said. I had no idea what they were talking about. My father and uncle didn’t believe them, insisting on seeing with their own eyes.

I found something unexpected—something that was free and had value that wasn’t widely recognized in America.

So off we all went, my brothers, cousins, and I, along with our parents, trekking up a slope toward a group of trees. I was baffled. My mother bent down, snapped off a stem of a plant, and held it up. I saw a thin green strand.

“If you look closely, you’ll see,” she said.

When I asked my cousin Won about this memory recently, he said our mothers right there began to snap stems of this plant in the tall grass and that we went back to our picnic area and returned with a brown paper bag, cuffed over so it stayed open. I remembered how impatient I was as a child. It was tedious work, taking a steady hour to gather a handful. But the zeal of the adults was infectious.

Secretly, back then, I had my doubts. I didn’t believe the light-green plant in my hand was remotely related to the brown vegetable I had loved to eat in Korea. I’d eaten it sautéed as one of several smaller dishes offered in addition to rice or one of the ingredients in bibimbap: the Korean dish of rice and an assortment of vegetables (carrots, spinach, zucchini, bean sprouts), pickled or sautéed, a small serving of marinated beef, and a sunny-side up egg, mixed with spicy gochujang. Among those ingredients, the one that stood out as one we’d been missing while in the United States was the carob-colored thick threads of this vegetable.

At home these stalks were dried for days, then soaked and boiled, seasoned and stir-fried. After it was cooked, the vegetable was tender but firm, savory in a woodsy way—a cross between spinach and mushroom in a single brown strand.

This weed in the park was my favorite Korean vegetable.

*

I’d seen a trailer for the movie Minari months earlier but didn’t watch the film until March. I knew to be on guard because my mother had died five years ago and I was afraid I’d be reminded of her. But I knew I had to see it. Friends and family were debating its merits. I wanted to have an opinion to weigh in, and I was curious. A film about a Korean American immigrant family is a rarity. Lee Isaac Chung’s movie begins with a view of green fields in a blur outside a car window. It transported me back in time. I felt an ache start in my chest, and it didn’t cease for the entirety of the film, like the moment you’re about to cry, only that moment goes on and on.

Minari is set in Arkansas—far from my aunt’s old home in Rhode Island—and takes place in the ’80s. But it’s about an immigrant Korean American family like my own. I was four years old when we arrived in the United States, a little younger than the character David in the movie. At one point, he and his grandmother, Soonja, trek through a field of tall grass toward a stream and discover that the minari seeds Soonja had planted weeks earlier have flourished. They’re now vegetables ready to be harvested. She is elated, praising the endurance of minari, how it grows without tending unlike many other vegetables. David picks up on her joy. He sings a song about minari, a song he’s made up, and Soonja sings along with him, in her Korean accent, repeating “wonderful minari, wonderful,” over and over again. In a time when so much is disappointment and struggle for David’s family, minari’s ability to grow far from its native soil is nearly miraculous.

Before we immigrated to the United States, I’d been raised by my grandmother—my mother’s mother—whom we had to leave behind in South Korea. By all accounts, she had heaped excessive love upon me, carrying me on her back when I was far too old to be carried. I don’t remember her in detail, but a feeling rises whenever I think of her. I know it was true, that I was loved. Seeing Soonja as a grandmother to David shows me that same kind of love. It also reminds me of my mother’s relationship to my children. She was their fiercest defender, like Soonja is for David, and my mother’s love of gardening would expand as our years in this country elapsed. Soonja’s appreciation of minari reminded me of my mother’s deep connection with the natural world around us.

In making the film Minari, Lee Isaac Chung had put a family like my own up on the screen. He had told a story that acknowledged our existence.

I savored that connection. I repeated “minari” to myself. The child inside of me celebrated at the thought that I too had picked minari, just like in the movie. I rolled the word around my mouth, parted my lips to start off that sound, “minari”—accent on the first syllable. I knew what minari was. I had seen it. I had known its value in a park in Rhode Island.

I don’t know how I realized I had confused these two Korean plants. The knowledge was sudden. I had been wrong. My memory told me I was wrong. The past that had vividly returned because of the film brought voices to my ears. I heard my mother, my aunt, my father and uncle, my brothers and cousins with sudden clarity: “Can you believe gosari grows here?”

The plant we had found was gosari, not minari.

Gosari is a tender plant, standing about ten inches tall, light green, curled at the top in a tight scroll. In English it’s called bracken fern or fiddlehead. It’s always been local to the American continent.

Minari is water celery, leafy like parsley. We ate that too in later years, a common vegetable that my mother and aunt would grow in their gardens in time. We had never found it in a park when I was a child. How had I made this mistake? Instead of attempting to understand why I’d replaced one for the other in my mind while watching Chung’s film, I felt ashamed. It was a familiar twist of emotions, a refrain of every mistake I’d made as an immigrant child. One mistake could mean ridicule from society; one mistake could mean dire consequences for me and my family.

*

During the week of the Atlanta spa shootings, my niece, Miju, wrote to me. She lives in California and I live in New York. We talked about how we were holding up. We talked about family. She’s a new mother. She said she had just watched Minari.

I was grateful to have the conversation turn to the movie at that moment. Partly, I was glad to talk about something other than my fears of the violence against Asian Americans and the reach of white supremacy into every facet of our lives. Partly, I was ready to admit my mistake.

My niece is the type of person who sends surprise gifts, seemingly out of the blue, out of her intuition that you might need it. An example is the book she sent me a few years ago called The Crossroads of Should and Must by Elle Luna at a time when I was deciding whether I should take one job or another. The book she sent me helped me choose. On this day that we were talking, she did it again. By talking about Minari, she gave me an opportunity to be kind to myself.

“Tell me how you felt watching Minari,” she said to me.

Because I was speaking to my niece, I found I couldn’t berate myself as I’d been doing until then. Sometimes the kindness of others helps us be kinder to ourselves.

We talked about how we wished there were many movies about Korean American families in America so that a single one would not have to make up for all the ones that weren’t. How a plant growing untended so far from Korea could remind us of another place, how this plant in the movie transported me to a time when I found something unexpected—something that was free and had value that wasn’t widely recognized in America. The gift of something nourishing and plentiful, distinguished from what was inedible all around it.

None of us know what we’ll find if we look clearly at what’s already around us. Even though it wasn’t gosari in the soil of Arkansas in Chung’s movie, it might as well have been for meaning the exact same kind of resilience and love. The gosari in a park in Rhode Island would mark a time when there wasn’t always enough to eat, and it would deliver the promise that there might be something familiar in this place where everything was new, when my mother and aunt found a part of Korea in the United States that would nourish us.