It was the chick sexing that did it, that brought me to tears the first time I watched Lee Isaac Chung’s latest film, Minari. At first, it is only alluded to through a simple question — How far is the hatchery from here? — but eventually it makes itself known through a series of shots of tiny, buttercup yellow chicks packed into plastic crates chaotically chirping as dozens of arms sort the small creatures into bins, blue for males and white for females. Chick sexing is a profession that takes up a large part of my maternal family’s history, but I have never heard it discussed by anyone outside of my Japanese American family, and I most certainly have never seen this type of work depicted in a film. But as soon as I saw it on screen — the motions of these men’s and women’s hands as they picked up and turned over those fuzzy bodies — it felt intimate to me in a way that I found myself wholly unprepared for.
My grandfather was a chick sexer for much of my mother’s childhood, and seeing this work, his work, reflected in this film felt like an overdue recognition for this often-undiscussed part of so many Asian American family’s histories. I felt seen in a new way, for once able to have something to identify with outside of the usual Asian stereotypes.
This film felt like it was willing to venture beyond mainstream ideas of what it means to be Asian in America to paint a picture of an Asian American family that would ring true. The film tells the story of Jacob Yi, a husband and father who has recently purchased a plot of land in Arkansas where he starts a farm focused on growing Korean vegetables. At the beginning, Jacob’s wife, Monica, is deeply worried about the new property. We learn the couple has moved with their two children, David and Anne, from California, where Jacob made good money as a chick sexer. Monica wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the demands of the hatchery, but Jacob hopes his farm will be their ticket out of the chick sexing business, despite the fact that this rural move has immediately isolated them from their Korean community. Recognizing that she cannot work and take care of her children all by herself, Monica asks her mother, Soon-ja, to travel from South Korea to move in with them. When Soon-ja arrives, she is vibrant and opinionated, coloring their world with curiosity and passion. Among many of the things she brings from South Korea are a gathering of minari seeds, a common Korean vegetable. Along with her grandson David, she plants the seeds on the bank of a stream in the forest surrounding their house. The plant’s presence and its growth are largely kept in the background as the film unfolds, but in the end, after a series of tragedies have befallen the Yi family, Jacob and David harvest the now-flourishing minari together, a sign that they will go on to succeed.
When Minari came out in 2020, word of the film’s brilliance quickly began circulating amongst the AAPI community. We passed reviews of the film on to each other like valuable gossip, amazed that one movie could get so much right about the Asian American experience. In an interview for The Wrap, Lee Isaac Chung talks about how minari is “a poetic plant” for him. “It’s a plant that will grow very strongly in its second season after it has died and come back,” he says, emphasizing the metaphor between the film and its title. The beauty of both minari the plant and Minari the film is that success is built on the generations that come before.
What I love most about this idea is that it can be applied to anyone looking to achieve the American dream. Minari is a film loosely based on Chung’s Korean American childhood, but it is a story that rings true for so many other members of non-white communities whose families immigrated to America and faced the same types of loneliness, isolation and longing for success that the family in Minari goes through. It is an immigration story that seeks to draw empathy from its viewers not through the common depictions of racial discrimination, but instead through the characters themselves and their hopes and dreams for each other and for their family as a whole. We see them struggle with many things — their professions, their marriage, their health — and while racism is one of their struggles, scenes like the one where Monica tenderly listens to her son’s heart murmur through a stethoscope or the one where she washes her husband’s hair as he sits in the bath do a lot of work to show us the quiet moments of both fear and tenderness that surround a family starting anew.
In many ways, this film feels perfect. It encompasses many of the emotions and stories that I have been told by my mother and her family about their life growing up. My mother is sansei, third generation Japanese American, and I believe both her success as well as my own can be directly traced back to the many victories and struggles of the issei (first) and nisei (second) generations of our family. Through their hard work farming and chick sexing and building their lives back after being incarcerated during World War II, these earlier generations laid the groundwork for us. I will always honor and be grateful to them for this.
If there is one thing I wished the film did more of, it would be to more fully depict the older sister Anne’s story. Throughout Minari, she is often in the background and operates more as a sidekick to her brother rather than a crucial member of their family. I often wondered what her life as a young, adolescent girl was like growing up in such a vast, isolated world. By depicting more of her inner life, the film could have paid tribute to that unique experience of growing up as an Asian American girl.
At the movie’s end, after Soon-ja has accidentally set fire to the barn where the farm’s first big harvest is stored, she shuffles away from the house, down the dirt road. It is not clear whether her departure is intentional, but she seems fraught with remorse as she walks, the crickets chirping incessantly like ironic applause. In the distance, David and Anne call for her to stop. “Halmoni!” they shout, “Where are you going?” It is hard to imagine how the family will pick up after such a devastating loss, but then David, who has recently discovered that the hole in his heart is healing, breaks into a run. It is a purposeful one, and he looks determined as he races to catch up to his halmoni and turn her around. In this moment, he becomes the physical representation of minari, a new generation that is stronger and healthier than the one that came before. When he finally reaches Soon-ja, he takes her by the hand and guides her back home. Each time I watch this scene, I am reminded of all the ways we help our families into the future. Minari, a film that portrays Asian Americans as families first and immigrants second, is the gentle hand reaching out to take our community’s own before leading us forward and on.
