For first-generation immigrants navigating an unfamiliar and often unwelcoming cultural context in every other part of their lives, the church was and is a place of survival.
A church isn’t just a spiritual place, Lee said. It’s a “fully embodied place made up of people in a particular situation,” he said. And the Korean American church was a place where Korean Americans could speak Korean, find community and figure out how to navigate their new context.
It was a place where their experiences mattered to God.
“I think it’s there to affirm who they are and be able to connect that with their faith. So the God that’s proclaimed in that church sees them,” Lee said.
In “Minari,” that’s the kind of community the Yi family matriarch, Monica, is seeking when they first attend a service at the white, rural church. She’s ultimately disappointed, and while the Yi children, David and Anne, do make friends at the church, they also are met with racial microaggressions.
That resonated with Pastor Daniel Jung of HCPC Living Stones EM, the English language ministry of Hawaii Central Presbyterian Church in Honolulu.
Even though Jung didn’t grow up in rural Arkansas, so much of the film captured his childhood, even the awkward questions he fielded from congregants at churches where he preached while attending Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he said.
In particular, he called the experience of leaving one group for another where one doesn’t quite fit “the quintessential Korean-American faith story” in a post for the Banner, a publication by the Christian Reformed Church in North America.
The portrayal of the white church in “Minari” is “both endearing and sort of cringe-worthy” for Jean Neely, who teaches writing at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian university in Azusa, California.
“You get the sense that they really mean well, and they do want to welcome this family who’s very different … and yet, there’s also this sort of utter cluelessness about how to welcome this family, or how to make them feel at home,” she said.
American churches have come a long way, said Neely, who was raised in the Korean American church and spent most of her adult life in multi-ethnic or predominantly white churches.
But it’s not just enough to invite people through the door and say they are welcome, she said.
“Even though there’s not this intention to exclude, just in the very teaching and the theology and representations, there can be this implicit message that some people do not reflect God’s image as much as some other people do,” she said. “That’s still something that the church really needs to attend to and that they ignore, because these things really have an impact on people’s psyches and souls.”
The Oscar buzz around “Minari” is something Neely said she couldn’t have imagined growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood.
It’s important for audiences to see the diversity of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community and to not “lump all Asian Americans together into the common stereotypes of the model minority,” she said. It’s also a step toward greater inclusion, she said, and it comes at a critical time when violence and racism against the AAPI community are surging.
“It’s so important, especially now during a time when there’s a lot of anti-Asian violence and a lot of anti-Asian sentiment in the community, to have these very affirming and positive cultural portrayals and representations out there in the community and these assertions that we do belong,” she said.
“We are just as American as any other family.”
This article originally appeared here.
