hankyoreh

Joseph Juhn

Some shows get your heart aflutter with excitement with their trailers alone. That was the case when I watched the trailer for “Pachinko,” a series on Apple TV+, about a month ago. The show felt so precious, so much so that I wanted to save it up for later. But while the series itself is fascinating, I wanted to highlight one of its implications: that a shift in viewpoints has taken place, whereby diasporic Koreans are now producing their stories in their home countries and introducing them to Koreans in the motherland.

“Pachinko” is an epic drama that takes place across Korea, Japan, and the US centering on four generations of a Korean Japanese, or Zainichi, family. The book that the series is based on was written by a Korean American author who lived in Japan for several years, while the show’s two directors and producers are Korean American as well. The cast is also largely made up of Korean immigrants in the US and Japan. It’s simply miraculous that the international streaming platform Apple TV+ invested in, produced, and is distributing a show about Korean Japanese made by Korean Americans as one of its most ambitious releases for the year.

But recently, I felt slightly uncomfortable reading Korean news articles that have covered “Pachinko” as part of “K-culture” and as a veritable K-drama. Of course, it’s undeniable that the basic backdrop and history underlying the series is that of the Korean Peninsula, but I wanted to examine what lies beneath the popular Korean urge to simply claim every narrative related to Korea as “ours.” I wanted to pick holes in the uncritical thesis “everything Korean belongs to Korea.” I suspect that at work underneath such a mentality is a fundamental ignorance of the existence of diasporas and diasporic worldviews, as well as the long-standing viewpoint of perceiving those of the diaspora as “marginal objects” rather than “storytelling subjects.”

Israel didn’t claim Jewish American director Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” as Israeli just because the movie raised awareness about the Holocaust, nor did Italy claim Italian American Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” as Italian just because the film brought Italian mafias into the limelight. Likewise, the creative worldviews and works of diasporic Korean creatives should be “theirs” alone. Considered “compatriots” outside of the Korean Peninsula up until now, they have now become subjects who directly create diasporic content to tell their own stories.

In fact, Koreans abroad have been telling their stories from their respective places for decades now. From “Minari,” which garnered lots of attention last year, to Korean Chinese director Zhang Lu’s “Dooman River,” Korean Japanese director Yang Yong-hi’s “Dear Pyongyang,” and “Side by Side,” a documentary by Glenn Morey based on interviews of over 100 Korean adoptees, Koreans outside of Korea have been prolific creators of literature and film. It’s just that Koreans in Korea weren’t aware. From now on, I think there will be more instances in which diasporic stories get shared with the world through the crossover between foreign capital and domestic creators.

To that end, I hope Koreans in Korea begin to reflect on how useless it is to try to “privatize” the stories of Korean Japanese, Korean Chinese, Kareisky, North Korean defectors, Koreans in South America, Korean adoptees, as well as other diasporic individuals who have immigrated to Korea. I think it’s time that we recognize that we are in an era in which Korean things can belong to something other than Korea. Only when we accept diasporic stories — alike to ours but also different, familiar to us yet also new — as they are, will the basis and depth of culture on the Korean Peninsula grow and expand.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]