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    • DellwoodBarker2 years ago

      Incredibly Powerful. An education on a film and history I was unaware of. The familial necessity inherent here for healthy filial detachment resonates within my own being quite profoundly.

      On my last Gwangju trip, while roaming the quiet halls of the May 18 Archives, I found myself peering into a dim room where the only light came from a screen showing newly found, silent black-and-white footage of the 1980 uprising and its aftermath. I wedged myself into a seat between silver-haired Korean seniors—the demographic most likely to hold on to this history—and made myself watch every frame: choking black smoke; rows of roughly hewn coffins; an abandoned taxi cab, its windshield blown out. “Bloodstained flag,” I noted in an ugly scrawl, and yet the historical footage kept the carnage to a tolerable remove.

      While in real life the stark-white fabric of the Korean Taegeukgi would’ve been sullied to a stark, brutal crimson or a darker rust, it was all muted to dull shades of gray on-screen. I felt myself dissociate so that I could reduce the military’s cruelty to black-and-white text and numbers, to keep the pain in the realm of the unfathomable.

      In the fictional world of Peppermint Candy, Young-ho’s guilt over one senseless death ripples through every scene for the rest of his life. The film allows me to feel the blow of emotional truth, an impact that’s magnified by my awareness of South Korea’s historical reality. When I consider how the Gwangju uprising as a whole would have devastated the city and the lives of its citizens, including my father, the enormity of the tragedy racks my brain and my body. Perhaps this is why it took me the better part of a year to write this essay, because it hurt too much to hold space for the factual and emotional realities of a past atrocity when my present left me feeling isolated and hopeless.

      1. Update (5/21/2021):

        This paragraph crackles and pops with an aligned palability:

        The art of nonfiction requires writing into the questions that grow into obsessions. For me, so many questions persist about my parents and their lives before they immigrated to the United States, these stories long papered over by their silence, then pulled completely from my reach by our severed family ties. I probe my brain trying to reconcile my memories of a caring, nurturing father with the abusive, neglectful man he could be. I love my parents, but they were never able to resolve the violence and instability that marred our lives in America. Estrangement was the only way that I could pull free. Perhaps it’s only from a distance that I can hold space for all of their disparate parts.

    • crystalhanakim2 years ago

      This essay brought together so many interesting elements -- The Korean film Peppermint Candy, family estrangement, and the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when the South Korean dictatorship killed hundreds of people protesting for a democratic government. Hannah Bae does a wonderful job tying in her own difficult estrangement with her family into the larger Korean history that may have shaped her father. Loved this read.

      • DellwoodBarker2 years ago

        Wow! Thank you 🙏🏼 for sharing this Powerful Gem 💎

        This resonates on a Deeeep Level; microscopically personal and meta-macro-cosmically universal.

        A healing, honest, cathartic 3rd Eye Intensive salve.