Chapter Eight. The Cyclical Buildup of Historical Burdens: Reckonings in the Post-democratisation Era, 1980s–2010s

Abstract

At the turn of the twenty-first century, when “Peppermint Candy” (2000) was released, South Korea was recovering the 1997–1998 economic crisis, and until then, following the 1987 democratisation South Koreans had continued their breakneck economic development while riding the spirit of freedom to undertake comprehensive reforms. In dramatising this prolonged but acute transition, the sweeping cinematic tales set in the country’s most recent period have emphasised the firm connection between historical burdens and subsequent outcomes. What these films generally did not do so well is consider those left behind in formal democratisation—marginalised Koreans such as labourers, immigrants, and especially women. But in line with legal changes in the 1990s and 2000s that abolished gendered inequalities in Korean institutions, in the 2010s, more of the focus shifted to the female experience, and more women film makers began to make historical films. Notions of historical achievement, completion, or triumph thus came under further scrutiny if not direct challenge in such works, which have depicted separate social sectors having progressed along differing speeds and trajectories while facing interventions from the stubbornly cyclical past. The resulting mixture of chronologies is shown to further complicate the process of historical reckoning and attenuate any firm sense of historical agency.

FormalPara Playbill

“Peppermint Candy” (Bakha satang); Lee Chang-dong, 2000

“The Old Garden” (Orae doen jeongwon); Im Sang-su, 2007

“House of Hummingbird” (Beolsae [“Hummingbird”]); Kim Bora, 2018

“Traces of Love” (Ga-eul-lo [“To autumn”]); Kim Dae-seung, 2006

“Bungee Jumping on Their Own” (Beonji jeompeu-reul hada [“Bungee jumping”]); Kim Dae-seung, 2001

“My Sassy Girl” (Yeopgi-jeogin geu nyeo [“That bizarre girl”]); Gwak Jae-yong, 2001

“Ode to My Father” (Kukje sijang [“International market”]); Yun Je-gyun, 2014

“Samjin Company English Class” (Samjin geurup yeongeo Toik-ban [“Samjin Corp. TOEIC class”]); Yi Jong-pil, 2020

“Sunny”; Gang Hyeong-cheol, 2011

“Herstory”; Min Gyu-dong, 2018

“Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982” (82-nyeon saeng Kim Ji-yeong); Kim Do-yeong, 2019

The film “Peppermint Candy” begins and ends with basically the same scene: The main character, Yeong-ho, while lying on the banks of a particular stream, looks up at a passing train on a railroad bridge. In between these two moments, however, are 20 years of life that turned a naive, sensitive young man, who in the film’s reverse narrative appears at the end, into someone quite different, indeed almost the polar opposite. In complementing the many allusions, such as in the paired scenes above, to the cosmology of cyclical return, the railroad tracks that connect the film’s six chapters of Yeong-ho’s adulthood point towards fatalistic destiny, with each chapter adding to the cumulative, indeed linear effect of his actions and environs. Instead of redirecting or reversing his self-destructive course, Yeong-ho seems unable, as if stuck on train tracks, to veer off the path set at a Gwangju rail depot in May 1980. Hence the simultaneous workings of both cyclical and linear time enable “Peppermint Candy” to capture masterfully the historical development of South Korea over the final two decades of the twentieth century, from the depths of military dictatorship to the anxious cusp of a new era.

Some experiences obviously have a greater impact than others, enough to place one’s life, as if on a trailing caboose on a long train, on a route that cannot be foreseen, much less controlled. Alternatively, as in history, each major moment, while framing the possibilities and inclinations of subsequent experiences, makes room for choice and individual agency, however difficult it may be. For unlike Yeong-ho, South Korean society as a whole overcame the trauma of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, by using the tragedy to drive the democratic transition and further maturation. At the turn of the twenty-first century, when “Peppermint Candy” (2000) was released, this extended outcome was less clear, as the country was recovering from the shocks of the most severe economic crisis since the Korean War. Before and after that 1997–1998 emergency, South Koreans continued to build on the 1987 democratisation, maintaining the breakneck material development while also using the new spirit of openness to undertake comprehensive reforms affecting almost every social sector. Naturally the cinematic works set in the most recent era have dramatised the content and form of this prolonged but acute transition, and with the passage of time their historical perspectives crystallised into varying depictions of what it all meant. But these sweeping tales of the country’s closest past decades all feature a firm connection between historical burdens and later outcomes. This common approach thereby projects the present back onto the nearest past and, more intensively, raises the converse question: How does recent history continue to refine judgement on contemporary society?

What these films generally have not done as well is to consider more fully those who were left behind in the great transformation of democratisation: those on the margins such as labourers, immigrants, and especially women. In the 2010s, however, as more of the focus shifted to the female experience, and as more women directors, writers, producers, and other creators made feature films, the notions of historical progress, completion, or triumph came under further scrutiny if not direct challenge. The 1990s had witnessed the beginnings of major legal changes, which had trailed material, social, and cultural transformations to finally address the last major institutional holdover of Confucian tradition—the legal framework behind the comprehensive subordination of females in Korean society. A final legislative push came in the mid-2000s with the abolition of the household registration system that had been in place for a century, if not longer. The mixture of chronologies that characterised films set at the turn of the twenty-first century captured such a progression of separate social sectors along differing speeds and trajectories of historical change. In turn these works continued to complicate the process of historical reckoning, especially given the stubborn elements from the past that attenuated any sense of historical accomplishment or finality.

Between Cyclical and Progressive Recent History

The gap between the cyclical and linear notions of history often seems formidable, but they are in a sense equally necessary pillars of the bridge between fate and freedom, or structure and agency, upon which traverses historical experience. Korean films of the hallyu period could draw upon more than a millennium of cultural understanding, especially from Buddhist teachings, that moderated the sense of inexorable, cumulative progress in the modern era. This perhaps explains the wondrous variety of time narratives—time-shifting, flashbacks, parallel time frames, concurrent or conflicting chronologies—that sometimes appear even within the same film. Such a manner of mixing and merging different historical timetables seems more feasible when the chronological gap is not so great, and hence it sees heavy usage in films set in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when dealing with the past becomes a more immediate, indeed unavoidable concern.

This principle is illustrated well in a film that actually was released in the opening year of the new century. When “Peppermint Candy” (Bakha satang; Lee Chang-dong, 2000) hit the theatres, its backward narrative immediately drew attention, with individual chapters connected by film footage, run in reverse, of railroad tracks as seen from the end of a moving train. This signals the connections in the adult life stages of Kim Yeong-ho, the anti-hero protagonist, and reinforces the train as the film’s overriding symbol. Powerfully, the originating point in Yeong-ho’s two-decade degeneration is a train depot in Gwangju in May of 1980, when as a fresh recruit he is sent to the city as part of the military suppression of the civic uprising. In the backward narration of the movie, however, this episode comes at the end. The film begins with a very different Yeong-ho, around 40 years of age in 1999, who staggers into a reunion party, held at a riverbank under a railroad bridge, of his former factory work group from his pre-military youth. The revellers, however, discover that the shy and reserved Yeong-ho they once knew has been replaced by a nasty, confused, bitter, and ultimately suicidal middle-aged man. He soon meets his end by climbing onto the tracks and confronting, with open arms, an oncoming train while shouting, “I want to go back again!”

This is the train, we find, that had set his life on a course of increasing depravity, venality, violence, abusiveness, and all-around unpleasantness, ever since that moment in Gwangju two decades earlier. Each succeeding chapter in the film goes further back in time, demonstrating the accumulation of experiences that corrupted Yeong-ho’s character: his suicidal and homicidal state after having lost everything to the 1997 financial crisis, as he reunites briefly with his long-lost first love, Sunim, who is now clinging to life in a hospital bed; which is preceded by Yeong-ho’s life as an angry, philandering, and abusive petty businessman in 1994; preceded by his ugly activities as a dirty cop who readily tortures captured dissidents in the spring of 1987 while the mass democracy demonstrations are taking place; preceded by his initiation into the brutalising police force of the military dictatorship in 1984, when he also callously rejects Sunim; preceded by his experience in Gwangju in 1980, just as his wholesome affection for Sunim (“purity”) was developing, as symbolised by his hoarding of peppermint candy pieces that she sent him as he was beginning his military service. This last (earliest) episode also shows his meeting Sunim for the first time at a picnic gathering of his work team along the same riverbank and railroad bridge of the film’s opening. Together, then, these “time boxes” in reverse chronological order reveal with increasing insight how an unadulterated young man was transformed, through the cumulative effect of his environment over two decades, into a monster.

As noted above, the train, or the railroad, constitutes the metaphorical centrepiece of this character’s descent, as if the stops on its hellish trip corresponded to the film’s chapters. A train, if only as a passing roar and lights, makes an appearance in each of the chapters, supplementing the brief interludes between episodes showing movement along railroad tracks. The train hence seems to signal inexorability—Yeong-ho’s incapacity to dislodge, through derailment, his doomed course once the train has left the station, so to speak, from Gwangju. But Gwangju does not hold exclusive determinative power; each successive stage in Yeong-ho’s life introduces historical forces from South Korea’s development that layer more harm upon his original sin and hence lead to the next stage: military dictatorship, brutality and corruption, the culture of greed and expendability. Over these two decades, South Korea undergoes democratisation, of course, but this hardly registers in Yeong-ho’s life, so bound is he to the violent structures and mentalities of military authoritarianism. Despite his fervent attempts to forget and overcome his past,⁸⁰ such remnants of the past are too strong—overwhelming, in fact, particularly since the ethos of developmentalist capitalism, now in the guise of neo-liberalism, continued even after political liberalisation. (The economic crisis of 1997–1998 that bankrupted so many South Koreans seems to have tipped Yeong-ho over the edge.) Indeed the train represents not only the unshakable grip of trauma but also the extraordinary industrialisation and material transformation, carefully realised in the backdrops of the separate episodes, that South Korea pushed through under a techno-nationalist military dictatorship, the remnants of which continue to hold sway.

What is perhaps most remarkable about “Peppermint Candy”, however, are the concurrent workings also of cyclical temporality—and hence of the struggle in the nation’s history between fate and freedom—that is just as compelling as the forward drive of Yeong-ho’s life to its end. Although the railroad tracks suggest Yeong-ho’s life proceeding on a separate, parallel trajectory as that of the country, often it is directly crossing with and affected by that larger path. The train, though crucial in suggesting destiny, also stands as one of many items that act as not just recurring motifs but as carriers of a cosmological recurrence of existence, which introduces karma into the equation. The causes of Yeong-ho’s decay not only accumulate but constantly resurface (or never go away). Mirrors and the washroom, for example, reflect his life as a torturer. And as in “Once in a Summer” (Chap. 7), the notion of the everlasting hold of one’s “first love” takes various forms, despite Yeong-ho’s decision early on to deny it, at least on the surface. His violent hands, which become stained by blood (literally and figuratively) and faeces (literally), function in a similar way following the moment he demonstrates his rejection of Sunim with his probing hands. And two final motifs also signal Yeong-ho’s inability to elude his life cycles: a camera that Sunim had gifted him (he had told her he wanted to be a photographer) that he rejected, twice no less, the second time by destroying the film contained therein; and a gunshot wound to his leg from the Gwangju debacle, which acts up at inopportune moments. The reason why all this cannot be attributed simply to Gwangju is that Yeong-ho has a deja vu experience when he first meets Sunim, as he tells her that he recognises their surroundings of the riverbank and the railroad bridge for some reason. The cycle of existence is completed when he walks away from his friends’ gathering to duplicate the movie’s opening shot of his lying on the same riverbank and watching a train pass overhead on the same bridge. And as he stares upward, the young Yeong-ho is moved to tears, although it remains uncertain why: due to his recognition of a bad previous existence that would soon exercise retribution in his current life, or to the simple emotions or an unsullied, very sensitive young man? Whatever the case, given the integral integration of South Korea’s historical circumstances into his life to come, the answer would have to apply to the nation as a whole.

What to make of this historical legacy, especially of the democratisation struggle, constitutes one of the central themes also of “The Old Garden” (Orae doen jeongwon; Im Sang-su, 2007), an adaptation of Hwang Seog-yeong’s famed novel of the same name. Just as Deok-su in “Ode to My Father” and the women in “Sunny” ponder the value of the sacrifices they have made (below), “The Old Garden” poses questions about the human toll of engaging in the anti-dictatorship resistance. But unlike “Ode to My Father”, the main lead characters in “The Old Garden” find little comfort in the broader progress that resulted from their sacrifices, for their personal loss cannot be properly counterbalanced by national redemption; rather, as in “Once in a Summer” (Chap. 7), the separation from one’s love interest is made permanent. There is little hint of celebration or glorification of the fight for democracy and its great breakthrough in 1987, which overthrew the military dictatorship of the 1980s that had perpetrated the Gwangju massacre. Instead “The Old Garden” questions the ultimate significance of sacrifice for the greater good when the costs of that sacrifice extend beyond one’s self. It is, in sum, a mournful allegory on the larger meaning and value of South Korea’s democratisation and modernisation.

As with most of the other films in this chapter, “The Old Garden” depends considerably on time mixing, and the constant back-and-forth between different time settings, sometimes separated by nearly two decades, continues throughout the narrative (as in the novel). The movie begins with the male protagonist, Hyeon-u, who has spent nearly 17 years in jail for his role in the anti-dictatorship resistance of the 1980s, finally gaining release in the closing years of the 1990s. Having been completely stripped of any contact with friends or family, he is stunned to find that his mother has become wealthy through real estate speculation and that his siblings enjoy unimagined material comforts. He also learns that his beloved, Yun-hui, has died, and he becomes overwhelmed by grief after first not knowing how to respond to this news, so numb had he become to the world outside the penitentiary. This lack of awareness stands in sharp contrast to the time when, as a young man, he was perhaps too conscious of what was happening around him, and thus begin the flashbacks, starting with that familiar setting: Gwangju, May 1980.

As in “Peppermint Candy”, the violence of the Gwangju Uprising is minimally shown; rather, the devastation comes through in a scene in which Hyeon-u visits, in the opening days of the uprising, a makeshift morgue in a Gwangju gymnasium filled with wailing, blood-stained plastic body bags, and crude coffins. He is suffused with rage and thirst for retribution, but as a wanted man he must flee, and a year later he finds sanctuary and love in a remote cottage that is home to Yun-hui, a schoolteacher and artist. But Yun-hui tells him resolutely that, while she is sympathetic to the cause, she is no activist. This ambivalence becomes important to the story in the film’s second half, when the focal point shifts to Yun-hui as she acts as the voice of scepticism about “the movement” as well as a caretaker of younger activists in Hyeon-u’s stead. Both roles heighten her position, ultimately, as a heroine but also as another victim—not only through her death from cancer, but also through her forced separation from Hyeon-u. For a relatively blissful few months, they had built a homestead in that mountainside cabin, tending to their vegetable patch while wondering how long they can remain isolated from the troubles of the world. Alas, Hyeon-u hears that most of his fellow resistors have been captured, and so, racked with guilt, he decides to return to Seoul, where he, too, will inevitably be nabbed. But this urge to sacrifice himself invites a rebuke from Yun-hui, an independent, modern woman who prioritises individual needs and smaller-scale bonds. She thus wonders aloud in agony why Hyeon-u cannot, for once, do things for himself (and the couple) instead of mostly for others.

This line of questioning escalates to issues surrounding the value and cost of the democracy movement as a whole. In the present day of the film’s story, as the twentieth century is nearing its close, Hyeon-u reconnects with his former fellow agitators, all having been freed but suffering in their respective ways—from bankruptcy, alcoholism, mental illness, and loved ones’ early deaths. Such outcomes are shown even in the scenes from the mid-1980s, at the tense height of the organised, underground opposition after Hyeon-u’s arrest in 1981, when Yun-hui becomes that senior advisor of sorts to a new generation of activists and workers. Clashes between their determined resistance and the casual savagery of the security forces are interspersed with comparably fierce debates within the movement. Their arguments about how to understand and proceed show the internal ideological fissures and demands, in the aftermath of Gwangju, that are portrayed as forming an oppressive structure on their own. Yun-hui eventually grapples with an offshoot of this struggle, trying to raise her daughter, the product of her brief time with Hyeon-u, while suffering from a serious illness. The girl grows up without a father and eventually without a mother, for Yun-hui, after repeated denials of visitation rights or even correspondence with Hyeon-u during his incarceration, passes away in the mid-1990s without ever seeing him again. She leaves for him a portrait she drew that places a young Hyeon-u, in his high school uniform, side by side with the older Yun-hui, with her head bald from cancer treatments. This temporal disjuncture reinforces the film’s recurring overlap between the past and present, as do the frequent seamless flashbacks. Compressed time is demonstrated also by Hyeon-u’s re-emergence into the world, like Rip Van Winkle, after 17 years in prison, as well as fantasy sequences involving his infant daughter, who as a glam teenager at the end of the film finally meets her father in the middle of bustling, gleaming Seoul. As much as the new society as a whole, she is the fruit of the “old garden” cultivated by the painful struggles of her parents’ generation, which might have made the sacrifices, in the end, worthwhile. And like the boy Nagan in “The President’s Barber” (Chap. 7), she might also represent the resilient spirit of democracy. But what remains elusive is a secure sense of propriety and historical justice, given what had driven her father to make his choice and her mother to suffer from that decision.

In reflecting the view of many, if not most, South Koreans regarding their recent past, “The Old Garden” stays somewhat ambivalent regarding this matter, even while lamenting the excessiveness and unevenness of the sacrifices demanded from those at the forefront of the struggle. At minimum this story further complicates the glorified standing of democratisation and the prioritisation of idealistic over material advancement. But it also adds further glory to the generation of mostly young people who fought, and paid a heavy price, for the country’s welfare—arguably, as much as the Korean War generation had done in its struggle against communism and poverty. In this film, however, even after the 1987 political liberalisation, Hyeon-u spends another decade in jail, as if, like Yeong-ho in “Peppermint Candy”, he is chained to the formative period of his youth, regardless of the formal transformations in the structures of authority. Without necessarily trapping these characters in the grip of history, such portrayals reflect the ongoing difficulties of arriving at a comfortable understanding of the democratic transition’s significance.

At other times such uncertainty is expressed as scepticism over the breakneck developmentalist ethos, which produced economic growth but also established precarious constructs, even in the literal sense, that would torment the country long after political liberalisation. The mid-1990s witnessed a succession of collapses that issued a jarring reminder about the temporal disconnect between different sectors of development, showing the edifice that was South Korea crumbling like a house of cards. “House of Hummingbird” (Beolsae [“Hummingbird”]; Kim Bora, 2018), a taciturn portrait of a teenaged girl, Eun-hui, living through these times while undergoing a process of self-discovery, places the protagonist in southeastern Seoul—the region called “Gangnam”—as two shockingly unforgettable pieces of news locate her story in history: that of the mid-1994 death of Kim Il Sung, the North Korean dictator, and of the collapse of a section of the Seongsu Bridge over the Han River in Seoul shortly thereafter. The latter moment, in particular, functions also as a symbol of the absence of a clear path forward for the adolescent protagonist, who suffers familial, school, and cultural pressures as she seeks a more definitive role in all three realms. The analogy to the country’s own rush towards development is visualised in an eerie scene of her and her two siblings looking from the riverbank at the dilapidated bridge, which had killed over 30. Whether for the individual or the country, the search for a reassuring pathway forward gets clouded by the lingering debris.

Such a theme is explored also in “Traces of Love” (Ga-eul-lo [“To autumn”]; Kim Dae-seung, 2006), a melodrama of separation and reckoning following the sudden collapse in 1995 of the Sampung Department Store in southern Seoul, which took over 500 lives. What gets destroyed along with the building is unavoidably historical: a sense of clarity and reassurance about the country’s recent past as well as the present. The political undercurrents were also unmistakable, for in the aftermath of this event, investigations revealed collusion between corrupt government inspectors and regulators with the department store’s owner, a would-be tycoon who cut corners on the building’s construction. In the film, the couple shattered by the disaster consists of a budding young prosecutor, named Hyeon-u, struggling against a venal legal culture, and his fiancée, a television documentary producer named “Minju”, perhaps meaning “democracy”. Minju, having been in the department store when it caved in, finally succumbs to her injuries under the rubble while comforting a young cafe employee, Sejin. The story mostly follows Hyeon-u and Sejin on replicating journeys of mourning and self-discovery, interspersed with many flashback scenes of their respective interactions with Minju, who serves as the spiritual conduit between the two survivors.

Instead of becoming preoccupied with indignation and despair, which are self-apparent in any case, the film rather quietly grounds the survivors’ grief in the ancient spiritual solace of regeneration and renewal, with tacit optimism for a path out of trauma. Although absent a Buddhist element in the storyline aside from brief visits by the main characters to a mountain temple, “Traces of Love”, like “The Old Garden”, is nevertheless suffused with inferences of reincarnation and its implications for the cycles of history. This is shown in the constant shifting between—to the point of blending—past and present, and in the lavish scenery of changing seasons that reflect and direct wanderings of consolation. As the film’s Korean title suggests, autumn, more so than spring, signals rebirth, recovery, and rediscovery out of trauma, a lesson that extends to the nationwide grief and scepticism that understandably prevailed in South Korea following this shocking tragedy in 1995. The presentation of the characters’ travels across the country’s beautiful landscape, which alone is enough to make a viewing of the film rewarding, seals the overlap between the personal and the societal.

Such a historically informed deployment of reincarnation as a plot device appeared also in two very different but equally compelling films that appeared in 2001—the first a hit comedy that introduced two future movie stars, and the second a less-viewed but even more remarkable story about the recurring presence of the past. This latter work, “Bungee Jumping on Their Own” (Beonji jeompeu-reul hada [“Bungee jumping”]; Kim Dae-seung, 2001), was the debut effort by the same director, later, of “Blood Rain” (Chap. 4) and, indeed, of “Traces of Love”. Like the latter film, “Bungee Jumping” is a melodrama that integrates reincarnation into thinking about the way the circle of history expresses itself through characters and social concerns. (In more ways than one, the act of bungee jumping alludes to the cyclical nature of being.) Through extended flashbacks, the plot links two time frames—the present moment of 2001 and 17 years earlier in the mid-1980s—but rather than democratisation, the pressing social issue is homosexuality. And through the transposition of one’s existential essence, the film deftly applies a distinctly Korean-Buddhistic approach to illuminating this contemporary matter of growing attention (and contention). Standby motifs of trains, personal tokens (a lighter), gestures (raising a pinky finger), and “first love” ideals highlight the human connections bound by destiny and reframe the notion of a “soul mate” by asking, “When you love somebody, do you really love some body, or some soul?”

Though not as explicitly, a similar question is asked by the often uproarious comedy “My Sassy Girl” (Yeopgi-jeogin geu nyeo [“That bizarre girl”]; Gwak Jae-yong, 2001), the historical allusions in which appear limited to short fantasy scenes of a generic or fictional past, as well as of an imaginary future. Indeed, on the surface the sassy girl, played with irresistible panache by a young Jeon Ji-hyeon (Gianna Jun), is an in-your-face prophet who not only smashes the established gender hierarchy, but exuberantly, and menacingly, flips it. The countering character comes in the form of an emasculated young man who wears pink clothing and high heels, gets taken down by female cops, and must continually be rescued by the girl, who even goes back in time to impose her personal gender order. As a fantasy or romantic comedy, “My Sassy Girl” is actually not so successful, but these hints at genre seem just a ploy, for the real purpose is to throw a major wrench into popular expectations of love and fate. In nodding to the melodramatic convention of fated coupling, the film actually accentuates its disdain for any patriarchal constraints on female freedom. Love comes only through the exercise of agency, and in pounding home this point, “My Sassy Girl” forecasts, with a heavy but hilarious hand, later films (next section below) that impart feminist messaging to the recent past by mixing historical time frames.

This overlap, but portrayed on a much more epic scale, also characterises the second most popular historical film in South Korean box office history, “Ode to My Father” (Kukje sijang [“International market”]; Yun Je-gyun, 2014), the setting of which extends from 1950 to the present of the mid-2010s. While not as innovative as other works in its juxtaposition of differing chronologies, “timing” is central to the storyline. Most of the film is filled with extended flashback episodes interspersed with shorter interludes of the present day, which establishes the connection between the past and the present in a semi-cyclical, semi-linear dynamic. More importantly, however, unlike the films examined above, “Ode” demurs from the politics of this experience. Instead, the film conceives historical development as measured mostly by economic growth, along with South Korea’s integration into the global order, which together also comment on the meaning of national division. The Korean title, Gukje sijang (“International Market”), references the famed bazaar in Busan formed by Korean War refugees, which in turn calls attention to the crucial role of ties to the larger world in the country’s material advancement.

The film’s opening sequence, set in contemporary times, establishes this outlook with panoramic views of the harbour area of Busan, filled with images of sleek tall buildings, construction cranes, and half-finished giant bridges reinforcing the inexorable progress of development. An elderly couple taking in the view bears the worn features of having traversed this arduous path of modernisation. But while the woman has found peace in her old age, her husband Yun Deok-su, the film’s protagonist, stubbornly clings to his small shop in the International Market and nastily chases away would-be buyers who want to upgrade it like the surrounding stores. We eventually discover that Deok-su is still waiting, somehow, for his father, whom he last saw over 60 years earlier and whose lingering spiritual presence represents Confucian familial responsibility and personal sacrifice—which explains the film’s English title of “Ode to My Father”—as well as the interconnectivity between the past and present.⁸¹

The viewer is then transported back to the first of several main chapters in Deok-su’s life: his family’s harrowing escape through the Heungnam Evacuation of December 1950, just ahead of advancing Chinese soldiers in the Korean War. This is when ten-year-old Deok-su, in the hysteria of the mass scramble to board an American warship, loses his younger sister Maksun, who had been clinging to his back while he chaotically boarded the rescue ship. His father, who must now stay behind to look for her, instructs Deok-su to find the store run by an aunt in Busan, where they will all reunite after the father finds Maksun. We next see Deok-su’s mother and her three remaining children eking out a living in the International Market area of Busan, as American GIs dangle chocolate to kids on the street and entrepreneurial Koreans attached to the American military pass by, including a young-ish man named Chung Ju Yung (Jeong Ju-yeong), the founder of Hyundai. Chung is clearly more the face of South Korean historical development in the film than political figures like President Syngman Rhee, whose temporary capital during the Korean War was located a stone’s throw away from the International Market, or President Park Chung Hee, the main force behind the state-directed, export-oriented industrialisation that elevated the standing of companies like Hyundai onto a permanent pedestal. Rhee’s only appearance in the movie is as a radio voice, and Park’s not even that. Instead, the cameos come from economic or cultural figures attached to the outside world, like Chung, Andre Kim the fashion designer, or the pop singer Nam Jin, whom Deok-su encounters in Vietnam as a fellow soldier. Deok-su, as did Chung Ju Yung, Park Chung Hee, and countless young men of the time, treats the Vietnam War as a financial opportunity, a trough replenished by the Cold War. As with its effect on South Korea’s industrialisation, the Vietnam War also represents the next step in Deok-su’s development. This episode’s closing scene of desperate Vietnamese villagers being whisked away in a South Korean gunboat, with Deok-su jumping into the water to save a little girl who had been separated from her older brother, is a replay of the earlier American rescue of northern Koreans from Heungnam, when Deok-su carried a little girl, his sister, on his back while climbing onto a ship.⁸² At long last, in the final flashback chapter of his life, when he participates in an early 1980s televised reunion of separated family members from the Korean War, he finds his long-lost sister Maksun, who has grown up in California.

The jolting loss of his sister amid the desperate scramble to board American ships in the Korean War, her subsequent upbringing in the US while separated from her birth family as well as from her native country—as an adult she is shown having married a Caucasian and barely able to speak Korean—and even the siblings’ ultimate reunion, are open to subtle, conflicting readings of the film’s messaging. But unmistakably, “Ode to My Father” views South Korea’s external connections, especially with the US, as the incubator of modern South Korean history, which is defined primarily as material progress. All the episodes reiterate this idea, including the one set in the 1960s in which Deok-su, in a bid to finance his younger brother’s university education, enlists as a coal miner sent to West Germany, for this is where Deok-su—again, as a stand-in for the country as a whole—meets his future wife, one of the many South Korean nurses exported to West Germany at the time. That he also impregnates her there carries further significance, marking the outside as the reproductive generator of South Korea’s internal development. The story arc of his maturation, after all, began with the Korean War, when US-led UN forces established the basis of the country’s subsequent growth and identity. Indeed the American commander’s decision to jettison his military equipment in order to make room for the terrified Korean refugees shows the film’s overall favourable impression of the US, albeit not without some ambivalence: Was Maksun really rescued, or snatched? Regardless, every major episode in Deok-su’s life has an indelible foreign connection that shapes his fundamental being: the Heungnam Evacuation via American warships, his coming of age in the International Market area, his transformational experience as a miner in West Germany, his adventures in the Vietnam War, and finally his tearful reconnection with his long-lost baby sister calling from Los Angeles.

Whether so intended by the director, however, this internalisation of the outside world gives the impression of remaining oblivious to the more troublesome realities within the country, particularly the struggle against oppression. Hints of these conditions, however, appear here and there, in the harsh treatment meted out by power holders like street bullies or local businessmen, for example. Less vaguely perhaps, two satirical scenes show people reflexively jumping to attention whenever the South Korean national anthem is invoked over public loudspeakers, an inescapable component of life in the dictatorship era. In the latter such scene, Deok-su’s wife Yeong-ja, while forced to follow along, grits her teeth at this trite exercise of authoritarian regimentation, and not only because it interrupts—metaphorically as well—her efforts to convince her husband not to go to Vietnam. Deok-su thinks he must go to earn money for his sister’s dowry and to save their family store (so that his father can find them), but also because he must do his patriotic duty as deemed by the country’s political leadership, which nevertheless warrants barely a mention in the film. “Ode to My Father” thus represents well the staunchly anti-communist, pro-American view of most of the oldest generation of South Koreans, who still consider the United States the country’s indisputable saviour from the Korean War—the signal moment, to them, of their lives and of South Korean history. (Such basic divides in historical memory continue to reflect and even determine the politics of South Korea today.)

This scene from the early 1970s between Deok-su and Yeong-ja is crucial also because it reinforces the movie’s balancing of fate and freedom, though slightly more towards the latter, as represented by modernisation in the material realm and broader opening to the outside world. As for fate, the unavoidable but inscrutable cycle of existence and whims of destiny, usually expressed as bad luck, come across in Deok-su’s helpless retort to his wife, one uttered often by Koreans in moments of helpless despair or confoundment: “This is my fate [nae palja da]!” Although a humorously observed motif in the film is Deok-su’s bad “timing”, shown in his inability to keep his eyes open for pictures, Deok-su’s life does indeed suffer from untimely interventions from the heavens, it seems. These moments redirect his dreams and plans into a recurring pattern of difficult sacrifice for his family, starting with that fateful moment as a boy when his father anointed him the household’s caretaker, just before bidding goodbye. This life responsibility and identity seem to be represented by the hold on Deok-su’s life by his father’s spirit, which in turn is symbolised, among other things, by butterflies. But the interweaving of this cosmically personal phenomenon with the realm of national history appears most visibly in the Vietnam episode, which replays the Korean War rescue, as described above. In its relationship to (South) Vietnam, then, South Korea takes the former US position in relation to South Korea. The cyclical paying forward of American grace through the Vietnam War, however, also requires a stage-oriented historical accounting of Deok-su’s and South Korea’s growth.

Here, though, in echoing Yun-hui’s admonition in “The Old Garden” (above), Yeong-ja’s point in her argument with her husband is instructive: “Do something for yourself for once instead of only for others. It’s your life. Why are you missing from it?” Deok-su must exercise full agency in his life, she says, by finally letting go of his past in order to pursue his personal growth and goals. To be sure, the recurring force of fated interventions, or the stickiness of that past—especially Confucian familial duty—is deemed worth observing, but it must eventually give way or at least join the greater dynamic led by linear progress. Narratively, this reminder of the cumulative outcomes of “development” comes through the constant flash-forwarding back to the future of the present day, when Deok-su and Yeong-ja are doting grandparents living in relative comfort while their adult children go on holiday to Thailand. Both realities constitute a reflection and product of their collective history, however glaring is the absence of the country’s troublesome politics.

Struggles to Achieve Female Freedom

The backlash to “Ode to My Father” pointed to the harmful negligence from such a traditionalist view of South Korea’s past: a glaring disregard for the painful moments, institutions, and behaviours from the dictatorship era, especially for those who were victimised, struggled, and continued to be suppressed and left behind, even as development and democratisation were achieved.⁸³ The film’s ode to hoary Confucian patrilineal ideals of masculinist responsibility also seemed alarmingly unawares, if not antediluvian. In contrast, other films suggested that the political breakthrough of 1987 could serve as a pointed target of scepticism. The incongruity between the liberalisation promised and indeed partly accomplished, on the one hand, and the continuing repression experienced by subaltern Koreans, such as labourers and the rising numbers of immigrants, seemed to demand greater attention. And based on feature films set in the eras leading to and following the 1987 democratisation, no group is portrayed as having suffered from this disjuncture more than females, and no stubborn mechanism for the confining power of inherited fate was as debilitating as the patriarchy.

The 1990s, after all, represented historically the turbulent birth period of South Korea’s new democracy, when norms and expectations that were long sought and are now mostly settled formed through sometimes severe trials, especially the great economic crisis of 1997–1998. Before that jarring event, however, the middle of the 1990s represented the period of “globalisation” (segye-hwa). This was the reformist slogan espoused by the presidency of Kim Young Sam, a former dissident who literally held hands with many traditionalist political elements in order to win election in 1992 as the second president after democratisation. The motto and its workings in the corporate culture and economy, still dominated by the chaebol family-run conglomerate companies like Hyundai and Samsung, provide the backdrop for a delightfully witty comedy about women clerical workers, “Samjin Company English Class” (Samjin Geurup yeongeo Toik-ban [“Samjin Corporation TOEIC English class”]⁸⁴; Yi Jong-pil, 2020). Given the title, the real company alluded to is hardly veiled; but equally suggestive, in stark contrast to “Ode to My Father”, is the harmful impact of globalisation, as represented by the heavy demands for learning English and its damaging gendered consequences in corporate culture. In these terms, the ill treatment of female white-collar labour in the film demonstrates how mid-1990s South Korea, despite the outward sheen of democracy and material advancement, was in important ways still a backwater.

The notion of backwater also takes on literal significance in the story as the flowing, polluted channel for the industrial exploitation of the environment and rural areas, as represented by a village where a Samjin Corporation electronics factory operates. Otherwise, the story is set in Seoul, with the cinematography recreating the nostalgic feel of a time when the city was a colourful, bustling arena of both plenitude and stress. Reminders in everyday technologies from that heady time abound, especially communications devices that signal a rapidly transitional moment when coin-operated pay phones, beeping pagers, and early wireless handsets somehow all worked together. Also unmistakable as time markers are fax machines—along with the practice of faxing—and bulky computers, representing the company’s products and indispensable instruments in its open-area work spaces. Cultural references to the mid-1990s are most notable for alluding to American influence and its threats of domination, as exercised by the English language but also McDonald’s, Bill Gates, corporate raiding, and the Hollywood movie character “Rambo”. The latter two (three?) items stand for the aggressive, indeed hyper-masculinist pressures from abroad that bear down on this Korean corporate setting, the victims of which take on a decidedly feminine character. But it is also these women who lead the resistance.

“Rambo” is actually a real character and a main symbol. It is a goldfish, and its name is devised on the fly as the syllabic reverse of the name of its gentle human caretaker, “Boram”. She is, together with Ja-yeong and Yuna, one of the three protagonists, all female clerical workers whose indispensability to the office stands in reverse proportion to their status and privileges. They band together to reveal a cover-up of leaking carcinogens from that electronics factory and of a looming international takeover led by a suave Korean-American man lining up as the new head and face of the company. But the three women bump against the corporate walls put up against their kind, who are confined and objectified much like a poor animal in a fish bowl. Biological destiny is undoubtedly highlighted here. Early in the film, when Ja-yeong first sees the goldfish in an office that she’s helping to clear out, she asks her male co-worker about it (Image 1), to which the guy says the creature will have to be flushed down the toilet; and if it doesn’t survive, well that’s its fate. Sure enough, towards the end of the film, three goldfish appear together in a bigger tank, looking a little like the secretarial uniforms of the lead trio, to drive home the point that the fish represent the women, and vice-versa. Their efforts to save Rambo, an amusing subplot, hence works as a microcosm of the main plot to save the company and village through the empowerment of the women. Here, the fish bowl can stand for Samjin Corporation, the abusive culture of such companies, late capitalism, or South Korea as a whole, so oppressively wide-ranging are the structural forces (Image 2).

Image 1

Ja-yeong wondering about a company boss’s pet, from “Samjin Company English Class”

Image 2

Boram and her supervisor with the goldfish named “Rambo”, from “Samjin Company English Class”

There is thus a strong class dimension to this tale of girl power, although pointedly the lesson is specifically about 1990s South Korea, as well as much later—to a lesser degree—given the news of the scandalous persistence of rude mistreatment (“gapjil”) still endemic to the country’s corporate environment. In the film, some of the nastiest verbal barrages come actually from a female manager, who is one of few members of her gender at that rank. But she has a university degree, unlike the three heroines, all graduates of trade schools who must tolerate their subordination while striving to improve their English enough to gain promotion. But English is hard, and given its functioning as a tool for power in the corporate setting as well as in larger society, the obstacles are formidable. So observes Yuna, the most worldly studious and large-thinking of the trio, who recognises the structural problem and yearns for a revolutionary flight from their plight in the company and the country. The dream of greener pastures is tempered considerably, however, by the environmental destruction of the countryside and the dangers of a US-dominated world.

Not all American characters are like that, though, and this is one of the many qualities of the film that are so irresistibly crafty. For English language ability, even at a rudimentary level, also becomes a tool for discovery, agency, and subversion. And in this regard, along with the solidarity from other female clerical workers and even some formerly clueless male bosses recruited to the cause, most of all it is actually numbers, more than words, that hold the answer. The numerology of the film is definitely centred on 3: the three main characters who appear together in countlessly interesting formations; the three in the name of the company (“Samjin” could mean “Three Advances” and/or “Three Truths”); and the three unsavoury Americans, one of whom is supposedly an MIT-level genius. But numbers also stand for fundamental principles and objective truths unsullied by human abuse. The numbers speak for themselves when yielding chemical test results or when conjured by Boram, a math savant whose quick calculations help drive the women’s sleuthing of the mystery. In this quest Boram, who works in accounting and personalises her numerical affections, expresses disgust at being ordered to manipulate the figures. But the women find ways to turn this exercise of fraud into an instrument of empowerment. Thus their facility with numbers—precise amounts of ingredients in their bosses’ coffees, the logic of fax numbers, counts of company shareholders—showcases the possibilities for females to turn the tables during this historical period shortly following, while further realising, democratisation. Whether this potential progress eventually came to fruition is left unanswered by a somewhat ambivalent and shaky ending, which nevertheless does not diminish the film’s overall effect.

More secure in its portrayal of historical outcomes is the hit movie “Sunny” (Gang Hyeong-cheol, 2011), a comedy-drama set in two time frames, the present day of 2010, and a quarter-century earlier, the mid-1980s, when seven high school girls in Seoul formed a clique called “Sunny”. Their lives as teenagers are portrayed as vulgar and violent, which characterised their behaviour and manner of speech—though mostly in either a humorous or innocuous way—in coping with the vulgarity and violence of the time. Politics intrudes in the form of riot police battling pro-democracy demonstrators in the streets and secret policemen looking for the main character’s older brother, a young labour activist fighting the dictatorship. That he eventually becomes a turncoat under pressure from the regime and, later in life, turns into a labour exploiter reflects well the unsettling impact of that period. As for the “Sunny” members, in their middle ages a quarter-century later, they have kept their penchant for pugnacity and swearing but have scattered into different outcomes in terms of livelihoods, families, and health. They all suffer, however, from the lingering patriarchy, except for one member, Chun-hwa, who has managed to attain complete freedom and self-made wealth, but alas it is her terminal illness that prompts a reunion after all this time.

The main character, Nami, takes the lead in 2010 to find the others after discovering Chun-hwa’s condition in the hospital, a symbolically significant setting where much of the story in the present day takes place. Chun-hwa, as the leader of the “Sunny” comrades in high school, had warmly welcomed Nami, a new student from the boondocks of Jeolla province trying to overcome her provincial accent and hostility from another clique member, Suji. Suji, who is as beautiful as she is reserved, finally accepts Nami despite her personal antipathy to people from Jeolla province due to her stepmother’s origins there. This process of acceptance, as articulated by Nami herself, would support the regional reconciliation necessary for democratisation. Indeed all the action-packed fighting of rival girl gangs with each other and with the riot police, which is staged with limited damage as an indicator of good and evil group identities, seems designed to highlight the struggles of overcoming or accounting for the past, especially the persistence of gendered burdens. In support of this sentiment, the persistent time-switching between the two settings culminates in a pairing towards the film’s end. In one scene, Nami the high schooler speaks through a videotaped recording to Nami the mother, herself, of a troubled teenaged girl; and in another, the older Nami comforts her adolescent version on a street bench following a moment of heartbreak. This latter moment, a fantasy sequence, comes after Nami acknowledges that, for all her domesticated comforts in middle age, she still needs to follow in the footsteps of her ill friend Chun-hwa and become the protagonist (juin-gong) in her life instead of always playing the supporting role, whether as a wife, mother, or simply a woman.

The struggle to account for, in order to overcome, a painfully gendered past also frames films that deal with the survivors of the “comfort women” system, not as a story set in the 1940s but rather as more recent endeavours to gain recognition for their suffering. Two such feature films, as with the two works that connected the wartime ordeals to latter-day outcomes (Chap. 5), were released very close in time. The second film will be analysed: “Herstory” (Min Gyu-dong, 2018).⁸⁵ As the title suggests, “Herstory” is meant to draw attention to the gendered dimension of both the societal disregard for the comfort women’s experiences and of the difficult means by which accounts of their hardships gradually won recognition in the court of public opinion starting soon after democratisation. Here the court is also the government docket located in Shimonoseki, Japan, while the other main setting is Busan, with the film’s characters shuttling between these two cities, including by ferry boat, during the 1990s in an effort to win Japanese government acknowledgement, compensation, and apology.

This long, enervating legal fight is led by the film’s two leading characters, whose relationship is transformed fundamentally over the course of the film, including through a shifting of the dramatic focus from one to the other. In the beginning of the story, Bae Jeong-gil, an elderly woman in the early 1990s, appears as the long-time housekeeper for a wealthy middle-aged woman, Mun Jeong-suk, who owns a travel agency that is thriving—due partly, of all things, to “gisaeng” (courtesan) tours of men from Japan. Jeong-suk’s ignorance of this seedy dimension to her business is shattered when, at a gathering of a women’s business association that she helps lead, she is suddenly arrested for abetting prostitution. Such a personal connection to larger implications, including Jeong-suk’s struggles—as with Nami in “Sunny”—in raising a teenaged daughter, is both joltingly symbolic and key to the film’s gendered messaging. Jeong-suk also seems to be a single mother, and left unaccounted for is her fluency in Japanese, which presumably comes from her interactions with Japanese tourists.⁸⁶ Rather, what is deemed important in Jeong-suk’s character profile is her almost wilful ignorance—in mirroring that of society as a whole, including Korea’s professional women—of the backstory of these struggling “grandmothers”, including her housekeeper Jeong-gil, who quits suddenly. After walking through a poor neighbourhood in search of Jeong-gil, Jeong-suk finds her debilitated while dealing with a mentally ill adult son suffering from syphilis. He would later take on elevated significance in the storyline and serves throughout as a symbol of painful, uncomfortable historical remnants. For he appears to have inherited that condition, just as Jeong-gil was once a “comfort woman”.

This revelation produces a major turnabout in Jeong-suk’s outlook on things, and she decides to divert her attention from the travel agency to the cause of these grandmothers, initially to gain monetary relief for their difficult circumstances, but eventually for something even more difficult: official acknowledgement. The film follows the development of the plaintiffs’ pursuit of compensation in a Japanese court, enabled throughout by Jeong-suk’s resources—which eventually are depleted, forcing her into debt—and the assistance of civic groups as well as a Japanese legal team led by a Korean-Japanese attorney. The main group of four “grandmothers” includes her former housekeeper Jeong-gil, whose climactic testimony at the end of the film presents a stunning revelation. By then, the court case has taken six years and nearly two dozen trips between Busan and Shimonoseki, earning the nickname of Shimonoseki-Busan Court (Gwanbu jaepan) in reference to the ferry that plied this route. In their first trip on this boat, one of the elderly women gets sick because of the triggering of traumatic memories from half a century earlier, when she had taken the same trip under very different, indeed awful circumstances. The film actually spends a lot of time showing these women crammed into the confined spaces of moving vehicles, in likely allusion to the trains, trucks, and ships that during the war had carried them to horrific destinies. Now, however, they are shown freely chatting, reminiscing, and even singing Japanese soldiers’ songs that suddenly materialise like a permanent wound. The power of traumatic history presents itself in full, but such disturbing moments also symbolise the continuing hold of this trauma’s gendered dimension. Except for that attorney and Jeong-gil’s son, all of the film’s main characters are females, of many generations and vocations, who constantly battle the systematic structures of abuse and disregard that inhibit meaningful historical reckoning. And the outbursts of fierce opposition, often violently, to these grandmothers’ legal pursuit are all carried out by men, Korean and Japanese, consciously and not, whether in the courtroom, the streets, or even taxis.

Such a struggle to exercise female agency and escape the patriarchal cycles of recent history also lies at the heart of the most controversial of all these provocative films discussed here, “Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982” (82-nyeon saeng Kim Ji-yeong; Kim Do-yeong, 2019). When it resonated as a best-selling novel, the backlash was severe from particularly young men who insisted that it unjustly distorted the contemporary situation, and that it wilfully targeted Korean males. The film adaptation, though faithful to the novel in broader terms, presents a fuller historical dimensionality to the characters and societal context through the integration of many short flashback scenes. While set primarily in the late 2010s, the recalling of Ji-yeong’s life is concentrated in three separate stages: as a young girl in the early 1990s, as a high school student later in the decade, and as a young woman in the 2000s attending university before working at a marketing agency for several years. After getting married, however, eventually she quits her job to raise her baby daughter, and these most recent transitions seem to have contributed to her current mental illness, which appears most conspicuously as a multiple personality disorder. But the pressures had welled from more structural and historical sources as well.

Unlike films such as “Samjin Company English Class” (above) and some female-centric works set in the colonial period (Chap. 5), the family lies at the centre of the story, and as a microcosm of society at large, it imparts the protagonist’s most immediate difficulties but also a way forward through treatment. At an expansive framing, the film presents the story of Ji-yeong’s place in a matrilineal succession of four generations, starting with her maternal grandmother. She thus bears the accumulated trauma of three generations and must prevent its transmission to a fourth, her baby daughter. But the cyclical component of fate also intervenes, in the form of basic Confucian mentalities of male domination that persist, however weakening. Thus it makes sense that in Ji-yeong’s suddenly vocal manifestations of her illness, she channels the compassion and remorse of both her maternal grandmother and mother, like a shaman summoning the pain of reincarnated loved ones. These two figures also appear as key living characters, especially Ji-yeong’s mother, who carries literal scars of her sacrifices and occasionally delivers bursts of pent-up anger. Other reminders from this feminine line include the two older women’s poignant melancholy, which drives their protective affection for their daughters and granddaughters. But it is also female family members—notably, Ji-yeong’s mother-in-law and her aunts on her father’s side—who demonstrate the deep rootedness of the problem by acting as legitimating transmitters of male supremacy. Indeed, in comparison the male family members elicit a more hopeful tone. Ji-yeong’s well-meaning father, however traditional and occasionally offensive, has been moderated considerably by her mother, and her younger brother, Jiseok, has served as an accommodating receptacle of life lessons from his female elders, conditioned not to harm and always striving to improve. (This father-son gap in awareness is indexed by a gift pen and, remarkably, red bean doughnuts.) And Ji-yeong’s husband Dae-hyeon, portrayed as nearly flawless in his sensitivity to the problem’s causes and his compassionate support for finding a sincere remedy, seems to personify the promise of South Korean society as a whole to learn from its past.

The interaction and passage of the generations in Ji-yeong’s family thus act as a measurement of the country’s progress, and as a cauldron of conflicting ideas and chronologies from its history. In this regard, the most intriguing character is Ji-yeong’s older sister Eun-yeong, who serves as the voice of frank clarity and, more pointedly, of opposition: unstinting resistance to the Confucian patriarchy, to be sure, but also to the lofty public standing of the 1987 democratisation. As an unmarried school teacher in her late 30s in the present day, she still acts as a somewhat domineering matriarch of sorts to her siblings, bestowing uncompromising wisdom and constant reminders of her refusal to bow. She playfully insists, in fact, that her younger brother Jiseok bow gratefully to her for having taught him proper manners and views. When he complains about having grown up under her thumb, she responds, “Hey, think of all the advantages you [guys] have received since nineteen eighty-something”. She ostensibly is signalling her feigned disregard for the details of his birth, but she is likely also referring to the supposedly historical moment of 1987—probably Jiseok’s birth year—when democratisation took place, but for the benefit of only half the population at most. As it turns out, Eun-yeong has long held such awareness and is old enough to remember (the ultimate disappointment of) that year. In one of the film’s flashbacks, Eun-yeong as a young teenager shows her baby sister Ji-yeong where on a map of the world she wants to go. In echoing the sentiment of Yuna in “Samjin Company English Class”, most of all Eun-yeong just wants to escape her native country; in fact she wishes to travel to the Scandinavian lands, not just because of their famous progressiveness but also “because that’s where there are no Koreans”. Ji-yeong’s mother, for her part, has been more amenable to received social norms, but she too carries a fiercely righteous determination and therefore historical resonance: Although studious and smart, in her youth of the 1960s and 70s she had to go work in one of the many factories huddled in downtown Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon Stream area in order to support her two older brothers’ schooling. She thus had to forego her own dreams of becoming a teacher, an achievement that had to await her daughter Eun-yeong. “That’s the kind of thing women did in those times”, the mother tells her puzzled little girl Ji-yeong. She had thus joined the legions of underpaid female labourers who underpinned South Korea’s supposedly miraculous industrialisation, plaudits for which took on a blindly masculinist ring.

The coexistence of varying chronologies in this history hence reflects the conflicting trajectories of gendered progress in South Korea, the most conspicuous indicators of which understandably appear in the material realm of economic and technological advancement. The stages of Ji-yeong’s upbringing in the 1990s and 2000s are reflected in the changing mobile phone, which usually serves as a transmitter of good news and familial connection (both good and bad), but also as a medium of protection, including by documenting her illness. The dramatic transformation of the everyday mobile phone seems to contrast with the plodding emancipation of Korean females, with the persistence of longstanding ways attenuating, interrupting, or preventing progress. This dynamic also appears in the layout of a typical Korean apartment. In Ji-yeong’s present-day abode, the kitchen occupies the most confining space, thereby evoking the “inner quarters” (anppang) of traditional houses, while the veranda, facing the outside, lies on the opposite end. The balcony is also where Ji-yeong receives the most direct sunlight, which makes a frequent appearance in the film, conferring warmth, enlightenment, and hopes for a new day and better future. Ji-yeong’s journey—perhaps reflecting that of her country, given the frequency of flashbacks in the film—entails crossing or bridging that part of her apartment dedicated to gendered domesticity, which can enclose and trap much like a bird cage or a fish bowl, to the other side, where the walls and windows give way to open air. Or perhaps the solution lies somewhere in the middle. The closing scene shows Ji-yeong, having found her agency and purpose, seated at her kitchen table, but with sunbeams streaming through as she starts to compose her autobiography (Image 3).

Image 3

The title character of “Kim Ji-yeong, Born 1982” writing her autobiography at the close of the film

Among South Korean subaltern groups at the turn of the 21st century, females were the ones marginalised throughout history while remaining central to the family system, the realm of existence perhaps most reflective and generative of core values and collective character. This was likely why, as in other societies, modern change may have proved hardest to achieve in gender relations, for this would involve the intimate realm of the family and all its anchoring ties to the rest of society. The films set in this period of South Korea’s emergence as a new democracy thus prioritise the unfinished task of realising the promises of democratisation where—for at least half the population, but actually everyone—it counts the most. Whether for women or society at large, the recent past remains most receptive to a revisiting of this balance between cyclical recurrence and linear progress, a dynamic firmly dependent on both collective identity and readily perceived connections between past and present. Democratisation itself is taken as a positive step, of course, but also—as shown in “The Old Garden” as well as in the films centred on female characters from the 1990s to the 2010s—remains open to serious questioning amid reconsideration of what actually achieved freedom and what remained beholden to fate.