In One Bowl of Rice, 'Pachinko' Illuminates Korea's Past
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In Korea, the entire meal centers around rice. We call the dinner table a “bapsang,” literally “rice table,” because all the banchan—and the soups or stews, or even the meat or fish—serve to accompany the bowl of rice. While a meal can just be a bowl of rice, it’s not a meal without rice.
Apple TV+’s Pachinko, an adaptation of Min Jee Lee’s award-winning novel, tracks a multi-generational family across a century, transposing the life of Sunja, born and raised in Japanese-occupied Korea at the beginning of the 20th century, with that of her grandson Solomon, who’s navigating life on the corporate ladder in 1980s Japan. Sunja is an enigma Solomon doesn’t really care to crack, but as we walk in Sunja’s straw jipsin, we relive the struggles that she, and many Koreans, endured during the Japanese occupation. Their dichotomy, and this history, is unveiled over a simple bowl of rice.
An elderly Sunja (played by Minari’s Youn Yuh-Jung) has lived most of her life in Japan, following her departure from her home country of Korea as a young woman. In Episode Three, shortly after burying Kyunghee, the sister-in-law she’d been caring for, she’s dragged to the doorstep of a fellow Korean expat (Park Hye-Jin) by Solomon (Jin Ha), who hopes to convince this homeowner to sell her land to a large Japanese corporation. Sitting at the table of an unfamiliar compatriot, Sunja takes one spoonful of rice and her eyes widen, overcome with surprise. The homeowner understands immediately: “You taste it, don’t you?” It’s rice grown in their country. Solomon doesn’t comprehend; he can’t taste the difference, having eaten so many bowls of white rice throughout his life. Sunja, however, is transported, and eventually her composure shatters. Here, in this unassuming bowl of rice from the motherland she left behind so many years ago, lies her entire past.
In the many summers I visited my own halmoni in Seoul, I spent countless meals sitting at her glass-top table, watching her fluff freshly-made rice in her fancy electric rice cooker, carefully scooping out and mounding each bowl. Halmoni was precious about her rice in a way that took a long time for me to understand. As a kid, eating rice was often a chore—I remember the struggle of transitioning from eating cereal for breakfast during the school year in America to waking up to a full banchan and rice spread at 9:00 A.M. Korea time, too jet-lagged and weary to have an appetite. My grandmother loved rice—she kept several industrial-sized bags in the corner of her kitchen, as if in fear of running out.
My halmoni, while born a couple decades after Sunja, also lived her young life heavily under Japanese control. She was forced to learn and speak Japanese, required to worship at Japanese Shinto temples, and even given an entirely different Japanese name. During the occupation, every aspect of Korean people’s lives that was uniquely theirs was snuffed out—their language, their beliefs, their names. But most of all, the Japanese took their rice.
Rice was the center and the cause of Korea’s fraught history. For most of its existence, Korea had limited trade and visitors from most of the Western world, interacting mostly with the two countries it was caught in between: China and, to a limited extent, Japan. But by the turn of the 20th century, Japanese influence was encroaching into Korea, because Japan was experiencing severe rice shortages. Land, and therefore room to grow rice, had grown increasingly scarce, prompting the Japanese to seek new land close by in order to feed the people back home.
In 1910, Japan cinched full control of Korea. Many of Korea’s land properties were taken over by Japanese merchants and corporations, who forced Korea’s existing landowners and farmers into tenant farming. Korea eventually grew to supply almost 98 percent of Japanese rice imports, leaving little rice rations for themselves. During this time, Koreans subsisted off of barley, millet, and other imported cereal grains; white rice was a luxury few could afford, reserved for weddings and funerals.
During Sunja’s breakdown, she recalls the last time she ate Korean rice: her wedding day. In Episode Four, we see how this transpires. After an affair with the wealthy Zainichi fish broker Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho), a teenage Sunja (played by Minha Kim) becomes pregnant, leaving her on the verge of becoming an outcast. Isak (Steve Sang-Hyun Noh), a recent visitor who’d been nursed back to health at her mother’s boardinghouse, decides to repay the kindness by marrying Sunja and taking her to Osaka to live with his family. After a hastily-arranged marriage, Sunja’s mother Yangjin (Inji Jeong) begs the local grain merchant to sell her a small handful of white rice, just enough to send off her only daughter forever.
The exchange takes so much from Yangjin—not only a fair sum of money, but also her fortitude and dignity. The merchant, worried about inspection from the Japanese officials, tries to convince her to settle for barley or millet at a reduced price. Eyes brimming with tears, she’s forced to reveal that it’s her daughter’s wedding day, under shame, and that her daughter is leaving the country. Rice is the only thing resembling a dowry she can offer. The merchant quietly sneaks into the back and gives her enough for three bowls: “Perhaps the taste of it will swallow some of your sorrow as well,” he murmurs.
Back in her kitchen, Yangjin tenderly pours every grain into her rice pot: washing each grain with water, massaging each kernel, gingerly separating the rice water. Pachinko's commitment to showing each step of this process is significant—rice was so scarce that even the water used to wash it was saved and used again, often to thicken stews or ferment kimchi. Yangjin carefully fluffs the rice and brings the mounded bowls to her daughter and new son-in-law. When her mother uncovers the rice bowl, Sunja’s eyes widen. The weighty presence of white rice is not lost on Sunja, whose tears catch in her throat through Isak’s prayer, releasing quietly as she takes her first bite.
For the younger Sunja, this bowl of white rice represents everything she is losing: her mother’s love, her childhood friends, her country, her home. The white of the rice is like the white shrouds used in Korean burial ceremonies, wrapping her former life and burying the soul of the country she is leaving behind.
Decades later, for the older Sunja, one bite of rice is all it takes to unearth her entire connection to her homeland. Though she has had so many bowls of white rice since—as shown when we glimpse her carefully preparing meals for her dying sister-in-law—this one bite cracks open the past she sought to bury. Earlier in Episode Three, when Sunja was efficiently putting away Kyunghee’s belongings following her passing, she muses, “I wish I understood why some people cling to the past. What good does it do?” But sitting with her compatriot, eating the rice of her homeland, she sees how far away she’s really gone.
With age, Sunja, like my grandmother, has lost her appetite for food, for life. She only eats when it’s time, or to feed someone else. But eating the rice of her homeland re-awakens something in her, reminding her of everything she’d left behind, and all the struggles she’d endured. In the same way, my halmoni aged; her ability to eat waned until the only thing she would eat was plain rice, sometimes soaked in water or tea. She regarded every bowl of rice she touched as a reminder of all the rice she, and her people, once could not have. Even though rice was now plentiful, it wasn’t so long ago that there was so little. “But now we eat white rice at every meal and we don’t even notice it,” remarks Sunja. “And you think that’s a good thing?” counters the homeowner.
Solomon believes that he’s truly doing the right thing by convincing the homeowner to sell her land for a fortune. He’s never really known Korea, and only heard stories of past struggles, similar to many of today’s grandchildren. A great deal of money could make up for all the hardship these grandmothers had been through—shouldn’t that be enough? Isn’t it great that we can have white rice every day? What does it matter if it’s Japanese rice, or Korean rice? Look how far we’ve come.
During the occupation, Japanese landholders instructed their Korean tenant farmers to sow genetically hybridized rice varieties, which would eventually come to replace 90 percent of Korea’s rice varieties. The same modernization techniques, which resulted in higher yields and quicker, more bountiful harvests, were also applied in the years following the Korean War, with the goal of recouping the country’s economic losses and mitigating its intense rice shortage. While this fueled Korea’s incredible economic growth, it also meant that many of the native rice varieties of Korea were lost in just a short period of time.
Solomon's employer sees the Korean homeowner as someone who also needs to be removed from her land, yet again, to make way for modernity. Though rice, and specifically white rice, is incredibly abundant today, so much was cast away or lost in the process. As Episode Four comes to a close, the homeowner sits at a large conference table at Solomon’s corporate office, surrounded by lawyers and her children, who are all eager to close this big deal. Here, the show does a superbly subtle job of balancing the Korean speech versus the Japanese, as evidenced by the different colored subtitles (yellow for Korean, blue for Japanese), which underline the unspoken dichotomies and perceived statuses of those present. Reluctant to sign away her land, the homeowner begins to recount in Japanese how difficult it was for her family to even procure this small piece of land. She switches to Korean as she heatedly describes how Koreans were treated like “cockroaches” that needed “to be pounded into the ground.” She forces Solomon to put himself in his grandmother’s shoes as a lawyer irritably shouts at her to speak Japanese.
Solomon begins to realize that the expat women of his grandmother's generation did what they could to maintain their Korean-ness in the face of racism and opposition: by carving out their own spaces, making homes their own, speaking their own language, making their own kimchi, smuggling in their own rice. Are they less Korean for not returning to their own homeland? Isn’t eating their country’s rice their own daily form of silent prayer and homage to the land they left behind?
Ultimately, the homeowner keeps her hard-earned land, and Sunja travels back to Korea for the first time in fifty years. From a taxicab window, Sunja catches sight of the beach where she last left her mother, doubled over in tears with grief as Sunja’s ship sailed toward Japan. One bowl of rice has brought her back here as an elderly woman, where waves of relief wash over her and she begins to sob. Every kernel of rice has always been precious, because rice represents the nuances of what was stolen from her, and from so many other Koreans during the Japanese occupation. Each kernel of rice represents freedom, represents every grain of sand on the beach of the motherland to where Sunja returns.
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