– Spoilers Alert –
As the final scene faded into silence, right after Nora buries her teary face into her husband Arthur’s arms, I remained still, trying to contemplate the meaning of this delicate story. It left a bittersweet aftertaste with me in the following week.
The numerous reviews on critic’s forums certainly didn’t do this film justice, not because the comments were negative, but because most of them accepted it as a love story. This prompted me to express my interpretation which resonates with me, someone who shares a multicultural background with the protagonist, Nora. The film touched on several cultural and social subjects, and the director unites all of them brilliantly with an overarching theme – identity and belonging.
This story is certainly not about love, but about life, as the title suggests. It is a story about life, told through the lens of romance.
Primary vs Secondary Identity
The story follows Nora, the protagonist, from her childhood in Korea, to the adult Nora who had immigrated to Canada with her family, then immigrated to New York alone. Through the timeline, Nora has transformed from a “Korean-Korean” into a “Korean-American”, where neither we, nor Nora herself, can construe if this outcome was self-imposed or organic.
The film began with the scene where the protagonist and her sister were choosing their English names, and their parents preparing for the documents for immigration. Na Young is now Nora.
Several scenes conveyed the same message where Nora slowly adopts a secondary personality and identity, like when she struggled to type Korean on an English keyboard, and when she mentioned to Hae Sung that she only spoke Korean to him and her mother, which explained why her Korean wasn’t as good as her English.
12 years have passed, and Nora reconnected with Hae Sung, and it is apparent that she is trying hard to hang onto her Korean identity and culture, by staying in touch with Hae Sung, despite the time difference and physical distance between them.
Some might argue that this is a romantic setting about two childhood friends reconnecting and trying to reignite the love they had, but this is not the case, as they never mentioned love in their exchanges. The most intimate line they said to each other during this virtually connected phase was “I miss you”. We can interpret that Nora felt nostalgia rather than love, for Hae Sung.
“He was just this kid in my head for such a long time. And then he was just this image on my laptop. And now he's a physical person. It's really intense, but I don't think that that's attraction, I think I just missed him a lot. I think I miss Seoul.”
– Nora
24 years have passed. Now we are in Nora and her husband Arthur’s bathroom where she said the following things after she met Hae Sung in person in New York.
“It's so crazy to see him be this grown-up man with a normal job and a normal life. He's so Korean. He still lives with his parents, which is really Korean. And he has all these really Korean views about everything. And I feel so not Korean when I'm with him. But also, in some way, more Korean? It's so weird. I mean, I have Korean friends, but he's not, like, Korean-American. He's Korean-Korean.”
– Nora
Now, Nora has already been immersed in her secondary culture for over 2 decades. She has completely left her Korean identity behind, to a point where she struggles to accept the Korean way of living; to a point where meeting another Korean-Korean makes her feel both out of place, and a little more in-touch with her Korean identity.
The Belief of the “Superior” Western Culture
Another key subject that’s explored in this film is the belief (among Asian cultures) that the Western Culture is superior. As Nora’s family was preparing for immigration, Nora explained to her classmates that her father believed that he would thrive as a playwright in Canada, and Nora would have a higher chance to win the Nobel Prize if she left Korea.
And as we watch till the end, Nora (and her father) hasn’t necessarily achieved anything she believed the Western culture could enable her to achieve.
“Is this what you imagined for yourself when you left Seoul? Is this what you pictured for yourself? Laying in bed in some tiny apartment in the East Village with some Jewish guy who writes books? Is that what your parents wanted for you?”
– Arthur
Nora’s response to that revealed her disillusionment of this belief. And Arthur’s statement confirmed it for the audience – that the Western Culture is indeed, quite the opposite of its excessive glorification and association with opportunities to succeed.
“You’re asking me if you, Arthur Zaturansky, are the answer to my family’s immigrant dream?”… “This is where I ended up. This is where I’m supposed to be.”
– Nora
“It’s just that you make my life so much bigger, and I’m wondering if I do the same thing for you.”
– Arthur
The Guilt of Abandoning an Old Identity
Up to this part of the story, where most critics interpret as Nora’s unwillingness to let go of a childhood love, I’d like to see it as her sense of guilt and betrayal if she had to leave her old identity, and old life behind, to fully embrace her new identity of a Westernized Nora.
“It's like planting two trees in one pot. Our roots need to find their place.”
– Nora
Most people would question, why can’t someone embrace both their identities? I guess the answer is yes, but if you are bilingual or multilingual, you’d understand a little more that you tend to take on a different version of yourself when you are speaking a different language (read more about this in my article here). There’s always a dominant identity or personality that pushes the other out.
And Nora struggles to maintain a balance, to find the space in a pot for both roots.
Free Will vs Destiny
When Nora and Arthur met in the artist residency, Nora spoke of a Korean (and Asian) belief (called In Yun: 姻緣), where fate contributes to what happens in our lives.
In another scene where Arthur and Nora were in bed, and Arthur imagined a life which Nora made different choices and suggested a different ending. To which, Nora said, “This is where I ended up... this is where I'm supposed to be.”
Arthur’s perspective on where we end up in life is mainly decided by us and the choices we make, while Nora leans towards the credence that it is destiny or fate, or what Koreans call “In Yun”.
In the scene where Hae Sung and Nora went sight-seeing, Hae Sung brought up the following question.
“What prize do you want to win nowadays? When you were little you wanted to win the Nobel Prize, and twelve years ago you wanted to win the Pulitzer. What do you want to win now?”
– Hae Sung
I couldn’t help but contemplate the irony in which, Nora did believe that her decision to choose to leave Korea was to achieve something she could not in Korea, which suggested that she did believe she has a choice in what she wants in life.
Identity and Belonging
The overarching theme in this film was manifested by both Nora and Arthur, from different perspectives.
One scene that stuck with me, was when Arthur felt inadequate that he couldn’t understand Nora when she talked in her sleep in Korean, which led him to learn Korean just to understand his wife more.
This scene perfectly epitomized the theme of identity and belonging – To see someone completely, we need to understand them. And to fully understand them, we need to connect to all their identities.
On the flip side, rather than taking up a new language to understand her husband, Nora learnt English as an immigrant to be accepted by the Western culture, in hopes that she finds a sense of belonging to this new foreign place. And unintentionally, gradually, she left her other identity and culture behind.
The contrasting rationale of Arthur taking up a new language versus Nora’s, illuminated the gap in their relationship, and in a way, certain privileges of Westerners in the context of immigration. And I think that Nora’s refusal to address this gap (reflected in her reluctant attitude of “it is what it is”) is partly because she believes that Arthur will never understand her fully, even by learning her language.
And here, I can establish the understanding that Arthur is a representation of Nora’s secondary culture, while Hae Sung her native. And they are strongly tied to how Nora sees herself and how she exists in these two very different worlds.
Perhaps this can explain why Nora found it challenging to cut ties with Hae Sung, a childhood friend she no longer can relate to, both in life and in experience: because she cannot feel an absolute sense of belonging to the Western culture.
At the bar, the director placed Nora in between Arthur and Hae Sung, directly depicting Nora’s dilemma, prompting her to make up her mind in this in-between and limbo state of finding a sense of belonging as an immigrant.
And finally, Nora has decided to choose to belong to her American identity, to surrender the notion that life is purely In Yun, and to accept that she is the person who contributes to how she wants her life to end up:
“The Na Young you remember... doesn't exist here. That little girl did exist. She's not sitting here in front of you... but it doesn't mean she's not real. Twenty years ago, I left her behind with you.”
– Nora
In the end, she mustered the courage to let go of a life that she has long lost touch with, and ultimately, she finds peace.
This film is an absolute masterpiece – subtle yet powerful, tragic yet beautiful. The director explicitly forced me to contemplate life – what have we sacrificed to become? And are we making what we've sacrificed, worth it?
“If you bought a ticket to see this show, took the subway or a cab to be here, it cost you something to be here, and spend a couple hours with these old women. That makes you some kind of immigrant. And... all this cost me something too. I crossed the Pacific Ocean to be here. Some crossings cost more than others. Some crossings... you pay for with your whole life.”
