Past Lives.

and all these immigrant feelings

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in Past Lives.

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Everyone is all “Barbie Barbie Barbie”* and I am all “Past Lives Past Lives Past Lives”.

Past Lives touched on my diasporic longing, which has no singular definition as it manifests differently for each of us of immigrant background. If you Google the words, they’ll highlight a 2021 publication by Prof. Bakirathi Mani at Swarthmore College titled “Diasporic Longing”. Mani writes in the context of Asian Americans, noting that for this population “…diasporic longings mean that ‘home’ is always unfixed, subject to change, and narrated in the process of becoming.”

Extending this definition to wider diaspora communities, I describe my diasporic longing as something beyond language, a quiet discomfort in my being, a fundamental belonging to Kisii, which is a location that I relate to as home but also an outsider. I am a New American, meaning I am first-generation, the first of a foreign-born family who attained American citizenship, and third-culture, meaning I’m not explicitly an immigrant but not exactly not an immigrant. Despite being from a very specific place that is my ancestral home because of my family’s immigration, I will always be physically and somatically tied but separate from that specific place.

In this context, I purchased my tickets for Past Lives, knowing only that it touched on themes of immigration, lost love, and that people were reportedly leaving theaters crying. I did not cry but the film did touch one of my core wounds, the separation from my place of origin, the inability to fully claim that home, and all that I hope to establish for myself in the United States as an ancestor to future generations.

Potential spoilers and plot lines highly influenced by my personal perspective and lived experience to follow.

In Past Lives, childhood sweethearts Nora (or Na Young) and Hae Sung are separated when Nora’s family immigrants from Korea to Canada. They reconnect via Skype 12 years later. Nora is studying theater in New York City, pursuing playwrighting and on her way to an artist residency in Montauk. Hae Sung is studying engineering in Seoul, preparing to study abroad in Shanghai to learn Mandarin, which will increase his career prospects. There is something intimate and unspoken between the two. And, the disruption of place, Nora leaving South Korea, leaves a (seemingly) immovable rift between the two. They let each other go. Life goes on. And then they come back together.

A BETTER LIFE and sacrifice.

In many ways, New Americans are pioneering for their families, which is a heavy weight to bear. I can never match the sacrifice of the unknown that my parents faced coming to America. Also, the standard of what I’m expected to achieve in this country is astronomically higher than the average American.

At one point, Nora states that she’s emigrated twice to pursue her dream of writing. So much has been given up in the pursuit of a life that wouldn’t be possible in her home country, or, at its biggest, much smaller than the career she envisions for herself (from Nobel to Pulitizer to Tony). She can’t have sacrificed so much, both unwillingly and willingly, to live with a part of her mind stuck in Seoul.

BEING in-between.

“He’s so Korean. I have Korean-American friends but he’s Korean-Korean. And being around him I feel less Korean and somehow more Korean.”

-Nora after seeing Hae Sung for the first time in 20+ years

Nora’s immigration age is interesting since it is old enough to have foundational memories yet young enough that she adopted a foreign mindset and cultural context that would dominate the construction of her life.

I have a suspicion that immigrants have a marked understanding of intangibility. With an early introduction to the concept of “BOTH/AND”, being an immigrant is like being left without certain words or concepts. You feel out of context or you’re constantly learning that things you have taken as a given within your household are alien to most people in your day-to-day, predominantly white environment. AND you want to fit in with that predominant culture that precludes safety AND you’re a product of your most intimate surroundings, which exist in isolation. OOF.

For me, being so Western and also Kenyan, but without speaking Swahili, leaves me with a vestigial ache, a feeling that I have a defunct internal organ that is screaming to be put to use. Like words whispered just soft enough that I can’t make them out, that if I could just make out the words, some missing puzzle piece would fall in place, a missing part of myself unlocked.

When Hae Sung and Nora “break up” they haven’t even been officially dating. Beyond immigrant intangibility, who can’t identify with breaking up with someone you weren’t even dating in the first place? If you’ve felt this feeling, you might understand how destabilizing it feels to be mourning something you never even had to begin with, i.e. intangibility.

FATE AND mundanity.

A major undercurrent of Past Lives is the concept of in-yun, or how fate brings two people together based on countless connections in their previous lives. This reminds me of a certain dharmic concept, that I can’t exactly place at the moment, but is of the thought that for every person with which we have significantly engaged in this life, there are infinite lifetimes that we’ve experienced together outside another life. Every encounter between two people is in-yun. In my interpretation, the film leaves ambiguity in the degree of Nora and Hae Sung’s in-yun vs. that of Nora and Arthur, her husband.

For whatever romanticism and in-yun that Nora and Aruthur have, the film also highlights the mundanity of their romance. At one point, Arthur strips down the relationship to a series of conveniences catered toward remedying Nora’s tenuous residence in the United States as an immigrant. Arthur and Nora came together because they were both single and living in New York City, they moved in together to save money on rent and got married sooner than they would have to expedite Nora’s green card.

There are layers of things that immigrants in this country do as a matter of survival, because it is just the thing you do, because you’re on the path toward that “North Star” of a Better Life, for yourself and an Even Better Life for your children.

*

Regardless of immigration status, it is clear to me how so many of our life decisions are made for us in those developmental baby years. We spend the remainder of our lives contending with those decisions and if we’re lucky crafting a life based on self-determination.

Nora and Hae Sung were babies when they met. They were also babies when they found each other in their twenties. In their 30s, they have some grasp on being able to acknowledge what cannot be reintegrated between them. Ultimately, I found Past Lives, to be a story about Nora’s self-determination and how simultaneously painful and liberating this can be.

No strong conclusion here! Just thanks to Celine Song for this story and Greta Lee and Teo Yoo for their gentle depiction of the in-between.

xo Jessica

*I saw Barbie too. To quote my co-worker, “We have reached peak monoculture.”

I’m listening to a lot of Beverly Glenn-Copeland this month. The versus-chorus-polyphonic of “This Side of Grace” reminds me of the songs in the Seventh Day Adventist Hymnal, which I lived for during Sabbath because I was bored out of my mind, singing was the most entertaining part of the service and this hymnal was the only reading material around other than the tithing pamphlet.

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Doing Nothing at Somewhere Good.

I had around 50 RSVPs for my meditation earlier this month at Somewhere Good! It ended up being a group of 20 or so of us. I’m eager to lead more in-person meditations and so, I got another one on the calendar for this Sunday, July 30 at 6 pm in Bed-Stuy.

This month, we’re Doing Nothing which is actually Doing Everything. RSVP FOR DOING NOTHING.

Other Updates

• I will be traveling for most of August. Expect to have coverage in my Heal Haus class and potential disruption in this newsletter (i.e. I don’t know whether I’ll send an August slowly, slowly or not). Stay tuned.

• I will be on sabbatical from Inner Fields through December 2023. In case I don’t share updates here, I highly suggest you follow Inner Fields on Instagram to stay up to date on Sangha and other programming.

Work with me.

You can find me weekly at Heal Haus, monthly at Inner Fields and five days a week at Arena.

🌞