Asia Pacific Arts: My Big Korean Wedding: interview with the director and cast of Wedding Palace.

I’m verrry interested in this film about a Korean-American/Korean wedding both from a thematic and production perspective. It’s about a wedding between a Korean-American man and a Korean woman, and was shot by director Christine Yoo with separate U.S. and Korean production teams (starring Brian Tee, Kang Hye-jung (of Old Boy and Welcome to Dongmakgol fame), Bobby Lee, Stephen Park, to name a few, and ooh! Margaret Cho as “The Shaman”?!).

Having experienced a similar situation with my brother’s wedding, and being curious about/studying Korean/Korean-American relations, I can’t wait to see how she deals with the cultural assumptions that happen on both sides of a “Korean family.” I’d always had a sneaking suspicion that my parents’ insistence on what Korean culture is and what it meant for our family was contingent on the particular historical moment they left (the early 1970s), where they found themselves in the U.S. (California, but not L.A., so not a huge diaspora community), and the course of history in South Korea since their departure (tumultuous, to put it mildly).

My generation of 2nd-generation Korean-Americans’ (dating myself here a bit) interest in contemporary Korean culture was mediated through new immigrants, crappy video tape copies of Korean dramas, relatively limited access to films and music, and a seemingly bigger conceptual distance, but that has changed dramatically with the internets (duh) and greater movement of populations for education and leisure. This is not a profound statement by any means, but easier access to Korean media has really drastically changed the way the diaspora community views and relates to Korea proper, down to the concrete level of language acquisition and preservation/continued evolution.

When I first started really paying attention to Korean dramas while studying Korean language in the early 2000s, I asked my mother (who left Korea in 1972, had been back a handful of times, and was an occasional crappy video-tape watcher of Korean dramas) about the difference between two words for happy: “행복하다” and “기쁘다.” She’s no linguist, but she told me at the time that “행복하다” wasn’t used all that often because it meant a really effusive, over-the-top, ecstatic kind of happiness. This confused me, as the dramas I saw dropped “행복” like after-dinner mints, or like a completely normal part of everyday speech. Fast forward a few years, and “행복” is a normal part of everyday speech for my “at least two hours of dramas a day” mom, and a case-in-point that:

a. language evolves,

b. language in isolation in diaspora communities can stagnate or evolve differently,

c. access to contemporary media can change that,

d. korean dramas are insidious, and

e. my mom watches a lot of drama (she now claims that I have mis-remembered this conversation, or that it never happened).

This is a minor point in the greater conversation of how diaspora ties have changed in the last decade or so, but it came up again for my family when there were miscommunications and misplaced/misconstrued expectations between my (now) Korean-American parents and my sister-in-law’s “Korean-Korean” parents. Hijinks ensued, but probably in a less entertaining way than would happen in a film.

So, long story short, I want to see this movie, I wonder how she deals with the cross-cultural issues in the story, I’m fascinated by the aesthetic differences she sees between Korean film and Hollywood film (her milieu), glad to see Stephen Park of In Living Color fame again, Korean cultural essentialism academic jargon wankery, etc. etc. (Deep curtsy).