Stakes in the Land
A meditation on the Korean film Ex Huma
We are the product of our roots, and our feelings stem from a well that was planted generations ago. We are but a moment in time, an expression of that history.
When I was in the 4th grade, my parents sent me to Korea to experience Korean education. I don’t remember everything I did in school, but I clearly remember an assignment on what the future would look like. I drew a picture of Korea without the DMZ and juxtaposed the Korean flag's red and blue circle on top. My grandfather helped me outline Korea on two pieces of calendar paper, most likely A2 size. We taped the pieces together, top to bottom, because the picture was so large.
I remember that he was proud of our drawing and I overheard him talking to my grandmother about it. He said it was a very meaningful idea. He was originally North Korean and escaped as a refugee to South Korea during the chaos of the Korean War, but after the DMZ was established, he couldn’t see his family again.
I thought about the legacy of land as I watched Ex Huma, a Korean thriller mixing history and fantasy, which was released in February of this year. I was in Korea when it was on top of the movie charts.
The story revolves around a group of geomancers (Korean folklore practitioners) that try to exhume the grave of a patriarchal grandfather who sold out Korea during the Korean war. The plot is accessible online, and you can translate (through Chrome) some of the Korean sources I’ll link below.
In one scene, the main character has to make a choice between continuing to dig up the grave and stopping. His geomancer partner asks him why they should continue at the crux of the film. In Korean, he says:
“땅이야 땅, 우리 손주들이 밟고 살아가야 할 땅이라고!”
“It’s land. It’s land! This is the land that our grandchildren will have to step on and live on!”
He continues so that the group can remove a Japanese spike, which was planted in the middle of Korea during colonization.
What might these lines of sacrifice mean? For one, Choi Minsik’s determination is a way to heal the scars of the past, albeit in a very Korean way, through Korean traditional practices.
Every Korean alive today has some ancestral connection to the Japanese occupation of that national memory of suffering. That suffering takes form in Korean han, a sense of sorrow, resistance, and anger.
Japan and Korea have a complex relationship going back thousands of years, with a history of colonial resistance. The trauma of being colonized and external forces led to the Korean War, which was distilled down to the breakup and destruction of families.
That trauma lingers in Korea’s national identity, especially in our ties to the land.
My grandfather didn’t believe in the partition of Korea because a part of him, his family, was still up there, past the DMZ, past the mountains in the agricultural town of Hamgyeong.
In the last year of his life, he told me about his parents: about what they did for a living and what they were like. He told me about the winters in his hometown and the heavy coats they would wear, not having any kind of central heating in the 1950s.
He told me this to give me a sense of the land. Like the main character in Ex Huma, he knew it was something I should know, experience, and live on. I wish I could go see it—see what he saw and felt.
Sources and inspiration:
https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/culture/culture_general/1131880.html