“They were largely held outside of any kind of legal or political safeguards.”Īs living conditions in Korea under Japanese rule continued to deteriorate-and as the original contracts of Korean workers in Hawaii ran out -many Koreans found ways to move to California. “They worked under an extremely highly regimented system of labor with a great deal of surveillance and oversight, and lived in poor housing conditions,” Kim says. Korean workers were paid less than Japanese laborers and complained of being treated “like draft animals.” They were also prevented from seeking better opportunities on the mainland when an executive order targeted at curbing Japanese migration from Hawaii was also applied to Koreans in 1907. set up a system of indentured servitude, in which they lured Korean workers to Hawaii with promises of “gold dollars blossoming on every bush”-according to Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America: A History-and then had them work brutally long days on Hawaii’s sugarcane fields to pay off the price of their voyage. was looking for cheap Asian labor to develop its newest territory, Hawaii, especially due to the fact that Japanese workers there had begun to strike for better wages. At the start of the 20th century, the Japanese colonization of Korea had led to widespread oppression and poverty there. can be found in cities like Los Angeles and New York, the first wave of Korean immigrants were actually farmhands. While the biggest Korean-American populations in the U.S. Here are their stories, and the history that paved the way for them. “It feels so close to our story that I can’t believe someone made a movie about this,” Joseph Chong, who grew up on a California family farm in the ‘70s and 80s, says.īefore the film’s release, TIME asked several Korean-American farmers to watch the film and reflect on the aspects of it that resonated. “Agriculture was really the only viable form of livelihood for many Asian immigrants during this time period.”Īnd although most of the Korean immigrants who arrived following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 went into other fields, there are nonetheless many Korean-American farmers who acutely recognize the experiences portrayed in Minari-and until this point, had never seen themselves reflected onscreen with such specificity. “In the early 1900s, farming provided the foundation for the Korean immigrant economy,” Richard Kim, a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis, says. While Chung initially believed his life story to be unique, farming is deeply entwined with the Korean-American experience. But while Chung has successfully won over a wider audience, his story is also resonating particularly deeply with its subjects: Korean-American farmers and their families.
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