Recollection of ‘Past Lives’ and Dimensions of Diasporic Nostalgia
Moon Nayoung, also known for her American name as Nora, meets her 12-year-old childhood sweetheart from South Korea, Jung Hae Sung, twenty four years later. For most of the film, the dialogue in Past Lives is in Korean, despite being an American film. And as much as it was all-American, Past Lives is a heartfelt elegy to Korean immigrants: the life they left in South Korea, static from the diasporic condition they find themselves in. For an Asian-American, this condition is eulogized through double consciousness — a term inherently described as a dual self-perception to which colonized groups experience from either immigration or forced displacement.
Nora shares her grief through Hae Sung: the impact of her friendship with him re-welcomes the sensation of “being Korean” through their sweet reunion. Through their reunion, it reveals the double-consciousness ingrained in her: Nora, meeting her friend for the first time in U.S., regains her Korean identity while compartmentalizing its American counterpart. She allows herself to be Korean once again, and while this causes distraught to her as a woman married to an American white male, her nostalgia precedes her love for Hae Sung. Meanwhile, inexperienced with America, Hae Sung is introduced to signify a child lost in a foreign place, completely alien to his surroundings. Their reunion reaches an avenue where Korean identities rekindle in American spaces, while going through a process of grief of a childhood they once lost.
These diasporic conditions often rely on the intuition of “building identity” whose situation is placed under nations that reinforce hegemonic culture and homogeneous identities. In a “diverse” place like New York, this often directs to a conscious commitment to connect with one’s cultural origins, whether or not it is voluntary. The term “diasporic” and “double consciousness” often overlap, and Past Lives is an imminent by-product of the two: while the purpose of the diasporic Asian woman is to penetrate deeply into American society (and to dedicate herself to playing the American citizen), the role of class that is structured beneath this immigrant experience is seriously overlooked. Postcolonial critic Samir Dayal describes:
…The discourse of diaspora displaces the obsession with (particularly bourgeois) individual identity and the whole apparatus of normativity that sustains it. This entails, inevitably, a recognition of the endless transformation and translation of self. The self’s migrancy in negotiation is given a special saliency in the case of the migrant self. And there could hardly be a more apt image for this double consciousness than diaspora. (54)
This “endless transformation” is displayed under the heartfelt reunion we witnessed with Hae Sung and Nora. Not only this transformation is seen through their distant and aloof relationship, but also through Nora’s early childhood. The relentlessness of Nora to accomplish a Pulitzer prize after learning that Koreans are unable to achieve that same level of recognition in her homeland is particularly the bourgeois objective that Dayal observes. Here, we see young Nora explains her departure with an aspiration she had longed for as a twelve-year-old:
We assume that her parents, also both artists, are inclined to this ideology as well. The idea of a Pulitzer prize is a prompt to move to America, where hegemonic standards of literature and the arts are exclusively awarded in the West. Above all, recognition of artists in the West are far more achievable and is given a better payroll — another factor that is built upon the cultural assimilation this family experienced… or experiences.
He was just this boy in my head for a long time…
Diasporic nostalgia is a factor that functions in the cultural assimilation of Korean-Americans, and every other displaced foreign people. Emigrating as a child, South Korea is almost an indiscernible phantom tethered to the then-twelve-year-old Nora. Her fears and desires are localized by secluded Korean spaces, a country she might have initially felt she had no deep connection with. But it is with her adult self that she comes in contact with her “past life” — perverted by the rude awakening that her dreams are far more realized in New York than anywhere else, Hae Sung is a constant reminder that she is nostalgic to a life she had given littlest attention to. But Dayal implies that there is danger abound to embracing diasporic nostalgia — what the term “double consciousness” preserves as a “specific counterculture of modernity (Gilroy)” might bring complications to distinguish between the either/or of ethnical ambiguities. Dayal states that this nostalgia is “preserved at least from the illusion of a fixed identity and a pre-fabricated cultural role” (51).
Then we’re introduced to the idea of In-Yeon, the film’s recurring motif, where “fate” and “destiny” are dictators of lives, leading individuals into whichever despair or triumph they let it sweep them into. Conversing with her husband, Jewish-American Arthur succumbs into sadness upon witnessing his wife’s reconnect with a childhood sweetheart. Arthur expresses jest with a story as the “white American man standing in the way of true love,” to which Nora replies later on, “You’re forgetting the part where I love you.”
Earlier, we’ve witnessed the beginning of Nora and Arthur’s relationship through In-Yeon — mentioned by Nora, she alludes to this myth as “something that Koreans say to seduce someone.” We’ve had little exploration of their journey as a couple, and almost none as married. But it is with talks of Fate that keeps them to have these certain conversations: conversations whose resemblance to the postcolonial subject only persist in the ability to call two people conjugated in a multicultural world simply “a twist of fate”. These two individuals are brought together by force of bourgeois society and the emergence of a transnational economy. Both artists struggling to make their own name, Nora and Arthur met at an intersection where their artistic ambitions are pushed by privileges to define where they are right now. Nora is not simply, like she asserts, “where [she’s] supposed to be.”
We locate Nora at a crossroads that transcends the either/or decision to constitute her Korean identity. After all, South Korea is not a country we may say fully untethered to American influence. South Korean history is built upon years of American intervention. And like South Korean history, annexed by her husband and her former friend, Nora is caught between the complexity of this double consciousness that persists within her. She enables an internal critique while suspending the question of assimilation, allowing both people in her life assist her practical (Arthur) and sentimental (Hae Sung) needs. But most importantly, Arthur, her husband, as much as we had witnessed his disheartened gloom, prevails in this situation. Her marriage to Arthur is designated to guarantee Nora’s cultural assimilation as an American — and he might be right: he is indeed the white American man standing in the way of true love. Ultimately, Nora’s relationship to Arthur is beneficiary to her — even if it means to marrying to assure a green card, as both Nora and Arthur mentions in the film. Their love is genuinely a story that goes beyond borders, but this angle fails to suffice the explanation for the growing transnational cultural economy that defines the Korean-American experience.
While we continue the question of Nora’s assimilation as a first-generation immigrant, we also find ourselves doubting whether or not this reconnection was “ethical”. Love seemingly had no borders, but certainly this film continues to discuss it. We explore a little bit of Arthur’s pain as he accompanies Nora to a bar with Hae Sung, as he listen in a conversation he cannot understand. Between him and his awkward space from Hae Sung, there’s alienation that borders their acquaintance — not only because of Nora but also because of a cultural disconnect, emphasized under a façade of language barrier. He also mentions Nora’s Korean unconscious, to which he speaks of Nora dreaming in Korean. While this is symptomatic to Nora’s crisis of a dual consciousness, Arthur’s awareness of her ability to dream in Korean is reflected as a colonial agent.
Hae Sung tries to negotiate with Nora — under the mythical In-Yeon, he asks by wonder if they will ever meet again in another life. Nora, whose identity is fully transformed with the help of her husband as the colonial agent, chooses to detach the former friend in order to finally depart from her Korean life. When this decision is complete, we overlook the role of Arthur whose portrayal of misery as a sidelined character actually comes with advantage. This triangulation is necessary to meet Nora’s past and present life — a recurring transformation of the self, all while putting things in perspective in two completely different lives.
While diaspora and double-consciousness feature different definitions, both terms are associated with dual perception on immigrants and displaced peoples. ‘Diaspora’ is often confined to, as Dayal describes, a consistent “translation of the migrant self”, whose obsession of it becomes illusory and drenched in nostalgia. When described as a fully transformed binary identity defined by two separate lives of the migrant, shaped by the sociohistorical dimensions of both the migrant’s host and home country, it suffices as ‘double consciousness’. As we go through Past Lives, we see Nora struggling to trudge against these problems.
This film isn’t a story about regret, nor is it about a romantic triangle whose primary focus are two people who are in constant motion of what-ifs and chances between pauses. Simply, it is an honest and brutal portrayal of dissolution of ethnic influences and cultural origins to reach one’s American dream. Seemingly, Nora got what she wanted — she led her life to be a writer in America, and she did so successfully. Hae Sung’s departure locks the final completion of Nora’s American identity. His departure is her grief of the “past life” she had left — her homeland of whom she had little recollection. In the final phase of cultural assimilation, her Korean self do not survive this.
