When Young-ho screams his desperate words in Peppermint Candy ’s most arresting scene, I hear a version of my father’s hope for me: I want you to go back.Īppa never did teach me about Korean history or his own roots. As the film unfolds, taking us further back, scene by scene, through Young-ho’s past, Lee illustrates the way one man’s history, including his seminal trauma, will continue to reverberate across his life. Written and directed by South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong, the film tells the story of Young-ho, a man of my father’s generation, in reverse chronological order. “I want to go back,” a middle-aged Korean man roars, staring directly into the camera, early in the 1999 film Peppermint Candy, one of the narratives I return to again and again as I puzzle over the enigmatic details of my father’s life. Upon reading his words, I shrugged his wishes away in my own adolescent disinterest. “If she learns about Korean history and culture she can understand her parents more and she can have more experience in different cultures.” He left it there. “I wish she would learn more about Korean customs, culture, and etiquette,” he wrote.
CANDY CATAPULT MANUAL
I devoured tales of bold, independent girls-girls like Pippi Longstocking, Ramona Quimby, Scout Finch-that inspired me to bang out my own stories of adventure on the sticky manual typewriter that Appa once salvaged for me from a Salvation Army.įor his chapter in my middle-school autobiography, Appa typed out just half a page about me, his defiantly assimilated, American-born daughter. He would turn to theological texts to compose his Sunday sermons over his electric typewriter.
We brought them home, and we searched for meaning. Together, we piled up crinkly stacks of plastic-sheathed library books and clamshell cases of classic films on VHS. While I never saw my mother with a book in her hand, Appa was the one who brought me, without fail, on his weekly visits to the public library. Between Appa and Umma, there was only one obvious choice: my father. Chapter 35 was a “parent letter,” in which I was to trust one of my parents to write a bit about how they saw me.
CANDY CATAPULT SERIES
I was thirteen, thrilled that my seventh-grade teacher had assigned us to write our own autobiographies, chapter by chapter, through a series of manageable homework assignments. These days, when I want to see my father, I turn to stories: the ones in my head, the ones I’m starting to discover, and the ones he taught me to love, on the page and on the screen, back when we still had a relationship.īecause I’ve been estranged from both of my parents for the better part of a decade now, I see stories as my only way of filling in the void that they’ve left in my life.īack when I still lived under my father’s roof, before he could ever know the trajectory of my life and the separation to come between us, he wrote a clue for me, perhaps subconsciously, while helping me tell my life story for the first time. This is Gwangju Daughter, a column by Hannah Bae that uses art about the 1980 Gwangju uprising to unpack political and personal traumas.
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