To Infinity, and Beyond

Editor-in-Chief Ryu Dae-hoon

wherearetacos@naver.com

 Over the past few months, the movie ‘Minari’ has been achieving glorious box-office success. It is dominating the Korean theaters, of course, and even threatening Hollywood. The film and its actors have so far been awarded with 90 trophies from foreign award ceremonies alone. A lot of attention has been focused on 73-year-old actress Youn Yuh-jung, who had the main role ‘Soon-ja’ in the movie. She alone has taken home 32 awards out of those 90.

 Youn has not always been a successful actress and nor did she have an easy life in her younger years. She debuted in 1966 and worked for five years as an almost totally unknown actress. She finally became popular after filming a movie in 1971. However, in 1975 Youn made an unexpected decision, choosing to emigrate to the United States with her husband, who at the time was still studying theology and had no income. To get by, she worked at a grocery market and was paid 2.75 USD an hour. The decision to move to the US backfired, and after twelve years of marriage she divorced her husband and came back to Korea with her two kids. She had no income and her past fame had disappeared. Do you know what happened next to her? Youn became a huge star in Korea and was nominated as a finalist for Best Supporting Actress at the 2021 Academy Awards. She is competing with Amanda Seyfried, Glenn Close and Olivia Colman.

 We can learn all learn a lot from the attitude of Youn. Hardworking is not the only thing. She kept challenging herself to make it to the next level. Even after she became well-known to Korean audiences again, she pushed herself not to fall into mannerism. Acting in ‘Minari’ is also a representative example. ‘Minari’ is just a small-sized independent film. Even though she gets the VIP treatments in domestic films, she still headed to Hollywood leaving her reputation in Korea.

 The word ‘Minari’ means ‘water parsley’ in English. In the movie, Soon-ja planted water parsley on the shore. Water parsley is famous for its firm and steady growth in any condition, just like Youn really did through her whole life.