Steven Yeun Discusses the Critically Acclaimed Film “Minari”

STEVEN YEUN, ACTOR: Well, minari is a beautiful metaphor. Isaac, our incredible writer and director, taking a little bit from his own life, grasped onto this plant that really spoke so deeply. It is supposed to represent, on a larger note, minari, actually, you harvest the second growth of it. So the first growth dies, and the second growth thrives, and you harvest that. And it also purifies the soil and the water around it. And it was kind of representative of, I think, from my point of view, a boundless love that is represented at the hands of the grandmother, and so, hopefully, something that we can all kind of relate to.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You said, Isaac, the writer/director, drew on his personal life, his personal story. You also — I want to ask how it how it reflects on your own experience as well, because you were born in Seoul, and then your family moved first to Canada, before coming to the United States. We have this picture of you in kindergarten. And a close look at it, it’s quite revealing, because you have got all the all the kids in the kindergarten, and then you’re sort of a little bit away from them. They’re all jammed together, and you’re sitting a little bit away. What was it like being a little Asian kid in North America at that age? What do you remember?

YEUN: I think a lot of things happened. For me personally, I think it was the beginning of maybe feeling the feelings of isolation, of kind of having the framework that you understand up into 4 or 5 years old, when I immigrated, kind of reconstituted or kind of broken down. And the difficulty of immigration for second-generation kids is also that you’re further and further pulled away from your parents’ generation, through language, through your assimilation. And it happens slowly over time. And I think that has been kind of a profound theme overall in my life, that I think initially in my life served as something to either ignore or to be considered something sad. But I really do view it as this wonderful new perspective in my adult years of just understanding the singular place from which I exist and I kind of speak from. And so, yes, it’s been a crazy ride.