I have very strong feelings about books that eventually become movies and TV shows.
In short, they suck.
This past week, I have been proven delightfully wrong by Pachinko, season one now streaming on Apple TV+.
What does generational trauma really mean? Is the idea that we have had a hard life, enough to excuse our behaviour as adults? Pachinko the book deals with these very themes while also discussing diaspora, the Japanese invasion of Korea, and why people derive such pleasure from oppressing other people.
That’s a lot of material to cover, and the book by Min Jin Lee does the job beautifully.
In other words, the TV series already had a high bar set, and would it exceed expectations? I can only say that it has exceeded mine, with its sensitive rendering of every character, from a seven-year-old child to a seventy-year-old grandmother.
So, what does generational trauma mean? Can we really carry forward the sins of our father?
Turns out, we all do. We pay the butterfly effect price for having been born in a certain place and time, and also to a certain family. Families give us love, warmth, a structure to grow within.
But they also give us pain, sorrow, and vulnerability.
The TV series has many good things going for it. Such as the choice to stay true to the context of the original story, and therefore have its characters speak Korean, Japanese, and English.
Language isn’t just a medium of communication. It is an identity, a way to integrate ourselves into new societies.
I have many friends who have moved to the United States and have had not just a change of heart about India, but a change in their accent as well. I do not judge them. They are doing their best to belong.
Aren’t we all?
And yet, things do come full circle, in the show as in life. The most Americanised of us still wonder about the roots we left behind, and the life that could have been. We are creatures of possibilities, and we cannot handle the concept of a closed door.
There’s one scene in particular, in episode 2, where the protagonist, now an old lady, sheds tears for the land and the life she left behind, in the interest of the life she actually managed to live.
The grandson, embarrassed by his usually stern grandmother’s sudden breakdown, apologizes on her behalf.
To this, the other old lady in the room, possibly with a very similar life experience, responds,
“Don’t grudge her her tears, boy. She has earned the right to shed them.”
A stark reminder that even the most grown-up adults are still children, carrying the weight of the years that bore down on them.
I feel a particular kind of empathy now for my own grandmother. I may know of the weight she carried, but I will never have carried it myself to know what that felt like.
I may never be able to comprehend her judgement of me or my choices, but I now find the grace to accept that we lived in very different worlds, and were therefore right in our own ways.
And maybe, with that, I break the pattern of trauma. Who is to say that life does not imitate art also?
