Season 6, Ep. 8: My Father

Saturday School Podcast

We accidentally took a months-long break, recorded our last few episodes of our season in Dec 2019, then accidentally took another break, and then coronavirus happened. But last week, Ada's daughter was back to Chinese school on Zoom, so we're back too.

In this week's episode, we continue our exploration of Asian films about Asian America through the 2007 Hwang Dong-hyuk film "Our Father," starring Daniel Henney and Kim Yeong-cheol. It's inspired by the true story of Aaron Bates, a Korean American adoptee who, with the help of the Korean media, finds his birth father when he's in the army there, only to realize his father is on death row.

This is one of those episodes that rewards our regular listeners, as we compare Henney's gracious assimilation into the Korean melodrama style of acting, compared to his Chinese American/Canadian contemporaries who were too cool for school and blew up the Hong Kong film industry with "Gen X Cops" and "Gen Y Cops." We compare Henney's performance in this film to "Shanghai Calling," where he was able to act in the style of a Hollywood rom-com. And we compare "My Father's" uplifting, cutesy, very good-looking depiction of the Korean American adoptee story (where a guilt-ridden father can be forgiven and Korean America is open-heartedly embraced by Korea) to Deanne Borshay's autobiographical "First Person Plural," and her most recent "Geographies of Kinship," which shows that sometimes the adoptee experience is not that simple and questions who stood to profit off of the 200,000 babies Korea that have been sent to foreign countries.