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Life may be unraveling back at the trailer,

but the minari flourishes on the creekbank.

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In Lee Isaac Chung's  film Minari, there is a scene where the recently arrived grandmother, brings her grandson to a creek behind their house. There, she has planted the seeds of the vegetable which lends the movie its name—despite the plants arriving in America in her luggage, they have quickly taken to the wet soil, almost blanketing the riverbank despite the entirely foreign environment.

“The wind is blowing, the minari are bowing as if they’re saying thank you,” she says.

TATLER

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The ability of minari to grow anywhere like a weed, as Soon-ja explains to her grandson, no doubt contributed to its widespread culinary use across East Asia. Though David at first brushes off minari as a "useless" relic of Korea, much like his dismissive attitude of Soon-ja, the importance of the crop becomes clear when, towards the end of the film, a turn of events leads to Soon-ja's minari to become the family's only way to make a living.

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The

vegetable's resilience

becomes a metaphor

for the trials and tribulations

that the family faces in uprooting themselves

and transplanting their lives in a new place,

adapting to the environment to survive,

and eventually, thrive.

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As Chung puts it:

"The interesting thing about it is

that it's a plant that will grow very strongly

in its second season after it has died and come back.

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So there's an element of that in the film...

It's a poetic plant in a way for me.

"Minari is the Korean name for oenanthe javanica, a perennial herb that is grown throughout East Asia. In every country it is cultivated, minari has picked up a different name: Chinese celery, Japanese parsley, Indian pennywort, Java water dropwort, or water celery.

It is the only species within the water dropwort family that is edible, all others being extremely toxic. 

Within Korean cuisine, minari is commonplace thanks to its crunchy, hollow stems, and an abundance of leaves that taste like carrot tops or celery, with a slight peppery and bitter flavour to boot.

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Minari has also been used in traditional

folk medicine since antiquity,

and was

believed to

have a detoxifying effect.

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“As I researched the plant,” says Chung,

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“I learned that it dies away in the first year

and thrives in the second,

which is an incredible reflection

of many immigration experiences.”

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edu university of Utah