Past Lives, a film by Celine Song

This 2023 Korean film concerns the long-term fascination of a pair of Koreans, initially 12-year-olds. Hae Sung has finally earned the highest grade on a test, usually Na Young’s spot. Her artist parents announce to Na Young and her sister that they are immigrating to Canada, and the girls should choose Anglicized names. She decides on Nora Moon. She grows up in Toronto, becomes a playwright, and we see her at a writing residency in New York.  Spoiler Alert – I'm going to discuss the whole film. If you don't want to know more before you see it, Stop Now!

Twelve years later, Hae Sung makes contact through her father’s FaceBook page, and for a couple of years the two have frequent video calls. She asks if he plans to visit, he says maybe in a couple of years, asks her about visiting Korea; she doesn’t see that on her horizon, and breaks off contact. Another dozen years pass. Hae Sung is an engineer. He still longs for her, and decides to travel to New York – and admits to friends that he hopes to see Nora. 

They are pleased to be together, but their lives have diverged: she’s been married 7 years to an American Jew she met during her writing fellowship; he recently broke up with his long-time girlfriend because, in his own estimation, he is too ordinary, and as an only child she deserves an extraordinary spouse. “Past lives” refers to reincarnation, and to the idea of Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths in which an infinity of options are reduced to our individual trajectories: “past” in the sense of “gone by.” 

Nora’s husband Arthur asks whether, if she’d become involved with a different man at the writing residency, she might now be married to someone else, and her life with Arthur would never have happened. But Nora quashes that – here they are, together, and this is the life they have chosen and created. There is no other. She does not see some could-have-been life in her memories of Hae Sung – she is who and where she is, wholeheartedly. 

But when she, Arthur, and Hae Sung sit in a bar and she and Hae Sung have a conversation in Korean Arthur can barely follow, they talk about the Korean concept of In-Yon, in which affinity is a result of thousands of years of reincarnations, and cannot be denied. He speculates: perhaps in a past life she was a queen and he was a henchman, and they had an illicit affair. Or she was a songbird and he was a branch she alit on, before she flew off. But affinity or not, she stands firm in her choices: she can only be who she is now, and to sink into regret is to abandon the present in favor of some past life she cannot live. 

The other layer explored here is the immigrant experience – she explains to Arthur that seeing Hae Sung reminds her how Americanized her Korean American friends are, and how the culture Hae Sung is part of is one she gladly shed. Arthur knows some Korean, and Hae Sung has learned a bit of English, but their limited knowledge is one more aspect of their discomfort with each other. Both are jealous: Hae Sung of the man Nora chose to build her life with, Arthur of the man his wife can so easily communicate with, who shared first love. 

And yet, there is no explosion, no fight – as adults they assess their positions and accept them. It’s good to see a grown-up film!

The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich

This complex 2008 book has more characters than a Tolstoy novel. It is not one story but multitudes, with narrators of different generations, whose experiences intertwine and haunt and goad each other. Some are Native Americans, some are German or French immigrants, in a lonely section of North Dakota where reservation land borders failing small towns. Family trees interlock and divide and plunge skyward and earthward in a confusion the reader could either diligently list, or just flip back through to see which maimed branch this orphaned brother, this obsessed banker, belonged to. 

Or you could just read it for the stories, as rich and abundant as any Salman Rushdie could conjure – a violin that saves a hell-bent young man; a grandfather with many versions of how he lost half an ear; a baby that survives the murder of her entire family in an act that reverberates through the book; a preacher so swelled with spirit that none can withstand him – and more. Love affairs and vengeance and waywardness, the whole range of humanity with our fixed notions of the world, who cannot recognize what we’re doing even as we push it to its dreadful end, crowd its pages. 

Some of Erdrich’s work has plot. This one focuses on a place and its people; as with lives anywhere, plenty happens but not in furtherance of a tale so much as spinning out events and years, creating deep impressions of prairie and its inhabitants. As readers of Erdrich would expect, her characters span the spectrum of bigotry, intolerance, and delusion while tottering on the edge of absurdity, slowly releasing their secrets onto the page.