Past Lives will break your heart in the best way
On intercultural marriage, immigration, and how we become our choices
On the plane to Houston, I watched the movie Past Lives. This one had been on my radar for quite some time, but to be honest, I was a little scared of it. On a rare night alone the other weekend, Jorge and I almost watched it, but I bailed at the last minute.
It seemed from the trailer like it might cut a little too close. Immigration, regret, lost loves, intercultural marriage – I didn’t want to go there. Every couple holds within them a set of wounds – some spoken, some not – that can be made all too fresh with just a little salt.
I was 24 years old when I moved to Mexico and met Jorge. He was 28 years old when we moved to the United States. We were young enough that we were largely clueless and naïve about the complexity of an intercultural and interracial marriage, but it’s also possible that everyone goes into marriage a little clueless about the weight of their partner’s past lives, selves, places, dreams.
As sixteen years have passed, I’ve come to recognize there are parts of Jorge I can never truly understand. Sometimes this makes for a magical connection, the deepest kind of learning and acceptance. Sometimes, it’s incredibly painful.
Past Lives tells the story of Na-Young and Hae-Sung, childhood best friends in Seoul whose lives diverge when Na-Young’s family immigrates to Canada. Na-Young adopts the name Nora Moon, eventually leaving Toronto for New York and becoming a writer. Hae-Sung remains in Seoul. He lives with his family well into adulthood, goes to engineering school, and maintains a fairly traditional Korean life. Eventually, Nora marries a white American guy, a fellow writer named Arthur.
The movie’s tension centers around Hae-Sung’s visit to New York, where he and Na-Young/Nora meet up after twenty-something years apart. The question the trailer seems to pose is: are these two destined to be together? Is the white American dude, well-intentioned as he may be, simply getting in the way? Is this love fated? Is there such a thing as fate?
But the answers, I discovered as I sobbed my eyeballs out on Flight 6375 from Pittsburgh to Houston, were so much more nuanced, profound, and complicated than that. The movie ended up being a heartbreaking, tender treatise not only on the act of immigrating, but on marriage: how, as the poet Jane Hirshfield writes, we become our choices.
At one point, as Hae-Sung and Nora are spending the day together walking around New York, he references the deep feeling they had for one another in the past. We were babies then, Nora says. We aren’t babies now. She seems frustrated. She is married, has been married for twelve years. He is single.
He doesn’t seem to understand, she implies, what marriage means: that you grow up. That you leave behind this youthful notion of destined romance for something harder and grittier and beautiful in its endurance as much as its innate connection. And yet her yearning, not only for this boy she grew up with but for the girl she was with him, the girl she had to give up and rename and still misses, remains raw and palpable. She is talking as much to herself as she is to him, telling herself the story of her transformation, how hard she has worked for it, and how she has learned to live with its losses.
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