Cry With Me

    I took a trip to New York with some friends and a professor recently. The main reason for the trip was to visit the brand new Korean Culture Center that had JUST opened up the week before we got there. We took a tour around the building (well, only the finished rooms), and they had a library and a kitchen and a traditional Korean welcome room with heated floors. They also invited us to watch a Korean film in their theater room. The movie was called "Past Lives".

    The movie started out with two girls deciding their English names, for reason they have yet to figure out. Then, while at the dinner table, her mother asks who she has a crush on at school. Nayoung enthusiastically says she has a crush on her seatmate. Haesung. Their mothers then chaperones the kids on a date with each other. Nayoung's mother then reveals to Haesung's mother that they will be immigrating to Canada soon, so she wanted to give Nayoung great memories before they left. The day before they leave, Haesung tells Nayoung something that I forgot, and it might be important, but we're moving on anyway. The family moves and they spend the years trying to assimilate to the Canadian Culture. 12 years flies by and Nayoung, now named Nora, has moved to New York to become a world renowed playwright. While on the phone with her mom, she is scrolling through old contacts on Facebook when she sees a message on her father's profile. The message is from Haesung, asking for a way to contact Nora. She reaches out to him and they video chat over Skype. The first time they've talked to each other in 12 years. They talk for months after that and they get closer and closer with each video call. They try to make plans to meet up, but they fall through because they are in such busy time periods in their lives. Eventually, Nora brings up to Haesung that they should stop calling, especially if they won't be able to see each other in person anytime soon.

    During the hiatus, Nora goes to a writers retreat and meets her future husband, and Haesung goes to China for an internship and meets his future girlfriend. Another 12 years pass and Haesung decides to finally go to New York to visit Nora. He doesn't say it's to visit Nora, but we all know he went just to visit Nora. They meet up in person and this is the first time in 24 years that they have seen each other face-to-face. They have a day full of teasing and reminiscing and maybe even longing for each other. When Nora arrives back home to her now-husband, Arthur, he begins to unload all of his worries and insecurities onto her about how he feels secondary in her life compared to Haesung. She reassures him that Arthur is the one she chose and not Haesung, and that calms him down in the moment, but it becomes a problem again later in the movie. The day before Haesung leaves to go back to Korea, Arthur suggests that the three of them go out for drinks. So they do. And it's a little awkward at the beginning because Nora is having to translate the conversation for the both of them, but then Nora starts having a deep conversation with Haesung about how they could have been fated together. He even mentioned how he was having thoughts about being together with Nora and even starting a family together. Inyeon is the major theme that the movie is centered around. It's a Korean word basically meaning a connection between two people in their past lives. There is obviously a strong inyeon between Nora and Haesung, but because they were separated and Nora is now married, they will never get to find out if they were meant to be together or not.

    At this point in the movie, I start crying. The fact that they can't be together because fate had brought them down these drastically different paths just broke me. Because what if they had just kept in touch? What if Nora never met Arthur? What if Nora and her family had never moved away? Would they have been together by now? Will we ever get the answer to those questions? There was even this scene where Haesung was about to get into his taxi to go to the airport, and he says that they were probably together in another life. And he's fine with that. The fact that he is ok with the possibility that they were together someway, somehow in some other life is so sad. At this point, Nora and I were both sobbing. I think she was crying because she knew that they were fated for each other as well, but because she was the one to break off contact with him, she is haunted by the fact that she will never know what could've happened between the two of them if they had kept in contact. She will forever live with that regret. The regret that she left him behind while he never stopped thinking of her for a second. This movie truly broke my soul into pieces. It made me realize that sometimes fate doesn't bring you down the path you expected. You can do everything in your power to change something and fate still won't budge. However, that's not always a bad thing. Sometimes fate will take you down the path towards success or happiness, even if you try to get in your own way. Overall, I rate this movie a 10/10 and I strongly recommend that you watch it, even though I already spoiled it haha

Signing off,

K.L.