A still from the film "Ode to My Father" / Courtesy of CJ Entertainment

If a house is on fire and a mother and three of her children are safely outside, should she risk her life to run in and save the remaining child? “Yes, of course!” you think. All life is sacred. Each individual precious. But the answer from a Korean mother in the 1950s might be "no." Because if she went inside and died, who would be left to feed the other children? Despite the grief of losing a husband and a child, she is expected to bury her trauma, endure the anguish, and continue dedicating her life, irrespective of her own feelings, to her children. That’s what Korean mothers do.

That is one of the first lessons presented in the 2014 Korean movie “Ode to My Father” (weirdly enough, the actual Korean title translates to “International Market”). Moreover, that theme of sacrifice and familial duty is one that continues until the end. Ideas of morality, of good versus evil, or heroes and villains, are all absent. The core idea is duty. Not personal gain. Not self-interest. Duty. Duty to one’s family. Duty to one’s loved ones. Duty to one’s country. No matter the consequences or the discomfort.

The individual, in a psychological sense as we know it today, had not yet been born then. It only arrived later with the implementation of neoliberalism throughout society and the consequent atomizing of people into groups of one.

Eldest children

We experience this necessity of duty through both women and men. The protagonist of “Ode to My Father,” Yoon Deok-soo, is a Korean man born and raised in North Korea but then evacuated to the South following the Chinese invasion during the Korean civil war in early 1951. Losing his father and younger sister along the way, at a tender age he becomes the “gajang” – the one responsible for supporting the family no matter what challenges may come. This heady task, generally placed on the eldest son, is a burden understood by many in East Asia. Even young people today speak of such pressures through the terms ‘K-jangnyeo’ and ‘K-jangnam’ (Korean first woman and Korean first man, respectively). Eldest daughters whisper wistfully of their desire to pursue arts, painting, or dancing, only to eventually be pressured into a nursing degree by their parents.

The newly appointed young “gajang” Yoon Deok-soo, in a sense, represents the Republic of Korea. Thrust into a geopolitical situation he does not necessarily understand nor care about, he sets about his task........

© The Korea Times