Echoes from Past Lives
Examining the Narrative of Identity, Belonging, and the Price of Choices
I just came back from watching Past Lives, and this film hit me so hard I could barely move halfway through. While we’ll all take different things from it, I came away with these thoughts (Spoilers maybe? But not really anything that will affect the way you see the film):
Na Young and Hae Sung are in some kind of long-distance relationship though they haven’t spoken in 12 years. After a long while of video calling from New York to Seoul, she says to him: “I immigrated twice (Korea to Canada to the US) to get to where I am, and yet I find myself looking up flights to Seoul. I need to commit to my life here.”
How much have I exchanged in return for the hope of something more than I had, somewhere else? I call myself flippantly a serial immigrant to bring an air of levity to my mosaic life history. The truth is, each migration, from China to Calgary, Calgary to Montreal, back to China, to Germany, has cost me dear pieces of myself, and a little more each time. “Some crossings we will pay for over a lifetime,” Na Young narrates. I may have escaped financial debt for now, but for my multiple crossings, I will be indentured many lifetimes over. I pay for these debts in every moment, every interaction, where the kaleidescope of my history cannot be perceived, grasped, or welcomed with a space to rest.
Na Young decides to end her online relationship with Hae Sung to dedicate herself to her writing. She takes herself, her craft, and her life seriously.
When will I finally take myself seriously? When will I remember the price I have been paying to be here, where I am, and as I am today? When will I see clearly and profoundly believe the value of the life I’ve lived?
When will I stop using my own energy against myself, questioning my every decision, imagining up all the ways something I want won’t work out, or every reason I simply should not expect things to go my way?
I have immigrated not only twice, but over my entire lifetime. I have accumulated so many selves I cannot keep them all in the same room, or even in the same body. And recently, I have been negotiating passage through even the most prosaic of spaces with my least powerful, meekest, most insecure, squeakiest self. I can barely hear myself when I speak, especially in German.
I have been offering up the best of myself, in exchange for paltry crumbs of tolerance and acceptance from places I don’t even care much to belong to, or to gain begrudging approval from people who could not possibly understand what I am.
I have given up, piece by piece, the parts of me that I think are too much for this society, that community, some circle, whatever space, until all I have left of myself are the parts I don’t think anyone would disagree with.
I have become over-polite, grossly underconfident, irrationally insecure, and bleakly dulled in vision and imagination.
Na Young in the film tells her Jewish American book-writing husband, that she didn’t imagine being where she was, but that she ended up there. She insists, perhaps only to sound convincing, that she chose this path.
Where have I ended up, and how much conviction do I have in what I have apparently chosen?
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen myself reflected so deeply in a story. As great art does, Past Lives serves as a mirror to the parts of ourselves we have not yet learned to see, or that we have left behind.