Parasites, Pandemics and The Power of We
by Maya Han
March 15, 2020
It has been just over a month since Bong Joon-Ho’s thriller, Parasite swept the Oscars and took the world by storm. In this time strangely out-of-joint, this groundbreaking phenomenon of just a few short weeks ago feels like another year, if not another era: B.C. (Before Coronavirus). Yet the quick succession of one by the other hardly feels coincidental. The global sensation of this fictional domiciliary disaster film ominously parallels the real life global catastrophe following in its wake: from the parasite-host dynamic between the Kim and Park families we have shifted to the actual parasitic SARS-CoV-2 virus and its hundreds of thousands of actual hosts; newsfeed images of street sanitizing in Seattle, Barcelona and Tehran eerily recall the fumigation scenes outside of the Kims’ basement hovel; and the claustrophobia of the restricted mise-en-scènes of the Park and Kim domiciles is a sentiment we are experiencing now, confined to our homes to work remotely, quarantine or “shelter-in-place.”
As Parasite garnered increasing acclaim and reached new audiences last fall, I was struck by numerous non-Asian friends admitting to enjoying the film while finding the film’s central conceit “implausible.” The complete infiltration of an unwitting well-to-do family by a band of imposters may require a suspension of disbelief for some; a familiarity with the key Korean concept of uri may be a useful lens for understanding the film as well as our way forward in this pandemic. Koreans often use uri, meaning “we” or “our,” in place of “I” or “my,” for things that are common to a culture or community. Your Korean friend or colleague may refer to “our husband” or “our home” when you and the speaker share neither spouse nor house. It emphasizes a sense of belonging and, unlike the royal “we” in the West with its imperial overtones, uri can emphasize connection between people rather than the possessive relationship between an owner and object. At its best, uri galvanizes the collectivist spirit to overcome crises; before things go haywire in Parasite, we see the bright side of uri in the Kims’ scrappy and ingenious teamwork. Nefarious intentions notwithstanding, Parasite can serve as an unlikely object lesson in the cooperative power of the We.
While Bong’s film hurtles inevitably to its tragic conclusion, fortunately we have more control over the real life drama unfolding before us. Rather than helplessly succumb to ineffectual handwringing or doomsday despair, each of us has agency to positively affect the outcome of this pandemic, in simple acts like leavening the horror with humor, fact-checking the rumor-mongering, or filtering out the social media noise and instead using its power to rally and marshal our resources. Amidst the alarming headlines, there has been a groundswell call to action on social media and an impressive response from far-flung sectors: from entrepreneurs repurposing factories to engineer emergency ventilators to thousands of common folk crafting DIY masks for others in need (as a stopgap for governmental inefficiency). Restaurants are quickly being transformed into food shelters; fashion designers are fabricating hospital gowns instead of evening dresses; retired doctors are answering the call at overburdened hospitals and volunteers are stepping in as online tutors for homeless and latchkey children during the mass shutdown of schools. This is the collective spirit of uri at its best. Sharing, mobilizing and supporting within and across communities is the only way forward out of this crisis.