Prejudice unbottled in a migration success story
Daniel Nelson
A migrant’s occupation was set by who picked you up at the airport, recalls a Korean-American in the documentary Liquor Store Dreams.
His observation explains why so many Koreans in the US have worked in or owned what Britain calls off-licences. By the late 1980s, Koreans owned three-quarters of the country’s booze shops.
His comment may no longer be true, because most Korean liquor store owners are adamant that their children should not go into what has been an arduous, dangerous business.
Dangerous because so many stores have been the scene of shootings, robberies, arson and racial conflict.
Koreans followed the Jews and then the Japanese into selling booze, usually in poor, run-down, neglected communities. They worked long hours and prejudice often flowed both ways between owners and customers.
Director So Yun Um is well qualified to capture her father’s life in this heart-on-sleeve documentary because as she declares at the beginning: “I am a liquor store baby and I have big dreams”.
One of her dreams is this film - to be followed, she hopes, by many more. Her father is happy to be an early victim of her career, though he would have preferred to see her in a more conventional profession. Above all, however, he would like to see her married, a bone of contention, she says in her commentary, that has popped up like a whack-a-mole over the years (“How long will my poor parents think marriage is the answer to everything?”).
The film appears to set out to be a record of a migrant family’s life, starting with dad’s arrival in the US in 1981 with $100 in his pocket, and of differences between migrant parents and their children. But race quickly takes over as the theme.
So has her own memories to draw on - family members inevitably were drawn in to helping out in the store - and gently but firmly explores attitudes on both sides of the counter, as well as eruptions like the Los Angeles riots in the 1990s, provoked not by alcohol but by police shooting of Black men. Newsreel shots of the violence and destruction, and of Koreans firing at protesters are still shocking.
She earns her film-making spurs by confronting her father on camera about sensitive memories and issues, to the point of making him angry.
She also draws on the experiences of another liquor store baby, Danny, who like So, is a living illustration of the immigrant parent-child generational gap. Yet, unusually, he has returned to the fold after escaping: he got and held a dream job with Nike after walking hundreds of miles to the company’s HQ to submit his job application. I lived the ‘Just Do It’ motto, he recalls. “Now I am asking, ‘Why Just Do It?’” He’s unusual, too, in adapting to new times by leading a more inclusive, community oriented approach to the liquor business.
It’s a touching, honest, informative doc.