After last week’s unrelenting tragedies, “Chapter Eleven” is a relief: Kite flying! Chicken-thief hunting! Yakitori dates! A horny Kyunghee! Mozasu running around and wishing he could live in the country forever! Thank God, honestly, not that it’s all roses. It’s still 1945, and Yoseb is still in Nagasaki. Though the emergence of a romantic prospect in Naomi is welcome news to Solomon’s crumbling life, he looks and sounds like someone who is about to cross a line from which there is no return: He stipulates he only has about three months left in his bank account, so not much to lose. Hansu’s return to Sunja’s life makes me nervous, too; he is tender and reasonable here, but his proximity to the boys and to Sunja sets off a current of unease just under the wholesomeness of their new bucolic life.
Cinematographer Ante Cheng’s camera loves the light of the country — the expansive, bright clarity of daytime and the near-total darkness of night. The soft-blue shadows in the sequence when Kim Changho talks at length about what has led him there, waiting on a stakeout with Noa, Mozasu, and Kyunghee, has a cabinlike feel, evoking the intimacy born out of time spent in quietness and communion with nature. In the country, it seems, our characters are able to finally take a breath. But they sure were skeptical when they first arrived.
1945
“Chapter Eleven” picks up exactly where “Chapter Ten” left off: Tthe air raid’s sirens overwhelm the landscape, and you can’t see a thing. I held my breath as Sunja, Kyunghee, and the boys made their way home, terrified that one of them might get lost. Hansu and Kim find Sunja in the chaos, and Sunja introduces Hansu to Kyunghee as a “family friend.” They’ve come to take them to safety in the countryside, but the cautious, prudent Kyunghee is reluctant to leave without her husband’s permission. “Once you get his permission,” Hansu warns her, “you’ll be dead.” Sunja reassures her sister-in-law that they can trust the men, and as they pack, Kim proves his dependability. Kyunghee is burying family heirlooms for safekeeping when he comes to rush her along, saying there’s no time. We see Kyunghee raise her voice at a man for the first time. “I’m not stupid,” she snaps. Seeing she won’t be turned away from the task, Kim gets on his knees to help, telling her to finish packing while he buries the rest of the heirlooms. It’s a small but significant turn in the gender dynamics of Kyunghee’s life, and perhaps a harbinger of other disruptions to come …
Sunja and the boys, in the meantime, are packing their own belongings. Noa makes sure to bring a book, and Mozasu to bring bamboo spears. Though the circumstances are different, Sunja’s bundle-tying calls back to when her own mother packed her things before she left Yeongdo; they are the movements of a family that, in order to ensure survival, has to constantly be uprooted. In the car, with Kim in the passenger seat and Hansu at the wheel, Sunja remembers Jiyun, the young Korean mother who was her brief partner in rice-wine fermenting. Out the window, Noa spots Pastor Hu, carrying a pile of books. Mozasu looks on at the crowd, which soon begins banging at the car’s windows, begging to be let in. As they leave their life behind, darkness envelops the sky of Osaka. Barely visible in the car, Noa watches as a fleet of planes illuminates the horizon with dropping bombs.
In the countryside, by contrast, the light is crisp and clean. It floods the car, blanketing the family in the kind of hopeful light we haven’t seen at least since Sunja and Hansu snuck kisses at the cove back in Busan. Still, the little house where Hansu and Kim take them looks like it could be in one of the “before” pictures of Fixer Upper, not that shiplap would make anything better here. Kyunghee is more worried about having a kitchen, or a bed, both of which are absent. If that weren’t concerning enough, there’s also the fact that Kim will live there with them. That’s impossible, of course; that man is a stranger to the women, and Yoseb doesn’t even know that they’re there. Sunja and Kyunghee try to argue that they both grew up in the country and can take care of themselves, but Hansu shoots them down: Kyunghee’s family had servants, and it’s been more than a decade since Sunja has left the boardinghouse. His tone reminds them that in a house with a man, a woman doesn’t have a say. Over and over again, Sunja and Kyunghee find themselves unable to choose, indebted unfavorably to men who don’t hesitate to wield power over them.
Speaking privately with Hansu, Sunja sets her boundaries. “Though I am grateful for all you have done, I want nothing more from you,” she says. Accepting his help scares her — emotionally, certainly, but mostly because of Noa. She worries that her son will start figuring things out if he spends time around Hansu. When Hansu wonders, out loud, whether she thinks he would ever jeopardize his son, she reminds them that at this point they are strangers to each other. She is no longer “that girl at the cove.” Like her mother, she is now a widow. It dawned on me here that it couldn’t have been more than a couple of days since Isak’s death by the time they have this conversation. She hadn’t even had time to consider herself as a widow, to properly mourn her husband’s death. Sunja’s life is always changing despite her.
Time does go by, mercifully, and in June, Sunja and Kyunghee work alongside other men and women under the watchful eyes of a foreman and Kim, who stands up for them when their Japanese co-workers mock them cruelly. Mr. Kim is looking very well in this country light and his tank top, something I’m sure Kyunghee has already noticed. But he’s not just good-looking; he is also a spirited, natural companion to the boys. Noa and Mozasu are chasing after a chicken — for whose escape Mozasu cheers, hoping she’ll break free — when he comes to aid them, catching her in one fell swoop. “This is so much more fun than school,” Mozasu says, beaming, feeling grateful for “Koh-san” and the new luxuries of his farm life.
He only has reason to feel luckier when, like a suited-up Santa Claus, Hansu comes by the farm with a suitcase full of presents, including candy, a radio (!), a kite, and newspapers for Noa. He encourages Noa to practice his reading comprehension, emphasizing how he should pay as much attention to the meaning of the words as to the letters; Sunja looks concerned with it all, but the disarming ease of Hansu’s interaction with the boys makes my heart ache. Finally, and so unexpectedly in the middle of a violent war, when humanity’s capacity for evil was at an all-time high, the boys can have a few nice things. Even Sunja and Kyunghee laugh in delight as Hansu shows the boys how to fly the kite; but it’s not long until a fleet of planes flies overhead. Seeing her concerned expression, Kim gently reassures Kyunghee that the planes are going in the opposite direction of Nagasaki.
Kyunghee is not wrong when she reminds Sunja, later that day, that it’s impossible to know for sure, though. “You can’t promise me he’ll always be safe,” she tells Sunja as she assembles a package with newly sewn clothes for her husband. Kyunghee has been unfaltering in her devotion; but she is also a bit of a dreamer to Sunja’s pragmatic sturdiness, a follower to Sunja’s lead. It’s striking to see her speak so openly about what goes unsaid: In a way, she now occupies the role Sunja took on when she brought meals and clothes for Isak in prison. No one knows if these home comforts actually reach the men or if they make a difference; but it’s all they can do to keep moving forward.
It takes daily courage to be a member of the Baek family, and “Chapter Eleven” peels back the different layers of what that virtue might mean in a particular circumstance. There is the courage to accept uncertainty; to rely on a man who has hurt you; to keep going when the future is inconceivable. But there is also Mozasu’s courage when he promises the farm’s foreman that he will catch the thief who has been stealing the eggs from the chicken coop. When he divulges his plan to his mother, she immediately says no, it’s too dangerous. But Kim is sure that the thief is a desperately hungry person, not a dangerous criminal. With the help of the boys, he can catch the delinquent. Leaving Sunja puzzled, Kyunghee asks if she can come along to the stakeout Kim is organizing with the boys. “It sounds exciting,” she says, by way of explanation. It’s true, but she kind of sounds like what I sounded like when I told boys in high school that yeah, totally, I would love to sit on the couch and watch you play three hours of FIFA.
Later that night, the four of them lay out by the chicken coop wearing matching white bandannas and waiting for the thief to come around. Mozasu is impatient, but Noa takes the opportunity to learn a bit more about the mysterious Kim. Answering Noa’s question about how he met Hansu, Kim tells them about how his father lost his land to the Japanese occupation and later killed himself in the seized fields. After that, he left home and started working down at the docks, where he met Hansu. Just then, they see a group of thieves entering the coop. Kim and the boys circle them but most manage to escape, save for one, a boy who used to bully Noa at school in Osaka. Food is scant at the temple where he’s staying. Kim gives Noa a choice: They can let him go with a warning or report him to the teachers at the temple, who would no doubt punish him. Noa lets him go — of course. He learned well from his father’s forgiveness of Pastor Hu; and Kim himself complements his grace by gifting the boy a basket of eggs. Mozasu is indignant at his brother’s leniency, but Kim teaches him: “It’s better to have an enemy owe you than the other way around.” It’s a new read on Isak’s ethos of mercy, but a valuable lesson nonetheless.
“It’s a wonder if we’ll be able to sleep tonight,” Kyunghee says to Mozasu when he gushes over how exciting the stakeout was. But it’s something else that keeps her up. Kyunghee has the unmistakable look of someone who is sick with desire. Moisture weighs down the heavy clouds over the country. On a walk, Kyunghee sees Kim drinking shoreside, his back to her. He doesn’t turn around until she’s gone. Lightning breaks as if to explain why everyone is all of a sudden sweating.
1989
It’s not just Kyunghee whose love life is about to take a turn. When, in Tokyo, Solomon goes to Shiffley’s to tell Tom about the landowner’s new resolution to sell, Naomi makes eyes at him: first across the office, later in the elevator. It’s a bit hard to convince Tom of the legitimacy of the old woman’s decision after she backed out the first time, but Solomon appeals to Tom’s own insecurity, teasing him with the opportunity to go home with the money made from the deal. Accepting the transfer to Tokyo was a blow to Tom’s dignity, though he swears it wasn’t his fault that one of his client’s accounts was filed with irregularities. With the bag collected from the deal with Abe and Colton, Tom could potentially quit the firm and start his own business back in the States, near his children. Much like Hansu’s machinations more than 40 years before him, Solomon offers Tom a deal he simply can’t refuse, though “of course, there are strings attached.”
On his way out, Solomon stops by Naomi’s office, formerly his own. They’re flirty in that I-hate-your-guts kind of way, which seems to be Solomon’s preferred style of romance, if we’re to remember the way Hana talked to him. Solomon breaks the news of the landowner to Naomi, and then goes on to patronize her. He tells her that she will never run the firm, no matter how much she deserves it; she’s better than all of the guys, but alas, she is but a suited-up woman. Matching his freak, Naomi follows him into the elevator to ask him out. They go on a date to a yakitori stand — Solomon’s pick — which doesn’t impress Naomi but is what he can afford at the moment. Still, they have a nice time. Solomon wears his heart on his sleeve: He knows he’s at a low point, and if that doesn’t work for her, there’ll be no hard feelings. But he promises her that it won’t be that way forever. From here on out, he will only fuck over the people who deserve it. Naomi cheers to this absolutely insane statement. Maybe they’re made for each other.
The older Sunja also meets someone in “Chapter Eleven,” though the jury’s out on whether they are flirting or just being nice to each other. A man wearing suspenders and a bow tie approaches her at the grocery store to tell her that he witnessed Solomon’s outburst from “Chapter Nine.” He agrees with Solomon that the man behind the counter was out of line, and he thought Solomon was courageous to say something — there’s that virtue again. This compliment toward her grandson’s outburst leaves Sunja uncomfortable, so the man excuses himself. But later, when she sees him feeding the birds in the park on the way home, she sits with him.
At the store, the man approached her while she was by the egg cartons, and feeding the pigeons is an explicit callback to her time on the farm, surrounded by animals and nature and a touch of lightheartedness. They have a nice conversation, and as she gets up to leave, she apologizes for Solomon’s behavior again. She explains that he’s having a hard time, though she’d hoped things would be easier for him; when she was his age, she was standing “in ration lines and training in air-raid drills.” The man is the first older person in the show to suggest that just because he didn’t live through the war, poverty, or abjection, it doesn’t mean that life is easy for Solomon. In fact, he tells Sunja, “No matter the times, life is never easy.”
Life may not be easy, but Solomon hopes, at least, that he can make it more abundant and just, and therefore more bearable. Watching the Korean landowner leave her place from the back seat of a car, he gets a call from Tom telling him that they’re all in now. The deal is done. The land belongs to Abe-san.
Pinball Thoughts
• Though I’m not a Japanese or Korean speaker, I am bilingual, and it pleases me to see the show’s inventiveness in the closed caption department. I was grateful to know that Mozasu switches languages mid-sentence, as so many of us do.
• Seeing Kyunghee burying her heirlooms at the very beginning of the episode, I was reminded of the bones buried under the Korean landowner’s plot of land. I much prefer this kind of subtle connection between the future and the past to the heavy-handed transition between the pigeons in the park and the birds flying over the country, for example.