Decision to Leave

Decision to Leave | Directed by Park Chan-wook | 2022

For a long time I was in a relationship with a Korean man whose most salient trait was his moral platform. With him, I would watch many Korean films, whose rise in quality and international relevance had infected both of us with a semi-ironic sense of Korean supremacy. I am Chinese American. By comparison, China’s own stratospheric rise seemed crassly economic and feral. It wasn’t that South Korea’s ascendance wasn’t economic, it was that it didn’t appear to be: South Korea’s focus on soft power and exporting a cultural economy had been a state-sponsored effort decades in the making. But knowing so didn’t always help in the territory of the anxious mind; I could never escape the feeling that my own shortcomings issued from some ancestral source. Meanwhile, our respective East Asian communities regarded the Otherness of the other with coy suspicion. We were alike and also different: we shared colonizers, we put the West on similar pedestals; but still our small differences seemed irreducible, mitigate-able only with wry tolerance. A Korean friend of my mother’s described the combination of Korean man energy and Chinese woman energy as especially cursed.

It was the American in me that believed that a relationship between two intelligent and enterprising people could surmount the defeatisms of heritage; it also seemed like the American in me that saw our breakup as fulfilled prophesy: suddenly we were our heritage, damned to sink together because we brought along the baggage of our previous generations unknowingly. “Incompatibility,” my ex’s mother said to him. “Inevitability,” my mother said to me. My mother had a Victorian conviction that marriages were easier between two people of the same class and ethnic background. This had once struck me as bigoted and, at best, un-romantic. But the corollary to this conviction—that marriages should launch from a sobering assessment of compatibility rather than a jolt of emotion or desire—now seemed indisputable. And how could a person assess compatibility without admitting that our character, to some extent, adhered to identities outside of our control?

A mesh of interconnectedness unraveled and retracted like a hundred hissing measuring tapes, and the aftermath was littered with cultural references. His mother removed me from their KakaoTalk chat. On hearing this, my mother removed him from our WeChat group. I had a panic attack in a Lotte Mart. He ate Szechuan food and impressed our mutual friend with how much of an appetite he had for it.

Briefly, I tried to expurgate my interest in Korean culture. Surely it’d unfurled from intimate knowledge of a single person. But of course, the Korean cultural economy was a force that would go on sustaining my interest, even (and especially) in the absence of the relationship’s curation of it. I also realized, with dismay, that any experiences I had of these cultural products would be inseparable from my experience of the relationship—at least for a long time. Every story of the contemporary condition would produce a reaction in me both productively and problematically informed by my various identities—and by identities I mean resentments: the outcome of years of unexamined selfhood extruding through the thick matting of conflict. I brought these resentments with me to the movies. Why, I now wondered, did so many films from the Great Korean Cinema Men revolve around the idea of integrity? Why did I see in this space between the Korean Everyman’s innocence and his perturbation—my foreignness, my femininity? Why did I see that accusing finger pointing and pointing?

In the fall, Decision to Leave sailed into a cinema near me. The film starred Tang Wei—an actress I’d first seen in Ang Lee’s 2007 erotic spy thriller, Lust Caution. Her performance opposite Tony Leung was captivating; her freshness of face accompanied by maturity of expression conveyed exactly the kind of wary femininity that could successfully weaponize, and then become betrayed by, its own sensuality. The sex scenes from that film rank, for me, among the hottest sex scenes of all time. The Chinese State Administration of Radio Film and Television immediately banned Tang Wei from Chinese media. I followed her career intermittently after that; she went abroad, then after some years resumed making films in Asia—first a Hong Kong film, later on Korean films. She seemed incredibly hard-working and undeterred, learning language after language: for Lust Caution, she learned Shanghainese and the Suzhou dialect, for Crossing Hennessy, she learned Cantonese.

Here she was in Decision to Leave, reprising her role as a femme fatale too femme, ultimately, to truly fatale. I imagined fictive Korean elders nodding sagely at the doomed nature of the relationship on screen: an upstanding Korean law man, sucked into an obsession with a beguiling foreign presence. If anyone was convinced that Tang Wei’s character rose above manic pixie dream girl status, it was only due to the actress’s ability to imbue her character with depth. In reality, the character was textbook: she had no motivations beyond bringing their relationship to its inevitable conclusion; she had no purpose other than to rouse him from his familiar ways.

It wasn’t material chaos that she was bringing to his life. It was a chaos of the spirit. She was a threat—but not to his marriage, not to his job, not to his well-being. She merely threatened his composure. But for the lawman, composure is everything.

It made me think of other movies I watched with that ex: Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, 2019), Burning (Lee Chang-Dong, 2018). Those two also showed a Korean Everyman beset by some exotic and mesmerizing externality: the enigmatic Korean American playboy in Burning, the farcically out-of-touch upperclass family in Parasite. I had watched those movies with him in conjugal glee—thinking of myself as somehow included in this inquiry about nativity and integrity. I would be an Everyman too. After the relationship was over, I re-narrativized: I was on the sidelines of an inquiry that I could never be a part of. I was the threat: the antagonist who forces the good, golden son into a corner, where his integrity would come under test.

The protagonist is the one whose goodness the movie wants you to believe. The villain is the one whose evilness the movie sees no need to explain. The villain: not the one that changes, but the one whose well of darkness forces change. And yet it was the villain I had gone to see: the one who had been banned from her motherland.