Wealth is worth? Questioning the immigrant experience

Garnering yet more awards, TV series Beef expertly explores identities. Krish Kandiah revisits the K-wave drama.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

in a dim room a couple stand off against each other.

Steven Yeun and Ali Wong play Daniel and Amy.

Not since the ground-breaking series Breaking Bad can I remember such a captivating opening sequence. A road rage incident escalates. And escalates. And escalates. Just when you think things can’t get any worse in this dark Netflix comedy, the vicious consequences of the feud unravels further. I couldn’t stop watching, and soon Beef had me firmly dragged into the world of two protagonists, who may have had very different experiences of the Korean American dream but were more alike than they would ever dare to admit.

I am a huge fan of the global Korean cultural renaissance known as the K-wave. For me it started with Psy, the breakout Korean singing superstar hitting number one in the UK charts with Gangnam Style in 2012. Then there was BTS, the Korean Take That equivalent, who duetted with Coldplay and became the best-selling band in the world. Parasite was a remarkable movie, that grabbed multiple awards at the Academy Awards of 2020. Squid Game took the concepts of battle royale and Hunger Games to a whole new level and became a Netflix number one global download hit in 2021. Throughout the K-wave decade I have also been an ardent devotee of Samsung, the biggest brand in mobile phone innovation.

Something important is happening with the global recognition of Korean culture. Beef represents another step forward showcasing the Korean diaspora cultural ascendence. At this year’s Emmy Awards it is the third most nominations. It follows on from the Canadian comedy series Mr Kim, which offered an affectionate and amusing exploration of the experience of a second-generation Korean family coming to terms with life in Toronto. Beef similarly presents the US-Korean cultural experience without explanation or apology. It is powerfully assumed that this is legitimate and normal. There is no embarrassment, no exposition: just a cultural and narrative world that the viewer has to catch up with as soon as possible before they miss something.

Beef is Korean and American. It is a comedy and a tragedy. It is also, ultimately, a morality and immorality play. It explores three main issues: anger, identity and aspiration and how they interact with one another – for good and for evil.

But the rage runs deep. It is toxic to everyone it touches. What can break its power?

The instigating event in the show is a road rage incident between Daniel, a second-generation Korean immigrant to the US whose family faced financial ruin when a relative used their motel for illegal activity, and Amy, also a second-generation Korean immigrant, who is on the cusp of banking a multi-million dollar deal. Everything Daniel attempts he fails at. He can’t even manage to successfully end his own life, or even return the faulty suicide equipment to the hardware store he bought it from. Amy, despite outward appearances is also struggling. She is estranged from her parents, stuck in a superficial relationship with her husband, and dealing with a demanding and dismissive mother-in-law and a daughter she hardly sees. The near miss in the car park comes at a pivotal moment for both of these strangers and flips a switch in them that they cannot let go.

The feud escalates between Amy and Daniel with increasingly high stakes and terrible consequences. The more we get to know about our two protagonists the more we understand why they have reacted in the extreme ways they have and how much they both have to lose. I found myself watching through my fingers as I was invested in the characters and was longing for some kind of forgiveness, repentance or reconciliation. At some points faith seemed tantalisingly close to providing an antidote to the beef, holding out hope even in the very last episode. At other points it seemed that love would find a way to stop the tide of anger and revenge. But the rage runs deep. It is toxic to everyone it touches. What can break its power?

If the church were to face up to its own identity issues, perhaps it could be of more help to individuals who brush shoulders with it.

The more we are drawn into the lives of Amy and Daniel, the more we realise that they are both wrestling with major issues of identity. Daniel is seemingly willing to go to any lengths to win the approval of his parents while also clinging so tightly to his brother that he stifles him. Amy too wrestles with a series of strained relationships. Both are lonely, feel unseen and misunderstood. They both carry dark secrets. They both are crippled by feelings of worthlessness and guilt. Amy’s sexual intimacy is inhibited by the sense of betrayal that was caused by her father’s infidelity. Daniel’s work quality is compromised because of the weight of despair and shame. While they both present to the world as successful and strong, inside they experience anxiety, purposelessness and anger.

Beef therefore provides a powerful exploration of identity issues. Male and female, rich and poor, married and single - no-one is exempt from the struggles of knowing who we are and where we fit in. There are moments in the series where the church looks like it has the answer. Going to church is normalised in the show as part of the Korean experience, which appears to be a culturally confident move. But the church is shown to be struggling with its own identity crisis. It accurately portrays the experience of ethnic-specific churches in the West. Yet despite being made up of diaspora communities, more often than not their liturgies, governance structures and forms and language of worship, are based on white western norms. The Korean cultural renaissance has not worked its way into our expression of faith yet. If the church were to face up to its own identity issues, perhaps it could be of more help to individuals who brush shoulders with it.

Beef offers a challenge to the prevailing aspirational culture often normalised by immigrant communities – if you work hard enough you can succeed.

What Dan and Amy have in common is their belief that value or worth in the world comes through the amount of money they have access to. They both graft and strive and lie and steal in order to gain the economic success their parents failed to achieve. Their competitiveness at work spills over into a drive to win at all costs. Riches is righteousness. Financial security is salvation. Wealth is worth. Annihilating the competition is victory. Yet the wealthy people in the show all come to realise the truth of what Jesus taught: “what good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

Daniel is clearly faced with this choice right at the beginning of the series. He is at church when the words of a song seem to move him:

“Have you come to the end of yourself?

Jesus is calling.

Come to the Altar…”

This opportunity for a new start is juxtaposed with another. Daniel notices a possibility of ripping the church off financially, luring an ex-girlfriend back and replacing the worship leader. The church becomes the place where he can renounce or receive money, sex and power. He chooses the latter – to his own ultimate downfall.

As a second-generation immigrant, I was told that if I did well at school and set my sights on becoming a doctor or lawyer, then I could earn my place in the world. Qualifications could silence the xenophobes, money could buy me relationships and success could secure my future. Beef offers a challenge to this prevailing aspirational culture so often normalised by immigrant communities – if you work hard enough you can succeed. My Christian faith has changed that perspective for me. It showed me that financial gain was mono-dimensional, that chasing fool’s gold was a fool’s errand. Beef comes to the same conclusion, albeit with stronger language and adult themes. It takes a swipe at the hard- and cold-hearted calculus of personal aspiration, challenges consumptive materialism on its hollowed-out version of life and leaves it in the middle of nowhere to die.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.