Near the end of Min Sook Lee’s There Are No Words, the Toronto-based documentarian sits with her father and a Korean translator, each a point in a closely-tethered triangle. She turns to the translator and says, “There’s never been any genuine, authentic acknowledgement of his treatment of my mother, to the point that when he talks about how she died, he describes it as ‘she had an illness and I didn’t know she was ill.’”
As Lee speaks, the camera’s focus is on her father, looking off into the middle distance. He’s waiting for the translation.
Lee is no stranger to working with translators. Her 2016 doc Migrant Dreams and 2003’s El Contrato looked at human rights violations and the working conditions of migrant workers in Ontario.
There Are No Words is different from Lee’s earlier work because it places her own family in focus.
The documentary is about Lee’s mother, who committed suicide when Lee was 12 years old after years of mental anguish and abuse from her father. The world forgot about her mother, and so Lee endeavours to paint her portrait in tribute. Through interviews with friends and family in South Korea, and her father in Toronto, Lee conjures the image of a woman with a poetic soul, who was unmade by a cruel husband and relentless racism after immigrating to Toronto.
As Lee remembers her mother, she also shows us the political importance of our stories, demonstrating how they also reveal things about the world we live in, such as the cultural mundanity of gendered violence and the dehumanization of immigrants.
“The fact that I couldn’t speak to my dad about the most important thing in my life struck me as impossibly sad,” Lee tells me over Zoom from her home in Toronto. I understand what Lee means — a literal lack of language — but she understood me first. To watch There Are No Words is, for an immigrant and a person with a family history of mental illness, to be seen.
I tell her that the dynamic — between her, the translator and her father, which is repeated throughout the film — gracefully externalizes what it looks like for me, and for others like me, to perform translation work within our minds for our parents: putting our thoughts into our mother tongue, finding words for our feelings that our parents might understand. Lee nods.
Though the use of a translator to speak to your father is a bit sad, Lee knows it is an important dynamic to represent. “There are many people just like me in the diaspora,” she says. “We grow up with parents who are from the home country who often don’t speak English well or not at all. And we have no access to the culture or even our sense of identity from our original country because we’re raised in this place in which we’re scrubbed of any ethnicity. We’re assimilated into whiteness. And then there’s this total erasure of our identity.” Having worked to forget our native language when young, we find ourselves stretching backwards over time, scrambling for words.
“There wasn’t [any support] for my mother because she was a working class Korean woman who did not speak English,” Lee says. “She had no social capital. She had no social network of people [who she could turn to and say], ‘Hey, do you know a good therapist?’ She had no one to share what she lived with, because most Korean women, and in fact lots of women at that time in that class, they ate it. They kept it inside. And it was poisoning them. She never spoke about being beaten or she never talked about the way she was treated, or the words he [her husband] called her.”
Lee recalls experiencing language mockery growing up, a form of racism by which white people would humiliate her for any Korean she spoke in public; her mother experienced it often. “So having those conversations with my father, with a third person, an interpreter, felt to me was necessary.” It was a way to take back her voice, maybe even lend it to her mother.
There Are No Words is a stunning film that teaches us what it looks like to hold empathy for a person who commits suicide. But also, it shows us how each and every one of our actions exists within oppressive systems. Lee’s mother was so sad, but she was also brutalized by her father, and she was also the target of horrifying racism. Lee’s mother’s story is the story of so many.
This is a film about a loved one’s suicide, but it’s also a film about the importance of talking; of putting words to the taboo, or an image to an experience that defies the expectations of whiteness and patriarchy and colonialism — structures that deny empathy and humanity to marginalized people. In talking, Lee shows, we reclaim ourselves. Though abusers or systems might not acknowledge the hurt they cause, we can. The act of finding words, for Lee and There Are No Words, is an act of taking up space and speaking truth to power.
“When you tell your own story, you’re not being self-centered or narcissistic,” Lee says. Instead, storytelling becomes a way to think about your lived experience in relation to the social forces that shaped it.
“It becomes a social, political audit,” she suggests. “And doing that kind of inventory is a really powerful way to appreciate how the political is deeply personal.”
There Are No Words will screen at Innis Town Hall on Nov. 13 as part of the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.