<i>Past Lives</i> Captures What So Many Immigrants Feel

I often miss Taiwan, the country of my birth, like I miss an old lover. I felt this keenly when I watched Past Lives, the directorial debut of writer, director, and playwright Celine Song. The film follows Nora (Greta Lee), who emigrated from South Korea at age 12, leaving behind her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). Two decades pass before they see each other in person again for one fateful week in New York City, where Nora now lives with her Jewish-American husband Arthur (John Magaro). The story is partly based on Song’s personal experience.

“I was sitting [at a bar] with my childhood sweetheart and my husband and translating between these two guys who actually have no reason to even know each other, let alone have a kind of a deeper conversation,” she says on Zoom. She remembers the way people were looking at them, probably wondering, “who are those people to each other?” and “why did they end up here together?” In that moment, Song thought, “Oh man, if you guys only fucking knew who we were to each other.” This memory inspired the first scene of the film, where voices off-screen speculate who Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur are and how they ended up at a bar together. The rest of the movie takes the audience on the journey to how they got there.

Celine Song on the set of Past Lives with Greta Lee.

Through representing Nora as a bridge between her past and present—Seoul and New York, Hae Sung and Arthur—Past Lives perfectly captures how so many immigrants feel: belonging to two places at once. In one scene, after Nora meets Hae Sung in person for the first time since she left Korea, Arthur asks if she’s still attracted to him. She replies, “I don’t think so, but he was this kid in my head for so long…I think I just miss Seoul.” I was struck by how I felt the same way about Taipei. Like Nora, I emigrated from Asia as a child. It’s hard for me to separate my birthplace with the loved ones I left behind. Song explains how Nora processes that grief: “At the end when [Nora’s] walking home, of course she’s grieving the possibility of everything that could have been, but also the thing that she’s grieving is the little girl that she never got to say goodbye to properly.” Watching the film, I also shed tears for my 5-year-old self who left Taiwan because she’d have a “better life in America.” To this day, I wonder what would have happened if I stayed.

Song depicts the complexity of saying goodbye throughout multiple scenes in Past Lives. When Nora and Hae Sung are kids, their goodbyes “don’t stick” because they’re “too young” to grasp them, she says. They don’t give “a proper goodbye” because they “don’t actually think it’s going to be done.” It’s only later on, after they’ve grown, that they get the goodbye they were “owed as children.” This made me realize I, too, never had a proper goodbye with my grandparents, who raised me, because I was only a child when I left. Perhaps that’s why, as an adult, I keep longing for Taiwan and the life I could’ve led there. During the pandemic, amidst the rise of anti-Asian hate, I even fantasized about going back.

Beyond helping me grieve my own past, Past Lives has taught me to find comfort in the Korean concept of in-yun, or how fate brings two people together based on countless connections in their previous lives. Nora, when getting to know Arthur, tells him that if two people get married, they must have reached 8,000 layers of in-yun over 8,000 lifetimes that finally allows them to be together. When Arthur asks if Nora believes in in-yun, she jokes that it’s “just something Koreans say to seduce someone.” When I ask Song about the term, she lights up and says, “It’s an amazing thing! In-yun is basically about how you can’t control who walks into your life…and who stays in your life. That to me is…at the heart of the film. It’s about the ineffable thing…about every relationship, even the person who brushes up against you, even you and me who’s sitting here.” Song’s treatment of every relationship in Past Lives reflects this value, as seen when Hae Sung says to Arthur, “You and I are in-yun too.” Instead of representing the typical love triangle trope that pits love interests against one another, Song centers the significance of human connection.

Greta Lee as Nora, John Magaro as Arthur, and Teo Yoo as Hae Sung in Past Lives.

While Past Lives allowed me to reflect on my own immigrant journey, Song makes it clear that the film, and Nora’s story, are not only about that. “What I don’t want is for this movie to be a totalizing statement or…totalizing force in talking about what it is like to be an immigrant,” she says. “It actually is so much more about what is going on with this character [of Nora], and what she’s going through, what her journey is.” Other viewers may have different reactions altogether—which is exactly what Song expects. She says, “Depending on who you are, and who watches this movie, and how you watch this movie, and what situation you’re in in your life, I think you’re going to have a different reaction to the film.” She shared that audience members have told her, “I want to call my partner and tell them how much I love and appreciate them”; and another said, “I have to call my ex” because “my partner doesn’t give me the same feelings.” Whatever the response, Song believes it has “to do with what relationship status [the viewer is] in more than anything.”

For me, I have come away from Past Lives with a deep desire to say a proper goodbye to Taiwan and all of the loved ones I left behind. I grew up regretting not having more time with my grandparents, and part of my healing is appreciating the moments I did share with them in my early childhood, and cherishing every relationship in my life—past, present and future.

Past Lives is now playing in select cities and opens nation wide on June 23.

Nancy Wang Yuen is a sociologist and pop culture geek. ​She is the author of Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism and co-author of Tokens on the Small Screen: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Prime Time and Streaming Television. She has appeared on Dr. Phil, BBC World TV, Teen Vogue, New York Times and Washington Post among others.