Writing in the Style of Lee Isaac Chung

The Principle

Lee Isaac Chung writes about the specific kind of courage it takes to plant a garden in unfamiliar soil — and he means this both literally and as the defining metaphor of the immigrant experience. Minari (2020), his breakthrough film, is the story of a Korean American family who moves to rural Arkansas in the 1980s to start a farm, and it tells this story with a tenderness and specificity that can only come from autobiography. Chung grew up on that farm. He was that child. The film is his memory rendered as cinema, and its emotional power comes from the precision of a writer who is not imagining this life but remembering it.

What distinguishes Chung from other autobiographical filmmakers is his refusal to sentimentalize or dramatize beyond what the material naturally provides. The family in Minari argues, struggles, nearly splits apart, and finds their way back to each other not through grand gestures or climactic confrontations but through the slow, repetitive labor of daily life — planting, watering, harvesting, cooking, praying, fighting, forgiving. The drama is in the dailiness, and Chung trusts that dailiness to carry the weight of everything he wants to say about identity, belonging, and the cost of the American dream.

His perspective is always the child's. Even as Chung writes adult characters with full complexity — Jacob's ambition, Monica's loneliness, Soon-ja's irreverent wisdom — the emotional center of his work is the child who watches the adults navigate a world that is bewildering and beautiful in equal measure. The child does not understand everything that is happening, and that partial understanding is itself the story.

Screenplay Architecture and Structure

Chung's screenplays are structured around the rhythms of agricultural and domestic labor. Minari follows the seasons — planting, growing, harvest — and the family's emotional arc maps onto the farm's progress. The structure is cyclical rather than linear, returning to the same tasks, the same spaces, the same tensions with each cycle bringing deeper understanding.

He builds his narratives as accumulations of small moments rather than sequences of dramatic events. A grandmother teaching a child a card game. A father checking his crop. A mother ironing at night. These moments accrue emotional weight through repetition and variation until, by the film's final act, the smallest gesture — a hand extended, a plant growing — carries the full emotional burden of the story.

The family unit is both the subject and the structural container. Chung organizes his screenplays around the tensions within the family — husband and wife, parent and child, Korean identity and American identity — and allows these tensions to generate the narrative without requiring external antagonists or conventional plot machinery.

His climactic events, when they arrive, are often accidental or natural rather than dramatic — a fire, a medical emergency, a storm — and the family's response to these events reveals who they have become through the accumulated experience of the preceding narrative.

Dialogue

Chung writes bilingual dialogue with the ease of lived experience. Characters in Minari shift between Korean and English not as a dramatic device but as a natural expression of their position between two cultures. The grandmother speaks Korean. The children respond in English. The parents bridge both, and the linguistic gap between generations is itself a form of storytelling.

His dialogue is spare and domestic. Characters talk about practical matters — the water supply, the nearest Korean church, what to make for dinner — and the emotional content is carried beneath these practical conversations. A husband and wife arguing about whether to stay on the farm are really arguing about whether their marriage can survive the distance that ambition has created between them.

Children's dialogue in Chung's scripts has the unpredictable logic of actual childhood speech — David's observations about his grandmother, his blunt questions, his casual cruelties and sudden tenderness. Chung writes children as they are, not as adults remember them being.

The grandmother's speech in Minari — frank, funny, sometimes crude, always warm — provides the screenplay's most distinctive voice. Soon-ja speaks with the authority of someone who is too old and too far from home to bother with politeness.

Themes

The immigrant experience rendered without heroism or victimhood is Chung's foundational contribution. His immigrants are not symbols of the American dream or critiques of it — they are specific people making specific choices in specific places, and the universality of their experience emerges from that specificity rather than from any attempt at representational breadth.

The land as character — the Arkansas soil that Jacob stakes his family's future on, the minari that Soon-ja plants by the creek — gives Chung's work its grounded, tactile quality. The question of whether the land will accept these newcomers is both practical (will the farm succeed?) and metaphorical (will America make room?).

The tension between individual ambition and family cohesion drives the narrative without resolving into a simple moral. Jacob's dream of the farm is both selfish (it uproots his family) and generous (it represents his deepest vision of providing for them). Chung holds both truths without choosing between them.

Intergenerational connection — the way identity, knowledge, and love pass between grandparent and grandchild, often bypassing the middle generation — is rendered with particular warmth. The relationship between David and Soon-ja is the emotional heart of Minari, built on incomprehension and affection in equal measure.

Writing Specifications

1. Ground the narrative in a specific landscape — describe the land, the soil, the weather, the growing things with the precision of someone who has worked this ground and knows its character.
2. Write bilingual dialogue naturally — let characters shift between languages based on who they are speaking to, what they are feeling, and how formal the situation requires, without treating code-switching as a dramatic device.
3. Structure the screenplay around agricultural or domestic rhythms — planting and harvesting, cooking and eating, the repetitive labor that gives daily life its shape — and let the emotional arc follow these rhythms.
4. Build the narrative through the accumulation of small moments rather than dramatic events — trust that the weight of a grandmother teaching a card game or a father checking a crop will be sufficient to carry the story's emotional meaning.
5. Center the child's perspective — filter the adults' complexities through a child's partial understanding, allowing the audience to see more than the child sees while feeling the story through the child's experience.
6. Write the family's tensions without assigning blame — the conflicts between husband and wife, between Korean identity and American identity, between ambition and stability, should be presented as genuine dilemmas without clear right answers.
7. Create at least one intergenerational relationship — between grandparent and grandchild, elder and youth — that communicates love through incomprehension, humor, and the shared experience of displacement.
8. Include the physical labor of building and growing — describe the work of the hands, the ache of the back, the satisfaction of something planted taking root — as acts of faith and identity.
9. Let the climactic event be natural or accidental rather than dramatically engineered — a fire, a flood, an illness — and use the family's response to reveal the bonds that have been forming beneath the surface of daily life.
10. End with the family still in motion, still building, still uncertain — not arrived at the dream but still working toward it, with the labor itself revealed as the substance of belonging.