TV Rewind: Pachinko Broke Our Hearts With a Simple Bowl of Rice

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An elderly woman takes a bite of rice. It’s just white rice, the kind that’s long been a staple of even the most basic meal. But with just one taste, her eyes suddenly widen and well up with tears. The rice tastes “nuttier” than usual because it’s been shipped over to Japan from the woman’s homeland, Korea. And so what might seem like a simple bowl of rice is suddenly anything but.

Each unassuming grain contains multitudes of history, entire bloodlines of joy and loss condensed into the smallest kernels that so many now take for granted. But not Sunja (played by the iconic Youn Yuh-jung). For her, this is the closest she’s come to returning home in half a century, and perhaps the closest she’ll ever come to feeling the love of her long-lost mother who gave up so much for Sunja all those years ago.

Just as rice is the centerpiece of every Korean meal, so too is Sunja the centerpiece of Apple TV+’s Pachinko, an extraordinary adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s award-winning novel which follows Sunja’s family across generations throughout the 20th century.

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The story begins in Japanese-occupied Korea circa 1915 when Sunja is born, but rice—or the absence of rice—had already shaped what her life would be years before that. In fact, rice is arguably the centerpiece of Korea’s modern history as well, especially after Japan colonized Korea in 1910 and took control to replenish their own severe rice shortage.

By the time Sunja was born, the majority of Korean farmers and landowners were forced to work for the Japanese, supplying them with almost 98% of Japanese rice imports. What little rice was left for the Koreans who grew it was saved for very special occasions, and most couldn’t afford it still.

The Korean homeowner who gave elderly Sunja that taste of her youth alludes to this in Episode 3, during that very same sequence. “We grew it all, but they took it away,” she laments. It wasn’t just rice they were both left wanting for either. With Sunja’s grandson waiting beside them, the pair reminisce on how little money they had when they first moved to Japan, how they didn’t taste coffee for years, and how kimchi prices have risen to amounts neither of them could have dreamed of making back then.

In Pachinko, it’s the taste of food rather than the smell of it that pulls these people into the past most vividly, bridging the gap between the decades of Sunja’s life and different chapters of the book alike. Because, as she chews, the tears start to flow. “This rice reminds me… It reminds me of my mother the day I got married.” Sunja stops crying then, admonishing herself for “just being ridiculous.” Solomon (Jin Ha) apologizes to the homeowner, desperate to please her so that she’ll sign her lease over to his company, but his words have the opposite impact.

“Don’t look down on her tears,” the woman scolds in an instant. “She’s earned the right to those.”

But how exactly, we don’t learn until the next episode, “Chapter Four,” when we take the same journey Sunja’s mind did eating that rice, transporting us back over 50 years to her final days in Korea.

When a teenage Sunja (Minha Kim) discovers she’s pregnant with the baby of a wealthy (and married) Zainichi fish broker (Koh Hansu, played by the legendary Lee Min-ho), a kind visitor named Isak (Steve Sang-Hyun Noh) offers to marry Sunja and bring her to Osaka so she’s not treated as an outcast by locals on the island. With the same speed of a Pachinko ball in motion, Sunja and Isak tie the knot, and with that, they’re destined to leave Yeongdo—and Korea—forever.

Sunja’s mother, Yangjin (Inji Jeong), doesn’t have much to offer in the way of a dowry. In fact, she doesn’t have much of anything to give at all. But knowing that she’s about to bid her daughter farewell, most likely forever, Yangjin bravely ventures to the local market in search of rice to give Sunja “a taste of her own country before she leaves home.”

Watching Yangjin tentatively approach the rice merchant is already heartbreaking in and of itself. There’s shame in her voice, but defiance as well. “I’m not asking for much,” she says. “Just two bowls.” But both she and the merchant understand the true weight of this request.

“If an official came in here and saw I didn’t have enough for Japanese customers, I’d be in trouble,” says the man, understandably worried for himself. But when he realizes that Yangjin is about to lose her daughter under such shameful circumstances, he kindly goes to the back of his store and brings enough rice out for three bowls instead of two.

“Perhaps the taste of it will swallow some of your sorrow as well,” suggests the merchant. But what about our sorrow? What about our pain watching all this unfold?

Pachinko distracts us then with a stunningly crafted sequence where Yangjin prepares the rice back home using traditional Korean tools. The music moves and swells as water shifts and swirls in the pot, gently washing every grain. The show commits to every step, from the initial pouring to the fluffing of rice at the end. It’s a ritual of deeply significant meaning, one final act of love between a mother and a daughter before they say goodbye.

Yangjin brings the rice to Sunja and Isak, her new son-in-law, who are seated inside. Her mother hasn’t even left the room before tears start to fill Sunja’s eyes. Because she knows. She sees the rice and she knows how difficult it must have been for her mother to obtain it. The moment is a bit lost on Isak, a man who’s kind yet comes from immense privilege. He leads a prayer before they eat, smiling at his new wife, who struggles to hold back her sobs, nodding at his words as she wipes away the tears and tries her best to maintain composure.

Isak starts to eat the rice, but Sunja hesitates for a moment. Everything she’s ever known, her mother, her friends, her home, are all contained in this small bowl of white rice. To finish it means her time here is over too, but knowing the sacrifice it must have taken for her mother to buy these precious gains, Sunja eats it all, savoring every bite as tears catch in her throat.

Yangjin isn’t even present at this point, but her love for her daughter fills the room anyway, just as it fills Sunja’s stomach. It’s everywhere, a part of them both that will always remain embedded deep in their core. That’s true when teenage Sunja boards the ship soon after to leave, and it’s also true when she tastes that same “nuttier” rice again as an old woman, all these decades later.

Any other show would have brought us back into the past right after elderly Sunja first took that bite. It would have made sense, directly connecting the act of remembering with the memory itself. But not in Pachinko. Pachinko is smarter than that.

By making us wait an entire episode to uncover these new layers of meaning, the writing encourages us to imagine the power these simple grains of rice hold for Sunja. It forces us to consider the weight of these memories for ourselves and how food can connect us to our own past, too. In doing so, our hearts break for these characters, but also ourselves as we tap into deeper realms of pain or grief that we may not even be consciously aware of, just like Sunja when her tears start flowing with just a bite of rice at that innocuous kitchen table.

David Opie is a freelance entertainment journalist. To hear his ramblings on queer film and TV, you can follow him @DavidOpie.

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