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When Koreans were the foreigners: 'Ode to My Father' revisited

Europe is once again arguing about immigration: who should be allowed in, what newcomers owe the countries that receive them and what those countri...

The Korea TimesDavid A. Tizzard查看原文 ↗
A scene from the film "Ode to My Father"/ Courtesy of CJ ENM
A scene from the film "Ode to My Father"/ Courtesy of CJ ENM

Koreans who once migrated for difficult overseas work helped build a wealthier country, a history the author explores through the 2014 film Ode to My Father. The author shows the film to Contemporary Korean Studies students, who respond to its portrayal of family sacrifice and Korea’s past poverty. Critics argue that its sentimental nationalism softens the violence and contradictions of development, and the author supplements it with other readings. The film also prompts reflection on the sacrifices of earlier generations and the responsibility to leave something worth inheriting.

Ode to My Father was released in Korea as Gukjae Sijang, meaning International Market, and ranks among the top five films in Korean cinema ticket history, according to the author.

The author says the film downplays and romanticizes Koreans’ role in the Vietnam War and assigns students Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies as a resource.

The author has watched the film 63 times while teaching the course across two universities.

The article describes Koreans working in West German mines and hospitals, Saudi Arabian construction sites and Vietnam, often facing racism and discrimination.

The author says Korea’s development involved hard work alongside funding from Japan and the United States.

Published Oct 24, 2026 1:21 pm KST

Updated Oct 24, 2026 1:28 pm KST

A scene from the film "Ode to My Father"/ Courtesy of CJ ENM

Europe is once again arguing about immigration: who should be allowed in, what newcomers owe the countries that receive them and what those countries owe the people whose labor they need.

But there is an uncomfortable historical irony here. The wealthy societies now debating how many foreigners they can accommodate were often built, in part, by people who left poorer countries to do the jobs others would not. Korea knows something about this. Before the world queued up for its music, films and skin care, Koreans were traveling to the mines of West Germany, the hospitals of Europe, the construction sites of Saudi Arabia and the battlefields of Vietnam. They were the foreigners, the workers, the people whose labor was welcome even when they were not.

One way to understand what it means to leave your country in search of a better life is to watch someone else do it. That’s why after giving my students lectures on Confucianism and Buddhism, on the fall of the 1392-1910 Joseon Dynasty and arrival of Japanese colonization, on the division of the peninsula, the internecine Korean War and then the military-government-implemented drive to modernization led by Park Chung-hee, I show my students a movie. Sure, they need a break from listening to me every week, but they also need an aesthetic experience to put all of this into context.

So, I show them the 2014 movie “Ode to My Father,” released in Korea under the title “Gukjae Sijang (International Market). ” While many of my Korean students are familiar with it, my international students have never heard of it. Truth be told, many of them come expecting to watch “Parasite," because it’s the one Korean movie they have heard of. It almost breaks their brains when I tell them Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning exploration of Marxism is only ranked a lowly 35th in terms of Korean cinema ticket history. “Ode to My Father” is in the top five! In that sense, I tell them, they are watching a Korean movie made for Korean people, rather than K-content designed primarily for export.

This probably goes against all academic protocol and ethical behavior to share it, but one student wrote: “Actually, most Korean movies are tailored to Korean emotions. So this time, while watching a movie with foreigners, I was worried, thinking, 'What if they can't get into our story or don't understand it?' But contrary to that worry, the foreign students started crying one by one. Some were still crying 30 minutes after the movie had finished.”

Now, by way of confession, because I teach my class in Contemporary Korean Studies four times this semester, spread across two universities, and have done so for many many years, I have now seen Ode to My Father a total of 63 times. I often have to watch it twice in one day. Despite this, never have I felt bored by it. Not only because it’s a good movie that moves along nicely, the set-pieces and decade transitions coming regularly, but I also get"to see it through new eyes every time. I get to witness the reactions of a whole new group of young people being subject, without warning, to the nation’s famed tearjerker. Some of these students, even years later, still joke with me how I unfairly (yet beautifully) traumatized them.

A scene from the film "Ode to My Father" / Courtesy of CJ ENM

The film has its critics, particularly among those who see its sentimental nationalism as a way of smoothing over the violence and contradictions of Korea's development. They have a point. History rarely submits as neatly to a two-hour family melodrama as the filmmakers would like. Yes, the movie definitely downplays and romanticizes Koreans' role in the Vietnam War, so I give my students Viet Thanh Nguyen’s excellent “Nothing Ever Dies” as a resource. We explore Chang Kyung-sup’s “The Logic of Compressed Modernity” to understand the debilitating effects modernization had on some citizens here. And we explore the figure of Park Chung-hee, who doesn’t feature in the movie (unlike Nam Jin, Andre Kim, Lee Man-gi, Syngman Rhee, and Chung Ju-yung).

But I show this movie because it works. I have just marked more than 450 midterm exams and all the students who watched this movie rave about it in various ways. It hit them in a way they never expected. It made them understand their grandparents better; gave them more empathy for the old people on the subway; helped them see society a bit differently; reminded them that this hypermodern society fetishized by people all over the world didn’t look like this a few decades ago.

Because I’ve watched it so many times, I’ve been able to apply so many different interpretative lenses to it: economic, psychological, national, cinematographic, acting and so on. This time, I was struck by the theme of immigration. Not the often discussed idea of immigrants in Korea, but rather by the idea of Koreans as immigrants. Koreans as second-class global citizens. It will be hard to imagine that today because you only have to stick a Korean idol on a skin toner and it will sell an outrageous amount. Or slap the letter K in front of a concept and you’ve got something cooler than a penguin’s behind in January. But that never used to be case.

Koreans were once migrants. They were forced to work overseas in terrible jobs, experiencing incredible racism and discrimination. They were shoved deep underground into the hellish mines of West Germany, made to wash corpses, driven through the barren desert of Saudi Arabia, and dragged through the jungles of Vietnam. Korean people were the cheap labor in the factory. They were the people tasked with carrying out orders. A sweatshop of bodies for global capitalism. Nobody expected them to achieve anything. A British newspaper said, “It is more reasonable to expect roses to grow in a garbage heap than to expect healthy democracy to emerge from the ruins of Korea." In the early 1960s, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world.

But they did it. They toiled away for someone else and, in doing so, they made their country rich. They saw that their country had to develop. It couldn’t, it shouldn’t and it wouldn’t be poor. There was an existential aspect to this with North Korea and their army at the doorstep, but there was also pride. Korea would not be the world’s refugees. They would not be the fodder for anyone else or have their lives dictated by the whims of others. They would work hard, study, save, sacrifice themselves and then become rich. This was achieved on the individual level, the national level and, of course, the global level. Korean people are now the managers of multinational companies. Korean firms are now sent overseas to build plants and factories in which they have other people working for them.

Korean people were once those who wanted to escape poverty and the unfair treatment the global order had dealt them through colonization and division. So what did they do? They escaped poverty. Moreover, they built a safe, modern and functioning society. I think that’s a message worth remembering.

Yes, my students all cry at the family reunion scene and when young girls are lost on boats. But they also realize, with their eyes rather than statistics, that Korea used to be very poor. And the way they got rich (alongside funding from the Japanese and the Americans) was by working themselves to the bone. A phrase has it, “Society prospers when people plant trees under whose shade they will not sit.”

The grandmothers and grandfathers of Korea planted trees for us. We enjoy their shade, eat their fruit and bask in the comfort they created. We should remember what it cost them to plant those trees, and recognize that the comfort we enjoy today carries a responsibility of its own. Our task is not to demand the same sacrifices from the next generation. The world has changed. But it is to leave them something worth inheriting.

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