Review

Culture

Film & TV

16 January 2024

6 min read

Wealth is worth? Questioning the immigrant experience

Garnering yet more awards, TV series Beef expertly explores identities. Krish Kandiah revisits the K-wave drama.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

in a dim room a couple stand off against each other.

Steven Yeun and Ali Wong play Daniel and Amy.

Not since the ground-breaking series Breaking Bad can I remember such a captivating opening sequence. A road rage incident escalates. And escalates. And escalates. Just when you think things can’t get any worse in this dark Netflix comedy, the vicious consequences of the feud unravels further. I couldn’t stop watching, and soon Beef had me firmly dragged into the world of two protagonists, who may have had very different experiences of the Korean American dream but were more alike than they would ever dare to admit.

I am a huge fan of the global Korean cultural renaissance known as the K-wave. For me it started with Psy, the breakout Korean singing superstar hitting number one in the UK charts with Gangnam Style in 2012. Then there was BTS, the Korean Take That equivalent, who duetted with Coldplay and became the best-selling band in the world. Parasite was a remarkable movie, that grabbed multiple awards at the Academy Awards of 2020. Squid Game took the concepts of battle royale and Hunger Games to a whole new level and became a Netflix number one global download hit in 2021. Throughout the K-wave decade I have also been an ardent devotee of Samsung, the biggest brand in mobile phone innovation.

Something important is happening with the global recognition of Korean culture. Beef represents another step forward showcasing the Korean diaspora cultural ascendence. At this year’s Emmy Awards it is the third most nominations. It follows on from the Canadian comedy series Mr Kim, which offered an affectionate and amusing exploration of the experience of a second-generation Korean family coming to terms with life in Toronto. Beef similarly presents the US-Korean cultural experience without explanation or apology. It is powerfully assumed that this is legitimate and normal. There is no embarrassment, no exposition: just a cultural and narrative world that the viewer has to catch up with as soon as possible before they miss something.

Beef is Korean and American. It is a comedy and a tragedy. It is also, ultimately, a morality and immorality play. It explores three main issues: anger, identity and aspiration and how they interact with one another – for good and for evil.

But the rage runs deep. It is toxic to everyone it touches. What can break its power?

The instigating event in the show is a road rage incident between Daniel, a second-generation Korean immigrant to the US whose family faced financial ruin when a relative used their motel for illegal activity, and Amy, also a second-generation Korean immigrant, who is on the cusp of banking a multi-million dollar deal. Everything Daniel attempts he fails at. He can’t even manage to successfully end his own life, or even return the faulty suicide equipment to the hardware store he bought it from. Amy, despite outward appearances is also struggling. She is estranged from her parents, stuck in a superficial relationship with her husband, and dealing with a demanding and dismissive mother-in-law and a daughter she hardly sees. The near miss in the car park comes at a pivotal moment for both of these strangers and flips a switch in them that they cannot let go.

The feud escalates between Amy and Daniel with increasingly high stakes and terrible consequences. The more we get to know about our two protagonists the more we understand why they have reacted in the extreme ways they have and how much they both have to lose. I found myself watching through my fingers as I was invested in the characters and was longing for some kind of forgiveness, repentance or reconciliation. At some points faith seemed tantalisingly close to providing an antidote to the beef, holding out hope even in the very last episode. At other points it seemed that love would find a way to stop the tide of anger and revenge. But the rage runs deep. It is toxic to everyone it touches. What can break its power?

If the church were to face up to its own identity issues, perhaps it could be of more help to individuals who brush shoulders with it.

The more we are drawn into the lives of Amy and Daniel, the more we realise that they are both wrestling with major issues of identity. Daniel is seemingly willing to go to any lengths to win the approval of his parents while also clinging so tightly to his brother that he stifles him. Amy too wrestles with a series of strained relationships. Both are lonely, feel unseen and misunderstood. They both carry dark secrets. They both are crippled by feelings of worthlessness and guilt. Amy’s sexual intimacy is inhibited by the sense of betrayal that was caused by her father’s infidelity. Daniel’s work quality is compromised because of the weight of despair and shame. While they both present to the world as successful and strong, inside they experience anxiety, purposelessness and anger.

Beef therefore provides a powerful exploration of identity issues. Male and female, rich and poor, married and single - no-one is exempt from the struggles of knowing who we are and where we fit in. There are moments in the series where the church looks like it has the answer. Going to church is normalised in the show as part of the Korean experience, which appears to be a culturally confident move. But the church is shown to be struggling with its own identity crisis. It accurately portrays the experience of ethnic-specific churches in the West. Yet despite being made up of diaspora communities, more often than not their liturgies, governance structures and forms and language of worship, are based on white western norms. The Korean cultural renaissance has not worked its way into our expression of faith yet. If the church were to face up to its own identity issues, perhaps it could be of more help to individuals who brush shoulders with it.

Beef offers a challenge to the prevailing aspirational culture often normalised by immigrant communities – if you work hard enough you can succeed.

What Dan and Amy have in common is their belief that value or worth in the world comes through the amount of money they have access to. They both graft and strive and lie and steal in order to gain the economic success their parents failed to achieve. Their competitiveness at work spills over into a drive to win at all costs. Riches is righteousness. Financial security is salvation. Wealth is worth. Annihilating the competition is victory. Yet the wealthy people in the show all come to realise the truth of what Jesus taught: “what good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

Daniel is clearly faced with this choice right at the beginning of the series. He is at church when the words of a song seem to move him:

“Have you come to the end of yourself?

Jesus is calling.

Come to the Altar…”

This opportunity for a new start is juxtaposed with another. Daniel notices a possibility of ripping the church off financially, luring an ex-girlfriend back and replacing the worship leader. The church becomes the place where he can renounce or receive money, sex and power. He chooses the latter – to his own ultimate downfall.

As a second-generation immigrant, I was told that if I did well at school and set my sights on becoming a doctor or lawyer, then I could earn my place in the world. Qualifications could silence the xenophobes, money could buy me relationships and success could secure my future. Beef offers a challenge to this prevailing aspirational culture so often normalised by immigrant communities – if you work hard enough you can succeed. My Christian faith has changed that perspective for me. It showed me that financial gain was mono-dimensional, that chasing fool’s gold was a fool’s errand. Beef comes to the same conclusion, albeit with stronger language and adult themes. It takes a swipe at the hard- and cold-hearted calculus of personal aspiration, challenges consumptive materialism on its hollowed-out version of life and leaves it in the middle of nowhere to die.

Article

Community

Culture

Sustainability

Wildness

2 June 2025

5 min read

Hedgerows are boundaries, but they don’t divide so much as abound

The lines we draw between land and lane connect us.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Down in Devon.

Craig Cameron on Unsplash.

In May and June, the Devon hedgerows that hold the landscape outside my window are at their fullest, most colourful state of being. Walking the narrow lane that runs away from our house means walking between high hedgerows that rise like soft green walls either side, which really, means walking between ancient living things, because these hedgerows are old. Devon has some of the oldest hedgerows in the country, and so the world – older than the Parish churches whose towers I can see to the south, east, and west, which rise like old-growth trees out of a blanket of green fields.

Early Bronze Age farmers had to clear woodland to make their fields, and sometimes they left strips of woodland to mark boundaries. These are our oldest hedgerows. They are often found on parish boundary lines, and can support over 2,000 species, also acting as important wildlife corridors for many of them. To roughly date a hedgerow, you count the number of species in a 30m stretch – one species equals 100 years. I have taken to counting random 30m stretches of the hedges that line the lanes near us, and have concluded that we are surrounded by hundreds, in places thousands of years of history – of braided hawthorn and blackthorn, hazel and oak, pink campion and bluebell whose bulbs hide in ancient earth banks that many of the hedgerows sit on.

Now, in these spring hedges, hawthorn is in blossom, nettles overflow with prickly exuberance, and somewhere deep in the tangle a blackbird tunes its song. The hedges are thick with memory stitched together from centuries of hand-laying, stock-keeping, quiet watching. They are Devon’s old boundaries, but they do not divide so much as abound. Life spills from them: wrens and mice, vetch and violet, and so many more things unseen. These are not just boundaries that mark where other things like fields and roads begin and end then; they are living spaces in their own right. They are pathways for diverse life, they are structures that hold home and shelter, food and safety, they are corridors that contain history and story. They are not just edges, they are the centres of whole lives and worlds.

Walking here one May morning, I find myself wondering about the lines we draw – between land and lane, but also between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – and whether these lines too might be porous like the hedgerows, which have lived for so long not through independence but through care and relationship.

The hedges speak paradoxes that I am confronted with every time I go for a walk – of division and abundance, of separateness and connection, of containment and invitation. Lately, I am sitting with these and am coming to understand a threshold that the world offers me: between independence and interdependence. But the truth is I’m not very good at interdependence. I have so often retreated behind the wall of my self-sufficiency, but I am trying to pull that wall down and replace it with a porous and lifegiving hedgerow.

We draw lines – around ourselves, and between people, nations, beliefs, social classes, politics. Sometimes these lines are for safety, sometimes for exclusion. But the hedgerows tell me that it is possible to hold a line and also to let light and life flow through it and shape it. They tell me that these lines are not end points but invitations to communion.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin wrote:

“…I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?”

Le Guin’s work of science fiction is about otherness and connectedness, with different species having to learn empathy in order to collaborate and communicate. The darker the events in the book, the brighter the hope and relationship. The book feels like it was written for now, for this world.

On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations.

In a world whose people are persecuted, othered, tired, it is easy to believe that the way of things is division and separation. But hedgerows suggest another way to live: layered, porous, complex and interconnected, creating space not just for encounter but for new life through that encounter. This is how I picture the Kingdom that Jesus speaks about and so often found solace in: a world of intermingling and ever-growing aliveness. I think Jesus would have walked with the hedgerows had he lived in Devon. I think he would have used them to speak of boundary-crossing between heaven and Earth, clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile. I think he would have pointed to them and said, see the tangled beauty of these? They are what the Kingdom is like: held and open, living and lifegiving. This is what I want our future to be too.

As I walk these old lanes, I am deepening into my hedgerow apprenticeship. I am learning to sink my roots in, to tend boundaries with care, to make space for life. I am also finding that there is nothing in the hedgerows that speaks of self-sufficiency. These ancient, interwoven green features that have defined this landscape are here because of relationships between species. It is easy to talk about the interconnectedness of everything, it is another thing to try to live it – to live like gifts, reciprocity, community, are things that might take the weight of our time. These old hedgerows give me a foothold though – they enliven the overused but hard-to-live idea of interconnection, they show me what it looks like and that it is an approach to life that is patient, strong, sustaining, real.

When I reach out my hand I can usually find something edible or beautiful in the hedgerow depending on the time of year: blackberry, hazel, oxeye daisy, pennywort, primrose. Yesterday, it was the cow parsley that really caught my attention: its frothing, foaming flourishing. In a few weeks it will give way to what comes next, just as it has always done, just as this world will always do. On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations. I am also in the presence of relationship, and of hope.

Now, with so many crises bearing down on the world, and with anxiety and despair blooming, it is the hedges that remind me of other, older, wiser ways to be. It is the hedges that show me how to root deep into solid ground, and how to reach out to others, and to light, which are so often the same thing.

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