A three-minute tofu scene in Pachinko season 2 made me cry about moving to college.
I was an isolated eighth grader about to virtually start high school when I first read the series’ source material, Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko.” Both the book and the Apple TV series explore four generations of a Korean family, led by matriarch Sunja, and span from pre-World War II Korea to Japan in World War II and the 1980s. At the time, I remember being enraptured by how Pachinko, despite its generational scope, could feel so familiar. Here was a colorful family like mine, responding to a distinct external trauma as outsiders (the racism towards Koreans in Japan amidst overarching World War II). As a teen reader acutely aware of my Asian American identity during the COVID-19 pandemic, I found Pachinko surprisingly and frighteningly relatable — especially its discussion of how in responding to trauma, we can unintentionally hurt our loved ones.
Now, lying on the couch in my childhood home at midnight watching Pachinko season 2, I’m about to chart a new chapter. In less than a month, I’ll begin studying at Harvard: in less than a minute, the thought of this prompts me to devour the rest of the sliced oranges my mother has cut for me. We sit side by side, the blanket over our intertwined legs. Our noses are sharp with citrus as we think of tofu.
On my computer screen, Sunja (Minha Kim, who plays Sunja as a teen through adulthood) and teenage Noa (Kang Tae Ju) are also sitting side by side. As they eat tofu at the same market where Sunja sells noodles to feed her family, Sunja tries to convince Noa to go to Waseda University — a top university in Japan and the family’s lifeline out of poverty. The parallels between their relationship and mine with my mother aren’t lost on me. Noa, my mother, and I are all the eldest children in our family. Like Sunja and Noa, my mother and I have to say goodbye.
“I can’t imagine how [tofu in Tokyo where Waseda University is] can possibly be as good as this,” Noa says, partly to his mother, partly to the tofu vendor he’s in love with, and most of all, himself in episode 6. “When I’m there I know I will miss this.”
Suddenly, my vision of tofu blurs into tears. I think, “I can’t imagine how tofu at Harvard can possibly be as good as this. When I’m there, 3000 miles away from my hometown of Sacramento, I know I will miss this.”
When Noa looks at his mother, both of them stoic after he says those words, I know that she understands. And as I look at my mother on that fateful midnight and see the tears on her cheeks match mine, I know that she understands that this is goodbye.
It’s been three months, and aside from sorting dorm move-in logistics, my mother and I haven’t talked about me leaving yet. The tofu scene was our trial conversation. I began to see my mother’s perspective through Sunja, and my mother began to see mine through Noa.
The historical context that precedes Sunja and Noa’s relationship versus mine with my mother couldn’t be more drastic. Yet the struggle we share to say goodbye and the micro-expressions we wear to communicate this are the same. Tight lips. Pursed brows. Strained smiles. Watering eyes.
The moment of silence they, and we, share. And tofu at the center, as both catalyst and symbol.
The best tofu is soft, firm, and simple — ready to be eaten alone or after hours marinating in my mother’s distinct blend of Prik Nam Na (Thai fish sauce) and brown sugar on a bed of mealy rice or tangy glass noodles. Tofu is an unassuming medium for trauma, but it works so well because of this: its distinct texture yet bland flavor makes it easy to ignore but hard to forget just like a family responding to years of trauma through fight or flight (trying to forget). In Pachinko, this response is the only way Sunja’s family knows how to survive: in 2024 with my family, it’s the only way deemed socially acceptable as Asian Americans are toxically upheld as model minorities — relentlessly hardworking, academically high achieving, and silent amidst mental health struggles.
In Pachinko, tofu is practical, affordable sustenance for Sunja and her family; in my life, it’s the foundation for my favorite flavorful dishes. Across fictional and historical boundaries, tofu is how our families process the trauma we see both in the world’s treatment of us as outsiders and within our families. We “talk” through tofu because talking candidly about trauma is too explicit and the world tells us time and time again vulnerability is for the weak — for those who don’t have to make sacrifices. Around the dinner table, complex generational conversations can easily become a “who has it worst” competition. Everyone and every generation has a different definition of the extent of sacrifice for family. But everyone understands the purpose of tofu is to eat it. What it represents may be uncomfortable — raw healing from our external (society) and internal environments’ pressures (family) — but its edibleness is a reminder that difficult things can be digested by our mind and body.
As I watch Sunja and Noa eat their tofu as the scene ends, I begin digesting everything I’m learning to let go of before college.
There are the things that I can easily recognize: my immediate family, my house, the empty Cheez-It box I used to resolve writer’s block, and my bulletin board with printed and pinned clips of my childhood big dreams. In the middle, there’s a saturated photo of my eight-year-old self in a surgeon’s scrub cap and then a smaller, slightly blurry photo I printed solely of the Harvard insignia.
Then there’s the things I don’t know how to acknowledge I'm letting go of. How do you say goodbye to your past, present, and future? Pachinko doesn’t know the specifics of my story, but it validates the pressure I’ve felt since childhood to excel by society’s standards as the eldest. Noa’s perspective mirrors my own. I finally feel allowed to acknowledge the shame I carry for not sacrificing enough for my family — my immediate family in the present, the family I hope to build in the future, and my ancestors.
I am proudly a seventh generation Chinese American on my dad’s side. My ancestors immigrated here from Canton, China, during the Gold Rush. They healed others through herbs. Now I’m healing how I respond to my mental health and my mother’s, in part through the tofu of Pachinko.
One of my biggest fears has always been living my life on someone else’s terms. When I’ve expressed this before to my mother, we’ve never understood each other. “Who is this ‘someone else?’” she’ll ask. Before watching Sunja and Noa’s conversation about Noa’s career future, my answer was always “greater society.” The real answer is my ancestors, who’ve sacrificed for their opportunities that I have. The real answer is my mother. The people who shaped me and want the best for me. They are also why I cry about moving to college in my closet instead of expressing sadness openly with family.
Pachinko, especially season 2, centers on strength in sacrifice. But like Noa and his nephew Solomon (Jin Ha), I often don’t feel strong. Ashamedly, I’m almost hungry to sacrifice something substantial as Sunja and my great-grandfather (who came to the United States via Angel Island at age six) have for their families.
“What do I know of true suffering…it’s unimaginable to me,” Solomon says to his grandmother Sunja in episode 1. “I’ve lived a pathetically easy life. It’s understandable for you to loathe me.”
My jaw dropped hearing this — I’d never seen my shame so brazenly represented onscreen before.
My previous thinking about how moving to college could shift my family relationships and mental health has always been explicitly logical: I made schedules of when to call home, began interviewing for part-time jobs, and mapped out four-year plans with advisors to hold myself accountable to my academic goals as a premed student. I’m afraid that if I get sentimental I’ll be too scared to leave. And I know I must, because this move is for more than just me.
Acknowledging our drastically different historical contexts, I also spent sleepless nights studying like Noa. Like Noa, I am the eldest child; like Solomon (a Yale alumni in the show), I am an Ivy League student. Are we destined to be overachievers who never feel their work — or their trauma — is enough for their family? I can’t listen to those that tell me to take a break because my ancestors never got a break. If I stop, am I disrespecting centuries of sacrifice? Though I know I shouldn’t, I minimize my work life balance struggles because implicitly, I know mental health was not a priority for my ancestors or even my mother. Their trauma wasn’t talked about, so why should mine be? If they didn’t talk about their trauma, why should I?
Ultimately, Pachinko has taught me how we can be hungry for more than just food. Hunger is not just a physiological feeling but a mindset — expressed in Pachinko particularly by Sunja, who continually sacrifices for her family, her hands worn with the work of preparing food for others so she can procure food for her family. As viewers, we see her children, Noa especially, readily eat this food to fuel for school. We see them grow up and begin to digest the depth of their mother’s hunger — hunger for a life without social and financial barriers to opportunity. A life she has never known but makes sacrifices for so that her children will.
I see the way Noa looks at the ground as his mother tells her about her early days struggling to peddle kimchi. I see the way my mother looks at the ground watching him too: her face pinched to suppress tears. Suddenly, I realize the best way to recognize her sacrifices is to say goodbye and start my studies solo. So I do.
