A Tale Only As Old As Time

One self-contained multigenerational epic that refutes all mythmaking.

- By Kathryn Vanarendonk

YEARS AGO, while watching The Forsyte Saga, the 2002 adaptation of John Galsworthy’s gargantuan family drama, I began to wonder what it would be like to watch a television series that continues forever. It could be roughly like that one, I thought, or like the TV version of Roots: the story of how one bloodline registers enormous historical events on an intimate scale, told through each new generation as a barometer for the world in flux. It’s a thought experiment, one that gets to ignore all the logistical reasons a show like that is essentially impossible.

Pachinko, the new adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s generational saga about a Korean family, is not a realization of my imagined forever story, butit achieves all the same feats of scope and sharpness. The series slides among several decades at once: The protagonist, Sunja, is born in early-20th-century Korea, and Pachinko spends time with her in her early childhood (when she’s played by Yuna), in her young adulthood (played by Minha Kim), and when she is a grandmother (Yuh-jung Youn). Sunja’s life encompasses multiple titanic changes in both the history of the world and of her family. As a child, Sunja lives in Japanese-occupied Korea and grows up with the omnipresence of colonial rule. As a young adult, she moves to Japan. By the time she’s elderly, her family has put down roots in both Japan and the U.S. while maintaining a bedrock of Korean culture and identity.