Abstract:

This multi-festival film is a portrayal of the fortitude of an immigrant "war bride" in America. Seventy-six-year-old Young-Ja Wike is one of the 10,000 Korean women who married American G.I.s. after the war. For them marriage was the only escape from the crushing poverty of post-war Korea. "Grandma" lives in South Jersey with her uncaring, rather brutish husband in a kind of domestic servitude. She has brought up three unappreciative children, working doggedly to feed the family and run the household. On her own she cultivates a colorful garden of chili peppers which she dries and sells. Never having learned English, she is isolated from the community, and from her family as well. "Grandma" opens her heart to the Korean filmmaker, revealing the pathos of forty years in exile.