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When the Message Gets Lost
A Critical Look at A Great Divide
I recently watched A Great Divide; a film focused on Asian American experiences with racism in rural Montana. The movie is timely, and it clearly aims to highlight the challenges Asian families face in communities where they are seen as outsiders. Watching it led me down a rabbit hole of Korean history — particularly the Japanese occupation, when Japan attempted to erase Korean language and culture by forbidding its use and enforcing Japanese as the dominant tongue. That history, deeply painful and underrepresented, gave me a renewed sensitivity to what Asian communities in the U.S. may carry as intergenerational trauma.
But as the film unfolded, I found myself struggling — not with the message, but with the delivery.
In one scene, the mother of the family recalls her childhood as the only Asian girl in a new school. She admired a blonde classmate who wore beautiful dresses. Her own family, who ran a dry-cleaning business, couldn’t afford such luxuries. One day, when a blue dress came into the shop for cleaning, she took it without permission and wore it to school. The blonde girl recognized the dress, called her a “dirty thief,” and the other children joined in. Several of the children shouted at her to “go back to where you came from.”
