Taylor Pang, who works for the Department of Agriculture in Marks, Mississippi
There is no such thing as a monolithic community, be it in a rural town or the nebulous notion of what it means to be an American. Long before
Minari — a film about a family of South Korean immigrants in the 1980s — hit theaters, Emanuel Hahn and Andrew Kung explored Asian communities in the Mississippi Delta. The pair interviewed almost 20 people, including fourth-generation farmers and grocery store owners for a singular oral history project that launched in 2018. Many of the people they found living in the Delta were older, and the far-flung community was reluctant to talk to outsiders or address the racism that they had endured over the years.