My wife is Korean and she knows all the best Korean movies, so it’s fun to get under the sheets of our big, soft bed…and binge-watch Korean movies with her.  I don’t need to think too hard about what flick to choose.  I also get to ask her all sorts of invasive questions I would never ask a stranger.

I’m politically correct but, lurking inside me, is a secret wooly monster.  It wants to ask all sorts of questions that could be offensive. I’m just curious and I have to know.  Yes:  I was the kid who tugged at a stranger’s pant leg and asked very personal questions about their prosthetic limbs in the elevator.

I’ve been binge-watching Korean mysteries.  This is pretty much date night for me and my wife— a cardboard box of steaming pizza and a stream of Netflix.  Gone are the days when we cruised around the city, looking for trouble.

Korean mysteries are interesting because they remain true to the form:  they are fascinated with the exploration of social ills—serious issues that, like termites, gnaw at the soul of society.

American detective fiction has strayed from this key aspect of the genre.  We can now see material that is simply based around the detective as a quirky and interesting character—a central consciousness—that we find adorable and compelling.

Or we see material that depends upon ratiocination—the solving of a mystery, the unraveling of wildly knotted thread.

We see material that is basically realistic, our interest coming from the pleasure of verisimilitude—a realism developed over two centuries of literary history—that is intensely rewarding because we are addicted to it.

But we see less the probing of social ills that, say, a movie like Yellow Sea explores…which is funny because we used to see stuff like that more in American Detective Movies.  Yellow Sea examines the problem of Korea’s immigration policy—one that has created major rifts in a country that modernized through industrialization but, now, relies not on its own citizens but on transnational immigrant populations.

At any airport in Korea, you will witness the magnitude of this spectacle, as “guest workers”—often arriving in uniforms—are rounded up in groups by their minders.  Those Samsung phones, those LG Washing Machines,  those Hyundai cars—they are all made by “guest workers,” not workaday Koreans.

The largest group of guest workers are ethnic Koreans from China.  These people are technically Chinese nationals, who live on the borderlands between North Korea and the Middle Kingdom.  They look like Koreans.  They still speak Korean, but with a distinct accent.   And they maintain enough of the basic customs that they are seen as more desirable than the hordes of Pakastani, Mongolians, Vietnamese.

Like America’s Mexicans, they have become vital to the nation’s infrastructure; they arrive illegally and do all the drudge jobs in the service sector:  everything from busing tables to massage to prostitution.  And there’s a lot of prejudice.  Everybody thinks they are involved in crime.

Yellow Sea—a masterpiece—follows one such worker, named Gunam.  We find Gunam disconsolate, alcoholic, bereft at the beginning of the movie; his wife has left him to find work in South Korea. He has mounted such crazy debts, smuggling his wife to Korea, that he is hounded by the local gangster.

Gunam is presented with a golden opportunity that will allow him to make good on his debts and find his wife:  he is smuggled to Korea where he will kill a mob boss and search for his wayward wife.

Do you see the racism in the premise?  Gunam, just an Average Joe, becomes a deadly contract killer upon immigration.  All the Chinese are gangsters in this movie.  They all carry hatchets and meat cleavers and they know how to use them.

This is not to accuse the movie of racism but to show how the movie is enmeshed in it–troubled, trapped, prey to it–while simultaneously trying to unravel the racial puzzle that is modern Korea.  I won’t spoil the movie by telling you about what happens to the wife:  suffice it to say that she is indeed involved in the sex trade.  I suspect this is taken for granted by the Korean audience, as several characters tell Gunam to forget his wife who has undoubtedly run off with another man.

Yellow Sea is a stunning movie, beautifully shot in a way that even makes housing projects a thing of romantic beauty.   It boasts riveting action sequences.  It’s gritty, grimy.  The man who plays Gunam—Ha Jung Woo—is famous for his acting chops.  And he is well-cast as a sensitive, tormented thug.  Definitely a date night movie for a certain kind of sicko.  I left the movie wanting more…and more is what I got…in the form of a binge-marathon of Korean movies.

But I also left these Korean movies with this question:  why has American Detective Fiction moved so far away from this?  Is it political correctness?  Are we now afraid to offend people?  Are we wary of protest marches and law suits?  Is this good?  Is it bad?