In the summer of 2021, I bikepacked with my 17-year-old brother and childhood best friend from the border of Mexico to Canada along The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. Neither have biked more than 5 miles or spent much time in the outdoors. Riding Han is an adventure cycling film, with its foundational essence based on the Korean word “han” (한). Han is an inherent, undefinable and complex part of being Korean. It is internalized/unresolved collective grief, resentment and rage created by deep intergenerational trauma and oppression. Han manifests itself in the human experience of adversity through emotion, expression, and creation. Riding Han captures our journey as three Korean Americans, while exploring our identities through Han as Asian Americans, in a divisive time during the COVID-19 pandemic with anti-Asian hate on the rise. Han brought clarity that this is my time to create.
