What's problematic about watching book2tv adaptions is that you loose the context: not until 2nd episode did I realize that a Yale-educated, upper-middle class Korean American wrote this script to give voice to the "normal people", whom history failed. Despite the thesis, she clearly had the current American political climate in mind and indeed "explicitly intended to write political novels", which seems like a cultural annexation to me. In particular, she mentioned this experience in her New Yorker interview:

"It was specifically very important for me with the Koreans in Japan because I started out in the position of, “Oh, these are poor victims who’ve been oppressed by colonialism and how horrible.” And that’s all true, but they didn’t see it that way, and they told me, “You’re wrong.” And I was, like, “Well, O.K., how am I wrong?” When you hang out with them, you realize they’re quite––the word in Japanese––is they’re very genki. They’re very sturdy and strong. So I thought, Oh, well, where did that come from? And I realized it’s kind of like what Hemingway says about being broken, right? You’re stronger when you’re broken."

Despite her tranformation of a "poor victim" story into a "poor but strong victim" story, it seems to me she's imposed too much structure onto her interviewees' words. Colonialism and globalization are more complex than the conqueror-conqueror / oppressor-oppressed duality and especially complex for certain people, Mexicans, Japanese Koreans, and other "mixed-race" people for example. I'm not trying to put words into the interviewee's mouth, but he/she can definitely mean something different than the interviewer's interpretation.

Sense more authenticity in Solomon's and Naomi's stories though.