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As Korea’s present colonizer, the United States is implicated throughout Parasite. No single character exemplifies Americanness definitively. Rather, Americanness is an aspirational status. The United States’ presence is thereby marked by its absence, which paradoxically illustrates the totalizing nature of its hegemony. This is most immediately established through the use of English.

English is the contemporary language of capital; in Parasite, it delineates class and maps power. Ki-woo and Ki-jung, the Kims’ adult children, open the film with a search for their neighbor’s “WIFI” signal from their semi-basement home. Once they connect, they check for correspondence from “Pizza Shidae,” a pizza chain that contracts the Kims for “box” assembly. When the Pizza Shidae manager discovers poorly constructed boxes, she disciplines the Kims with a “penalty” for the harm that could befall the company’s “brand image.”

Every English word in the first five minutes of Parasite establishes the Kims’ class position in South Korea’s contemporary economy. The very first, “WIFI” refers to something the family doesn’t own yet relies on for their livelihood. “Pizza” and “box” indicate the products the Kims create as irregular workers. “Penalty” and “brand image” are invoked by the boss to discipline the family’s labor. From the onset, Bong and Han deploy English to chart South Korea’s neoliberal class system from below. Nearly half of South Korea’s workforce are irregular workers[2], the result of two decades of steadfast assaults on labor stipulated by the IMF in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.