Tangerines and the Fortress of Jeju Island
K-dramas are big on food and emotions. The breakfast tables are littered with spice and colors, sour and crunch. At night, convenience stores and tented stalls spew tteokbokki, fried chicken, and pork belly. And always, there are soju bottles and makgeolli bowls.
“You just come to my house to eat, don’t you?” That was Jenny accusing her tutor, Geum-myeong, in the Korean TV series on Netflix, “When Life Gives You Tangerines.” Geum-myeong, played by IU—the South Korean pop idol and actress—slurps glass noodles and, to Jenny’s annoyance, marvels at how it’s a specialty of the student’s housekeeper from Busan.
IU eats and eats on this show, her meals getting paired with every stage of life. Playing (also) the young version of Geum-myeong’s mother, Ae-sun, IU mumbles as she takes a bite from a block of bread given by the housekeeper, a stranger who happened to stay at the same motel booked by sweethearts Ae-sun and Gwan-sik.
IU, back as Geum-myeong, goes through the usual phases of adulthood. She leaves home for Seoul National University. During the flight, she finds a wad of money in a package hidden inside her bag by her mother, the middle-aged Ae-Sun, and begins to sob. From behind her seat, a small hand emerges with a biscuit. “Have a bite, crybaby,” a boy says. She slips the biscuit between her teeth, chin wobbling, crumbs and tears merging.
In Seoul, Geum-myeong finds work at a theater through Cheong-seop, a guy she meets on the street. One afternoon, the owner of Cannes Theater brings dumplings to the office. Geum-myeong crams large pieces into her tiny mouth until she realizes the treat was meant for Cheong-seop.
The only time Geum-myeong is somber in front of food is the scene when the mother of her boyfriend asks, “Do your parents know that you come to a boy’s apartment?” Geum-myeong hides her face, her head sagging with the weight of half-eaten kimchi and seaweed soup.
With the engagement off, Geum-myeong returns to noodles and a bowl of soothing broth. She also turned poetic. She returns home to Jeju Island, to Ae-sun and Gwan-sik, who smother her with peas and rice, broccoli, pork cutlet, red beans, and amberjack.
She turns callous as heartbroken, individuals sometimes do. “In the next life, don’t be my dad,” Geum-myeong tells Gwan-sik. But her father, the fisherman who had tried so hard to provide for the family, knows she doesn’t mean it.
In the middle of Ae-sun’s attempts to find a match for her daughter, Geum-myeong gulps down gimbap after gimbap. Turns out, her mother didn’t have to worry.
Food was her family’s love language, as was mine but that’s a story for another time.
Lawyer Jazmin Banal writes the column “This Is (A) Recording” for Panay News.
