Review of When Life Gives You Tangerines / 폭싹 속았수다

Welcome! If you’re new here and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical, magical powers of the Internet, my name is Ashley. I used to work professionally as a film and television critic at an online outlet (you can find my clips under the writing tab on this site), but I wanted to go off and do my own thing for a while, so I ended up leaving that position.

If you’re a returning reader, thank you so much for continuing to support this site! In late 2024 I was left unexpectedly unemployed from a different opportunity, and this website has been one of the few ways my sanity (and wallet) has stayed intact. I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the site, and I’m glad to enjoy my content enough to stay.

Enough on that! Back in the summer of 2024, I had the wonderful opportunity to receive an all expense paid scholarship to study Korean in Busan, South Korea. I had two weekends where I could travel freely throughout Korea, and during my first travel weekend, I ended up deciding I wanted to go to Jeju Island with several of my cohort members.

We had a blast on Jeju, but one of the most deeper impressions and curiosities I was left with were about the island’s history. In English translations, it’s fairly hard to find books dedicated to Jeju’s history that are nonfiction. We have a handful of English language fiction books about haenyeo and Japanese colonization on the island, but the nonfiction and academic books I want are almost $100.

That said, I want to learn more about the island as much as possible. I’ve been getting through all the fiction books thanks to my local library and reviewing them here on this site, as well as other brilliant books I’ve come across throughout the years, and I was overjoyed when I heard about When Life Gives You Tangerines.

I was unable to watch it as it dropped episodes weekly, as I was traveling in New York, then spent the rest of the month traveling in California. I was so tired each night that I didn’t get the chance to actually sit down and watch each episode one by one, so this review is coming out a tad later than the final episode’s air date.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to go on too much during the introduction, as I know these can get quite long.

On Jeju Island, one young couple finds their footing, breaking cycles of trauma.

This show begins right in the midst of the Korean War, although Jeju was not spared from the violence that was happening back on the mainland. We open in 1951, when Ae-sun, a young girl, finds her path increasingly intertwined with her classmate-slash-fellow villager Gwan-sik.

Ae-sun’s mother is a haenyeo, and because of the fact she needs to dive down into the water and hold her breath for long periods of time, it has left her with a medical condition. That’s what ultimately kills her, worsening Ae-sun’s position, as they were poor already, and now she has lost both her mother and father.

She grows up with the chip of losing her parents, especially her beloved mother, but Ae-sun is someone who dreams of going to the mainland and becoming a major poet in Korean history. As Gwan-sik and she grow older, it becomes obvious he is smitten with her, and he even sells her cabbages for her even when she should be doing the work on her own.

However, his parents and shamanistic grandmother disapprove of their little love affair with each other, which leads to even more resistance between the young lovers. We see how the two of them run off to Busan, despite being minors, and being screwed over because they’re naive in how the world works.

Regardless, throughout the series, we’re going to see how their love and dedication for each other is going to stand the test of time, even when there are tragedies and struggles ahead. Ae-sun is kicked out of school for running away, sealing both of their fates to lives as laborers, which leads to its own set of challenges.

We then pivot to the future, where they are adults and their kids are grown up. IU then pivots to play their daughter, Geum-myeong, and she is the focus of the more contemporary part of the show.

She’s in college trying to figure out her own romantic and professional life, but she doesn’t really understand the sacrifices her parents made in order to try and get her to where she is today.

That leads to more friction, but also some breaking of the cycles that led these women there. While Ae-sun never had her mother around when she was a young woman, Geum-myeong has that opportunity, creating some interesting themes about trauma and how we can create something new out of our lives even in the face of some terrible events going on all around us.

Overall Thoughts

Korean history is quite sad, especially when we’re studying the past one hundred years. I did my master’s thesis on Korea’s women literature during the colonial period, and the 1900s simply weren’t the best time to be living on the mainland or on the island.

The late 1940s is when a chunk of the island’s population was massacred by the Korean government, with the Americans turning a blind eye or helping this genocide unfold. We don’t really go into that during the show though, nor how haenyeos (despite Ae-sun’s mother refusing to let her become one) were actually one of the profitable ways to stay afloat on the island. Men were seen as less productive than women, who brought in the good bucks during the dangerous gig of being a haenyeo.

One might think of this show as terribly traumatic for the characters because of that, but I think it does such a good job of showing how there are pockets of joy and happiness even in our darkest moments. The actors did a brilliant job in portraying these characters, and the voiceovers and transitionary dialogue I found were like poetry. I really liked those voiceovers and found them inspirational in their language and phrasing.

The characters speak in Seoul and standard Korean television dialects, which is interesting, especially considering Jeju-mal, or Jeju dialect, is dying out on the island itself. I wish it could have included more Jeju-mal; I noticed that Busan satoori during those seasons, but maybe my ear is also untrained to Jeju-mal.

I say watch this show if you’re interested in what it has to offer about the period, as well as the brilliant writing. The back and forth can be a little tedious at times, but I can see how the show might lose its momentum without it. I think I would’ve been bored if it were completely chronological.

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