When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 10 Recap

Who's in the cast:
IU as Oh Ae-sun (young)
Moon So-ri as Oh Ae-sun (older)
Park Hae-joon as Yang Gwan-sik (older)
IU as Yang Geum-myeong
Kang You-seok as Yang Eun-myeong
Lee Soo-kyung as Bu Hyeon-suk
Choi Dae-hoon as Bu Sang-gil
Jang Hye-jin as Park Yeong-ran (older)
Lee Jun-young as Park Yeong-beom
Kim Seon-ho as Park Chung-seop (special appearance)
Jung Yi-seo as Song Bu-seon
Jeon Bae-soo as Song Yeong-sam (guest)
Yeom Hye-ran as Jeon Gwang-rye

In the 1990s, Bu Sang-gil comes home drunk in Dodong-ri, his fishing village on Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, and declares himself blameless. So why, he asks, has he lost the chief's post? He berates his wife, Park Yeong-ran, for eating on his money when she cannot even watch their kid. His son, Bu Oh-seong, asks whether Sang-gil even knows how old he is. Sang-gil retorts that stepmothers can be replaced but fathers cannot, and the boy says he would leave with Yeong-ran if they split. Oh-seong is sent to his room, Sang-gil trips over something, and Yeong-ran says again and again that she is staying. Sang-gil gloats that she could never survive without his wages.

Hyeon-suk and Eun-myeong under siege

Under an on-screen card telling people to knock first, someone walks into Bu Hyeon-suk's room uninvited, and Sang-gil's daughter screams for her mother. She is mocked for her photo of the actress Hwang Shin-hye and called an idiot for falling for the Yangs' son. A remark about the boy's mother and Hyeon-suk's own family breaks off unfinished, and Oh-seong sighs through it. The message she must pass on: if Yang Eun-myeong shows his face again, he is dead.

Outside, Eun-myeong breaks up with her, and they both cry. Hyeon-suk asks whether this is about her brothers, Oh-seong and Han-eum, or her father, and refuses to be dumped. He has been beaten up. Her brothers' friends are everywhere, he says, at the arcade, the roller rink and Chilseongtong, and one bus driver kept him on board to the end of the line. So she proposes they run away. Her father has torn off her bedroom door and threatened to shave her head and send her to a monastery.

Eun-myeong can only say he does not know. Hong Gyeong-ja, one of the haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers, urges a driver to keep honking and likens the weeping pair to the swirl at the center of the Korean flag. They say they love each other. Oh Ae-sun's narration says spring looks like a celebration only in hindsight; to new buds, it is war.

Geum-myeong refuses to be ashamed

In Seoul, at Park Yeong-beom's birthday dinner in his apartment, his mother pointedly asks whether Yang Geum-myeong comes here too. She criticizes Geum-myeong's soup ladling and asks whether her mother never taught her. Geum-myeong praises the kimchi; the mother bought it. Geum-myeong could eat two bowls; the family values portion control. Then the mother says it plainly: the apartment is hers, bought for her son, and Geum-myeong is not welcome. Yeong-beom says he means to marry her, chopsticks clatter, and his mother says her pride has been damaged.

Outside, Geum-myeong asks whether his family is Samsung or Hyundai. They attend the same university, and her parents love her as much as his love him. She refuses to be ashamed of her ladling and hates feeling like a clown dancing for a woman who will never like her. Over a digestive drink, she admits she overate to impress his mother. He must choose: good husband or good son. When he protests that no man could be both, she says her father was. "I won't marry your mother's son." Ae-sun's narration likens her daughter to an owl shrieking at every breeze.

The painter's mother

At the Cannes Theater, a Seoul cinema, a radio host calls the decade the roaring '90s, and people admire a new billboard. A woman who turns up every opening night is suspected of scalping. She is really asking passersby whether the painting looks like the film star Choi Jin-sil, and grieving that nobody looks at it. Geum-myeong's narration calls the basement painter a Picasso and the theater someone's Louvre. When the owner charges out shouting at scalpers, the woman asks whether he really takes her for one.

Geum-myeong offers her a free ticket to a Monday matinee. The woman asks her not to tell her son, Park Chung-seop, that she comes to see his work. He packs a lunch, comes home covered in paint and never says where he works. She has seen every drawing he has made since elementary school. Geum-myeong tells her the theater would be ruined without "Park-casso."

Eun-myeong's side business

On Jeju, at the Aunties' Seafood House, the haenyeo restaurant, Ae-sun asks not to be called Eun-myeong's mom anymore. Geum-myeong, who has a boyfriend, never calls home first, and a friend says grown children are busier than the president. Then the school calls. Gyeong-ja lets slip that Eun-myeong has been selling cigarettes: he buys them at the general store, claims they are for the aunties, and resells them at a markup.

A friend asks whether Ae-sun has ever asked him why he wants money of his own. Ae-sun never raises her voice at Geum-myeong, the friend says, yet she is hard on Eun-myeong, and shells hammered long enough will crack. Children remember favoritism. Ae-sun calls Geum-myeong sensitive, like herself, and denies thinking her son a pushover. Asked whether one child is her pride and the other an embarrassment, she answers that she is no saint.

At the theater, Chung-seop thanks Geum-myeong. It is his mother's first film in a cinema, though she watches the weekend classic on TV, and he has been too wrapped up in his own life. Afterward his mother says she cried from the moment Alfredo, the projectionist, appeared, and wonders how he earned a living after losing his job. Toto, she tells her son, reminds her of him. At her photocopy and binding shop, she fills a box with English books for Geum-myeong, an English literature student. Premieres are her only excitement, she says, and she will remember this day until she dies.

Over a meal out, Geum-myeong complains that Chung-seop's girlfriend, Song Bu-seon, keeps kicking her shoes aside at the door. Bu-seon, though hesitant, is set to marry the son of the family behind Pildong Noodles. Geum-myeong urges him to tell Bu-seon she is free to go, or to ask her family for her hand, so he has no regrets. He points out that Geum-myeong barely knows him. His mother loves him, she says, which is why he paints what he likes; she, too, keeps her chin up as her parents' pride.

What happened on Aegi Hill

Geum-myeong's narration recalls a time when kindness to strangers could be dangerous, and a TV report covers the Hwaseong serial killings. On Jeju, Ae-sun asks someone on the phone to have Geum-myeong call her. Her uncle, Oh Han-moo, says kidnappers deserve to be beaten to death. Someone ties Ae-sun's bad dreams to the coming ancestral rite, a memorial for the dead, and to what happened to her on that rite day as a child. Ae-sun names the place: Aegi Hill.

Years earlier, young Ae-sun lags behind another girl on the way to the rite. A black dragonfly, she explains, is the Grim Reaper for dragonflies, and humans cannot see their own. She chases it. At the Aegi Hill bus stop, a woman with a sore leg asks her to change a coin into ten hwan. The shopkeeper refuses, but the woman gives Ae-sun a coin, praises her as obedient, and sends her down a back alley to a cabbage seller for more change.

There, Jeon Gwang-rye, Ae-sun's mother, suddenly appears and demands to know who gave her money. A car pulls away, and the woman is gone. Ae-sun's aunt, Hyeon Yi-suk, tells the older Ae-sun that Gwang-rye had been out searching and kept quiet so as not to frighten her. At the rite for Ae-sun's late father, Oh Han-gyu, Han-moo grumbles that firewood is the least Gwang-rye owes for her child's free keep. Gwang-rye takes the coin as bad luck. Asked how she found her daughter, she says, "I have eyes on the back of my head." Ae-sun describes the woman: a pale face and strange scratches on one wrist.

At the market, Gwang-rye grabs the wrist of every woman who passes, scaring off Gyeong-ja's customers. Then a couple stops to browse, and their talk gives them away: older girls turn disobedient, and the last one was just right. Gwang-rye seizes the woman, accuses her of planning to make her daughter a beggar, and the market piles in. Yi-suk says the woman and her partner were beaten to death in the market, and the account adds that the police asked few questions in those days. Gwang-rye credited Ae-sun's late father for saving her that day; Yi-suk credits the mother. Ae-sun's grandmother is up late, forgetful but never of her elder son's day.

Ae-sun's dream

In Seoul, Bu-seon calls Geum-myeong to the phone, and her father, Song Yeong-sam, grumbles that Ae-sun always rings during the TV drama Eyes of Dawn. Ae-sun asks about the alley's street light and orders her home early. Geum-myeong asks whether her mother has no life of her own, and says she could fool her a hundred times over. Ae-sun retorts that she should try raising a child just like herself. On Jeju, an exchange about a set bought at the hardware store ends with someone telling Ae-sun to go to Seoul and see to it herself. Asked about her dream, she says it is not a nightmare.

In the dream, wind rattles the windows, and young Ae-sun tells her youngest, Yang Dong-myeong, that he gets candy after his food. He begs for a hug. A girl shouts that Geum-myeong is in trouble. Ae-sun wakes, then dreams again, and this time she turns back, calls the boy darling, and promises to fetch his sister and return with candy every day. Geum-myeong's narration says her mother had lost so much that she believed vigilance could hold misfortune off.

In Seoul, Ae-sun finds Geum-myeong unresponsive and screams for a doctor and an ambulance, calling out the name of her husband, Yang Gwan-sik. After banging at the door, Chung-seop bursts in, and it is carbon monoxide. The ambulance cannot reach San-108 in Bongcheon 5-dong, a hillside Seoul neighborhood, by road, so the crew must climb. Geum-myeong's narration says her mother phoned nightly once the nine o'clock news ended, and the nerves that annoyed her saved her life. Ae-sun tells her that Mom is right here.

In a memory, little Geum-myeong, who insists she is a magpie, has fallen off a roof, and her father caught her. A doctor tells her to treat her parents well, and Ae-sun apologizes over the stitches. Many moons later, the narration says, when she could no longer talk to her mother on the phone, she missed that anxious voice.

Thoughts

The hour is a parade of mothers, and the show lets each one love in her own shape. Yeong-beom's mother loves by gatekeeping, down to the soup ladle. Chung-seop's mother loves from the sidewalk, asking strangers to look at a billboard and begging Geum-myeong not to tell. Gwang-rye loves by grabbing wrists until she finds the right one. Next to them, Ae-sun's nightly calls stop looking like nagging and start looking like an inheritance. Her mother had eyes on the back of her head, and Ae-sun has a phone and the nine o'clock news.

The dream is the cruelest and kindest thing in the episode. In episode 6 Ae-sun ran to her daughter during the storm; here, in her sleep, she turns back to her youngest first and promises candy every day. The same instinct that once pulled her away from one child saves the other in a rented room on a hill, and the show is careful not to call it a fair trade.

The seafood-house scene deserves more weight than its jokes. A friend tells Ae-sun straight out that she is soft on the daughter and hard on the son, and Ae-sun's answer amounts to so what. Meanwhile Eun-myeong is selling cigarettes for pocket money and talking about running off with Bu Sang-gil's daughter. Geum-myeong has told Yeong-beom to pick between his mother and her, and the man who came through the door when it counted was the painter. My guess is that both Yang children are about to test how much their parents can take.

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