When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 11 Recap

Who's in the cast:
Moon So-ri as Oh Ae-sun (older)
Park Hae-joon as Yang Gwan-sik (older)
IU as Yang Geum-myeong
Lee Jun-young as Park Yeong-beom
Kim Seon-ho as Park Chung-seop (special appearance)
Kang You-seok as Yang Eun-myeong
Lee Soo-kyung as Bu Hyeon-suk

In the 1990s, in a Seoul emergency room, Yang Geum-myeong is alive after the gas leak that closed episode 10. Someone credits her room's warped window frame. Her mother, Oh Ae-sun, nearly missed her flight from Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, and came on nothing but an urge. Told that she saved her daughter, Ae-sun says Geum-myeong saved her instead.

Park Yeong-beom, Geum-myeong's boyfriend, wants it settled. They should marry now, he says, and move into an oil-boiler apartment. He hates her freezing room, her late ticket shifts and the way she does everything alone. In the taxi, he says, he kept thinking that if she died, he would too. Geum-myeong answers that the living carry on, though she admits she would barely get by without him.

He promises she will marry him, not his mother, and that he will handle his family. Over his words comes a replay from episode 3: her father, Yang Gwan-sik, vowing to keep Ae-sun safe from his own grandmother. When Yeong-beom asks her to win his mother over, Geum-myeong says she dislikes the woman too, after what was said to her face. Ae-sun overhears and asks whether his mother disapproves of her daughter.

On Jeju, Ae-sun's son, Yang Eun-myeong, has a girlfriend, Bu Hyeon-suk. The haenyeo aunties, Jeju's women free-divers, can hardly believe she is really the daughter of Bu Sang-gil. It comes out that her father and his mother once sat at this very spot on a set-up date, back when the shop was a café. Pressed for a plain yes or no, someone answers that the two never dated but did consider marriage.

Two men leave for the army

At a send-off, the signs do the talking. One begs YEM to come back, another says Hyeon-suk loves him forever, and a third vows to wait 26 months or 26 years. Eun-myeong is going into the army, and a voice says he should have gone to college.

In Seoul, Park Chung-seop, the poster painter known as Picasso, has also left for the army without a word. He was 28, it turns out. Since Geum-myeong is leaving too, she is told the two will not meet again in this life. She protests that he carried her to the hospital on his back.

Her narration moves to the 1993 KBS Korean Music Awards, where the singer Kim Soo-hee's "Sad Love" beats the pop group Seo Taiji and Boys for the grand prize. As 1993 ends, she calls it a season when the wind never rested.

In a memory from before he left, the two talk about the Baek Seok poem from episode 9, about a poor man and the beautiful Natasha. Calling him Mr. Park Toto, Geum-myeong tells him he is not poor, since few people earn a living from talent. His Natasha is not beautiful anyway, she adds. Self-pity will only make his life worse: a man who prices himself at 100 won cannot expect anyone to pay 1,000. He laughs, and admits he did not know he could.

At a spot facing what is billed as Korea's biggest Christmas tree, Chung-seop tells her she is like one. A tree does its job wherever it is put, he explains, sparkling in a basement or in a corner shop nobody visits. He only wanted to say something sweet, he adds, because of the day. She asks whether he is going somewhere, and the title card follows: My Love by My Side.

The families meet in Seoul

Geum-myeong now works an office job, Yeong-beom studies for the bar exam, and her one long-held dream, she tells him, is independence. That is harder than it sounds, her narration says, when life is one parental summons after another, all the way to meeting the in-laws.

At a Seoul restaurant, Ae-sun and Gwan-sik have flown up and are kept waiting by Yeong-beom's parents, who blame the traffic. Mom said it was fine before anyone else, Geum-myeong's narration notes, to people who had not apologized; that was how gravity worked in that room. Yeong-beom's father introduces himself by name, Park Geum-myeong, reminding the Yangs they have met before. Gwan-sik shakes the man's hand as her father, a handshake Geum-myeong had never seen before.

Lunch goes downhill. Yeong-beom's parents want the couple married soon, and his father notes it is odd for his son to call his girlfriend by the father's own name. When a second wedding in Jeju comes up, his side of the table answers that two would be embarrassing: Geum-myeong is joining their family, so theirs comes first. The wedding goes to Seoul. Yeong-beom's mother says she has asked Geum-myeong to quit her job and shuts her son down when he objects. Even the way Geum-myeong ladles the scorched rice soup is judged.

Her narration jumps back to episode 4, when young Gwan-sik moved to his wife's table and announced he would eat there from now on. Ae-sun liked to tell her that, as far as she knew, no other husband in Dodong-ri, their fishing village, had done it first. Back then it was a revolution, the narration says: he never left her alone on the battlefield. Geum-myeong only understood it, she says, while ladling that soup.

Told that a mother who does everything leaves her daughter knowing nothing, Ae-sun says Geum-myeong was too precious to teach. Heading for the subway, Gwan-sik tells his daughter she does everything well and Dad knows it. Once they are gone, Yeong-beom's mother calls the precious line a dig at her. Geum-myeong answers that she was raised like a treasured plant under glass, and asks her to stop being harsh, or her parents will cry.

Later, one of the Yangs admits wanting to call off the wedding a thousand times. Only Geum-myeong's feelings for Yeong-beom have stopped it, not any sense that she is less than him. The same voice wants to do everything for the wedding, so nobody can say their child came without even a silver spoon. Geum-myeong's narration admits she was the boss at home and a minion in his family.

The hanbok fitting

At a shop selling hanbok, the traditional dress the mothers will wear, Geum-myeong tells Ae-sun that pink suits her and pushes for floral embroidery, since she will be the bride's mother only once. Then Yeong-beom's mother arrives. Flowers would make Ae-sun look like the bride, she says, and she picks a red bean soup shade for her, keeping emerald for herself. When Geum-myeong says her mom likes pink, the woman calls pink tacky.

Afterward, Yeong-beom's mother finally accepts the gift Ae-sun keeps pressing on her. Ae-sun asks her to see Geum-myeong kindly, as a girl with a deep, caring heart, and says she has grown to like Yeong-beom because her daughter does. The answer is that she might die if she does not speak her mind. Her son is her life and her masterpiece, she says, and Geum-myeong is hard to like. She asks Ae-sun to help stop the wedding, each mother working on her own child.

When Geum-myeong asks why she was so quiet at lunch, Ae-sun turns the woman's words around: Yeong-beom is hard to like, and he has not even passed the bar exam. Geum-myeong accuses her of thinking her daughter is lesser, or she would have said she liked the pink. Ae-sun says she held back so the woman would not be cold to her child. Even a small scratch on Geum-myeong's heart, she says, bruises hers and Gwan-sik's.

Geum-myeong faces Yeong-beom's mother

Yeong-beom says moving out was his own decision, but his mother accuses Geum-myeong of coaxing him into it to get a house. Geum-myeong says they never discussed it. Then the mother admits she told Ae-sun they should both stop the wedding. Elsewhere, Ae-sun says she would wear the red bean hanbok a thousand times if it bought kindness for her daughter.

Yeong-beom's mother also blames Geum-myeong for driving a wedge between mother and son. Geum-myeong answers that she has put up with her only because she knows how embarrassed Yeong-beom is of his mother. The woman fires back that she took Gwan-sik for a lowly laborer when she saw his hand. "Not a single thing about my parents embarrasses me," Geum-myeong says. Reminded that the invitations are out, she refuses to marry like this, because her mom and dad would cry. The mother can barely believe that Geum-myeong is the one breaking it off.

The mothers' earlier talk plays out alongside. Marriage should join similar families, the woman says, and no struggling family is free of shadows. Speaking up, she adds, has lifted a boulder off her chest. Ae-sun asks whether she knows where she is setting it down: on her own son's heart. She is living her son's life as her own, Ae-sun tells her.

Years later, with TV news of Pope Francis's first arrival in Korea, Yeong-beom's mother tells her grown son not to drink too much, and a late-night fight follows. She lived for him, she says, and marrying that girl would have made him unhappier still. He answers that his life is wretched, and that he has never once had what he truly wanted. Over a wedding photo, he notes that she was the only one smiling. "My first love didn't end up as a fairy tale," Geum-myeong's narration says.

A year of goodbyes

Back in 1994, a North Korean broadcast announces that Kim Il Sung, the North's leader, died on July 8. When the engagement ended, Geum-myeong's narration says, she cried like a North Korean spy. They had been together seven years and spent a year breaking up.

Past midnight on a freezing night, Yeong-beom brings flowers, a birthday gift to himself. Geum-myeong tells him to stop, because it is exhausting. She still loves him deeply, she says, but she loves herself too, and feels too sorry for herself to go on. He offers to cut off his family. She asks who would want that life; as a family, she says, they would end up hating each other. When he says he cannot let her go, she tells him he can. "Life goes on for the living." She thanks him and says she is glad he is the one who will remember her in her twenties.

At their last meeting, Yeong-beom says he will miss her scent and makes her promise to call if anything happens, since she has no one in Seoul. Her narration says he was her lover, her family and her best friend. Losing him felt like watching the Little Prince leave the tiny planet only the two of them had shared.

Thoughts

The lunch is the best-built stretch of the episode, and it runs on a ladle. Yeong-beom's mother turns a pot of scorched rice soup into a test, Ae-sun parries with her too-precious-to-teach line, and the flashback to young Gwan-sik switching tables turns the meal into family history. Geum-myeong grasping what her father did only while serving someone else's family is the kind of hindsight this narrator does best.

What stings is how alike the two mothers sound. Both put a child first, and both hold their tongues for that child until they cannot. Ae-sun's silence is meant to shield Geum-myeong; the other woman's candor lands, as Ae-sun puts it, on her own son's heart. The flash-forward proves the point in a few cold minutes. Yeong-beom has been nothing but sweet all hour, and the show refuses to make him a villain, which is why the year of goodbyes hurts.

Then there is Chung-seop, who gets a Christmas-tree speech and is gone without a word, after Geum-myeong lectures him like an older sister. The episode files him away with care. She is left alone in Seoul, out of the theater and out of the engagement, holding a promise to call Yeong-beom if anything happens. My guess is that the painter, not that phone call, is the door the show has left open.

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