When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 12 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
Kang You-seok as Yang Eun-myeong
Choi Dae-hoon as Bu Sang-gil
Lee Soo-kyung as Bu Hyeon-suk
Na Moon-hee as Kim Chun-ok
Kim Seon-ho as Park Chung-seop (special appearance)

In the 1990s, a TV news report says a new pay-by-the-bag trash system has people dumping things they never needed to throw out. Yang Geum-myeong's engagement to Park Yeong-beom is over. In Seoul, a friend who checks on her finds not even kimchi in the place and reports that her mother has phoned again, apparently to make sure she is alive. A broken heart is more than a figure of speech, Geum-myeong's narration says: it hurts. The friend of seven years is gone, but the friend she has had for 20 still watches only her.

On the phone, her mother, Oh Ae-sun, offers to come up with jangjorim, a side dish she has made plenty of, and promises not to mention Yeong-beom. On Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, Ae-sun grumbles that her daughter now tells everyone but her. In a memory, little Geum-myeong whispers that she likes Kim Jeong-geun, the cutest boy in the neighborhood, and Ae-sun makes her promise to keep sharing secrets. They were once each other's whole world, the narration says, and only one of them moved out.

Geum-myeong comes home hungry

After about a thousand calls asking whether she has eaten, Geum-myeong finally feels hungry. She turns up late one night, unannounced, on vacation. A pot of jangjorim is waiting, and her dad has been peeling quail eggs for it since the day before. The chonggak kimchi, made from small ponytail radishes, has gone sour the way she likes it.

The feeding begins: broccoli she refuses, noodles, steamed buns and a real amberjack that has her warning her dad she will get fat. Her parents, the narration says, raise her a second time. On the phone from the army, her brother, Yang Eun-myeong, teases her for getting dumped. Home is a fortress, and she sleeps in it like a hibernating bear.

Sunrise on the Geumeundong

Before dawn, her father, Yang Gwan-sik, wakes her and asks her to go somewhere with him. She begs for more sleep, though her narration admits she used to leap out of bed at 4 a.m. for trips with Yeong-beom. She ends up in a life jacket on the Geumeundong, the boat named for the three children, watching the sunrise on his day off.

He prays at every sunrise for his children, he tells her, and if he sleeps less, she and her brother can sleep more. Nothing frightens him like the sea, he admits. When the wind is fierce, he looks at the faint light of another fishing boat instead of the lighthouse. Picturing someone else out there, just as lonely and afraid, helps. He and her mother are always sailing beside her, he says, and if she is ever hungry, she should come home.

Geum-myeong asks how they will face the neighbors now that the invitations are out. Gwan-sik says marrying into that family would have embarrassed him more, and he knew she would not. A richer, more successful family, he says, could have kept her from ever getting hurt. Then he should not be her dad in the next life, she answers. He always hands her 120 when he only has 100, and she would not swap him for the richest man alive. He would not mind if she never married; she says she will, since he is so happy married himself. The narration says she saw a different sun that day, and understood how warm it was beside her father only once that sun had set for good.

At the dock, she tells anyone who asks that the sunrise was just her and her dad. A man who says Gwan-sik once cooked ramyeon for him, evidently Bu Sang-gil, grumbles about a captain's airs, and someone calls Eun-myeong the brat who dumped Sang-gil's daughter. Ae-sun's voice from episode 4 returns, telling Sang-gil her husband is done working for him.

At his house, Sang-gil offers to take his daughter, Bu Hyeon-suk, out on his boat at sunrise, and she tells him to hire somebody. He asks whether she still writes to the boy and threatens military prison through a general he knows. She throws his womanizing back at him and says he has already wrecked her life. Notes on screen read I LOVE EUN-MYEONG.

A match from Seogwipo

Later, a match is pitched. The family has a kumquat field and a mountain, the father is famous in Seogwipo for his devotion to his wife, and the 29-year-old son is a public official. Geum-myeong protests to her mother that only a year has passed since the breakup, and the whole neighborhood knows. It knows nothing, comes the reply. Ae-sun never handed out the invitations, because she sensed her daughter would call it off. That, she says, is how she raised her.

As a bike memory plays, Ae-sun's voice repeats her words from episode 4: her daughter should be the one who flips the table, not the one who sets it. Geum-myeong asks why her mother never flipped one herself, and why she was always so nice, as someone counts out eleven tangerines for the price of ten. Ae-sun's answer is her children. Holding her newborns, she realized her life would become the stories they would tell at her funeral, so she could not live a day dishonestly. Geum-myeong finally understands why the invitation named her as Yang Gwan-sik and Oh Ae-sun's eldest.

Ae-sun says her daughter dodged a pile of dung by luck, and Geum-myeong defends Yeong-beom. Ae-sun knows without being told that she is crying inside, the way she cried for four days over Kim Jeong-geun as a girl. A first love, Ae-sun advises, should be wrapped up and tucked into the warm part of the floor, to take out now and then. Geum-myeong points out the flaw: "You live with your first love." She tells her mother to write poems. Ae-sun says she writes every day and that her poetry collection is over there; a card shows it is her 1995 household account book.

The narration says Geum-myeong arrived like a rag and leaves remade, like an old garment in a good tailor's hands. After she goes, the house feels empty. She took so much, her narration says, yet her smallest gesture squared the account in her parents' eyes.

Ae-sun's soft heart

The haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers, talk over an elder who dove past 80 and died, her children having taken the money from her hands. Talk turns to Ae-sun, who pities everyone and is always broke. One woman offers to step in, but another says to let her be. Once the aunties are gone, Ae-sun must stand without backup.

The aunties list Ae-sun's luck, including a sister-in-law who looks after her in-laws. Gwan-sik's sister, Yang Gyeong-ok, asks why she should care for their mother when there is an older son. Then comes the pitch: an Elvan Wellness Mat that will heal Gwan-sik's knees and even prevent cancer, sold at no profit. Ae-sun notes that Gyeong-ok has taken all her money again.

Their mother, Kwon Gye-ok, past 60, is minding a grandson, Seo Dong-min. She tells a silent Gwan-sik to go home to his wife, since nobody has ever taken Ae-sun's side. He borrows his daughter's line: he would not trade his mother for Korea's most celebrated one. Such a mother, she retorts, would turn her back on a son so devoted to his wife. Still, she tells him he has been a good son, and that staying alive was the duty that mattered.

Han-gyu's daughter

Ae-sun's grandmother, Kim Chun-ok, has a birthday, but she no longer recognizes anyone. She does not know her eldest grandson, Oh Jong-gu, whom she taught to read, or her own sibling. Then Ae-sun arrives with senbei snacks, and Chun-ok knows her: Han-gyu's daughter, the child of her son. Chun-ok keeps asking what is bothering her. Someone grumbles that a word about Ae-sun's troubles once got her a whole boat, and Ae-sun's aunt, Hyeon Yi-suk, asks for one too.

Ae-sun asks her grandmother to come live with her and Gwan-sik, and Chun-ok refuses. Ae-sun promises dentures in the spring, since Chun-ok once helped her get new teeth. In a memory, Chun-ok ties a thread to a little girl's loose tooth while a boy named Gwan-sik is pushed to go first. Back in the present, Chun-ok says she knows what is weighing on Ae-sun. All her life she has held in her son's name, and she still wants to shout it once and cry. "I know exactly how you feel." Those words put Ae-sun in her grandmother's lap, the narration says, where she cries for a long time.

Asked why she will not move in, Chun-ok says she never raised the girl and never fed her a whole croaker. On a warm mat, she says she will sleep well. Later, dressed in pink for the portrait her children will remember, she asks whether she lived well and paid off her debts, and is told she did, beyond measure. Asked whether her life was a picnic or an ordeal, she answers in voice-over: "Definitely a picnic." She got to see all her children. Chun-ok dies, and a memorial card for Kim Chun-ok of the Gimhae Kim clan wishes her a reunion at last.

Farewells pile up. A voice counts off parents and grandparents, someone has brought three spoons again, and a voice names Auntie Chung-su and then the grandmother. The narration compares the family to picnickers who set out side by side, only to find that each one rides out a different tide.

Spring comes early

For some, the tide brings a new arrival. Eun-myeong walks in to a feast and a demand for a salute, and Hyeon-suk is with him. Someone exclaims that the two are still together, and then the news comes out: Ae-sun and Gwan-sik are grandparents, and the baby already has a nickname, Strikey. The narration says new shoots rise even in frozen front-line soil, and that a winter as early as their spring is on its way.

In Seoul, someone shouts for Ms. Yang, then Geum-myeong's full name, through a crowd of fans begging Seo Taiji and Boys not to retire. It is Park Chung-seop, the poster painter from the Cannes Theater, a Seoul cinema. He is newly out of the army and running after her bus. The narration promises a glistening winter, as dazzling as spring.

Thoughts

Almost nothing in the first half is plot, and it never drags. The hour is about people feeding each other, and the boat scene is the best version of it. Gwan-sik at sunrise, watching another boat's light so he feels less alone, is the whole man in one image. The 120-for-100 line lands because we have watched him do that math for 11 episodes. The narration's line about her sun setting for good is a heavy thing to drop into a sunrise scene, and it shadows everything after it.

Chun-ok's goodbye is gorgeous. She forgets her grandson and her own sibling but not Han-gyu's daughter, and the name she could never say aloud mirrors the son Ae-sun and Gwan-sik still do not talk about. The episode never says Dong-myeong's name either, and it does not need to. I also loved the rich-man line traveling from Geum-myeong to Gwan-sik, who aims it straight at his own mother and gets a lecture on devoted sons for his trouble.

The new threads point back to Dodong-ri, the Yangs' fishing village. Hyeon-suk's news puts Sang-gil, who cannot even get his daughter onto his boat, on a collision course with the Yangs, and I expect him to take it worse than anyone. In Seoul, the bus chase gives Geum-myeong her own glistening winter. My bet is that Chung-seop gets the next scene to explain himself.

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