When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 13 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
Kim Seon-ho as Park Chung-seop (special appearance)
Jang Hye-jin as Park Yeong-ran (older)
Lee Jun-young as Park Yeong-beom

Yang Geum-myeong's wedding day falls during the IMF crisis, named for Korea's International Monetary Fund bailout. Someone tells her she looks beautiful, and her old university film club, the Yalashang Film Club, squeezes in for a photo. A memory returns to a farewell night before someone leaves for the army, when a voice vows to see her in a wedding dress one day. Back in the present, something lovely is unveiled, and a voice says the promise has been kept. Published coverage places her old boyfriend, Park Yeong-beom, at the wedding, and the voice keeping its promise is presumably his, though the episode never says his name. Geum-myeong's narration describes a heart pounding over who might come back and who might come anew.

Che-il turns one

A newcomer has entered the world of her mother, Oh Ae-sun, too, the narration says: a squishy little monster two generations younger who wins a surprisingly deep love. A card sends first-birthday wishes from Ae-sun's stepfather, Yeom Byeong-cheol, and his wife, Na Min-ok. A gift of 19 grams, said to come from rice-cake money, arrives with orders, repeated on the phone, to save it for college. The family of the baby's mother, Bu Hyeon-suk, stays away. Her father, Bu Sang-gil, wants no jobless son-in-law, the message goes, and her brothers never want to see the couple again.

A card marks the first birthday of Yang Che-il, Ae-sun's first grandson. His father, Ae-sun's son Yang Eun-myeong, means to do everything for his boy and grumbles that his own birthdays were bare. Asked how he will feed his family, he mentions a business plan. The name of his friend Park Cheol-yong brings a reminder that he was told not to run a pawnshop. Told to get up early and find work at the loading docks, he asks whether his father wants him to live the same life. A bucket only fills with the faucet wide open, he argues. His family will never settle for three portions of pork belly when they eat out; he wants five or six.

Someone asks why he treats his father this way. Even Steelheart, as Yang Gwan-sik was once called, picks up scars as the years soften him, a voice says. Called spikier by the day, Eun-myeong says children grow as far as they are believed in. Geum-myeong got full faith, and he got doubt.

Later, Ae-sun talks with Hyeon-suk's mother, Park Yeong-ran, who says her daughter's news felt like betrayal. Talk turns to what a pregnant bride goes without: a gold ring, even a brass one, and a veil. When Ae-sun starts to defend Eun-myeong, Yeong-ran says she has nothing against him, because sons take after their fathers. She has always envied Ae-sun: on sports days she hauled three children alone through the heat while Gwan-sik fanned his wife's back.

Yeong-ran says her daughter should be scolded to tears. Ae-sun refuses. Hyeon-suk will not be fobbed off with a brass ring, she says, and Yeong-ran may visit her and the baby whenever she likes. The narration recalls a poem Ae-sun once wrote, My Damn Child.

At the party, someone balks at Cheol-yong's baby present: a bottle of Chivas whisky. Eun-myeong complains that his sister slights her only nephew, and is told her company is in deep trouble too.

The IMF winter

TV news reports trouble at the Kia Group. The narration calls it a season of reaping, the harvest of whatever had been planted, a gold toad or a check dated for later. Workers chant against layoffs. A card reads OVERSEAS BUSINESS DIVISION ASSISTANT MANAGER, and the narration says an unforgettable winter was coming. Bulletins list one bankrupt group after another. Someone rehearses an interview, twice thanking the panel for the chance in hard times. Then the government announces it will ask the IMF for a bailout, and the news calls it national bankruptcy.

Third time lucky

On a bus, the announcement calls the next stop Sillim Market, formerly the Cannes Theater, the Seoul cinema where Geum-myeong once worked as an usher. A notice says the theater shuts down on December 1. The narration reaches for the old saying about one door closing and another creaking open. Inside, a ticket reads JA 17. Meeting even once takes lifetimes of fate, the narration says, so a third meeting ought to be lucky.

Someone is scolded for missing the goal after being set up. Then someone shouts Geum-myeong's name through a crowd, this time fans of the boy band H.O.T. rather than Seo Taiji and Boys. Only then does he grasp that there are just three chances. Over soccer commentary about extra time, someone yells for a bus to stop.

If the IMF crisis, her lost job and the theater's closing had not lined up, the narration says, this moment might never have happened. At the last stop, everyone is ordered off. Park Chung-seop, the poster painter known as Picasso, says he chased her from the theater and ran like mad. Someone guesses he must not be Picasso anymore. He still is, he says, at the Picasso Art Academy, which pays well. One of them has gone to the theater every day, just in case, and both say they missed each other badly.

Over drinks, one of them notes that they can order alcohol now, and the staring drives them both crazy. Someone claims not to get drunk easily. Someone warns Geum-myeong she will hurt herself and tells her to lift her foot, and she says that sounds just like her dad. Then comes a fuss over a cut that is not bleeding, treated with preemptive pressure. Back when he carried her books, he confesses, he kept wanting to hold her hand. Their grown-up romance, the narration says, ran more to La-Z-Boy than IKEA.

He sketches her, and she asks whether this is a Titanic drawing; the model and the situation are different, he says. The nickname Park Toto sets off a fit of laughter and a plea to stop. One of them says laughing together every day is harder than kissing every day, which is why they fit.

Real amberjack on Jeju

On Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, the talk over raw fish turns to real amberjack, and at last, the narration says, the two men meet. On Gwan-sik's boat, a saury comes up instead. Geum-myeong tells her dad to stop looking at her man like that, and the narration notes she has picked her man over her old man. Chung-seop praises such a kind fisherman for throwing the little fish back, and learns they are bait.

Aunties' Seafood House is run by the haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers. Its banners offer islanders half price during the IMF crisis and urge people to hand in their gold. The questions come: why he is on Jeju, and why a daughter should go to a man who cannot talk, ride a boat or drink. Chung-seop says nothing he does will matter if he is not liked, and is called a rude brat for not even trying to suck up. He insists he is trying everything, and adds that he does not normally eat much.

His trips after Geum-myeong to the toilet draw suspicion and an order to stand at attention. When the toilet question comes up again, the answer is simple: in case Geum-myeong falls. Told that no father would let his daughter fall into the water, he says he still means to protect her.

Outside, Geum-myeong tells him he was stiff, and he says that is simply how he is. She bristles. Does he think she sweetens her voice around his mother because that is her nature? "I am my dad's daughter." If her dad says no, there is no wedding.

Inside, Eun-myeong asks why this man is approved when his wife was not, and the siblings trade dirt: a kindergarten accident, a borrowed razor. That night, Ae-sun readies wild honey from Hallasan, Jeju's central mountain, for Chung-seop's mother, who sent a gift first. Gwan-sik keeps checking on the guest in the living room. A card reads FROM CHUNG-SEOP'S MOM: she picked the best persimmons in the fall and worked on them all season, gazing at them as she would at Geum-myeong. Someone tells Gwan-sik to let go of his uneven love.

Geum-myeong's wedding

A radio host trades IMF-era jokes about workers pushed out at 38, 45 and 56. On the wedding morning, Geum-myeong begs her mother not to cry. She will stay Yang Geum-myeong, she insists, and her pager number still ends in the family's 3312. Ae-sun says she is not giving her daughter away, and they agree to keep it cool for the photos.

Ju-gyeong, her photographer friend, runs late. The size of her love was no different, the narration says, only its temperature, and the right temperature let her be herself. Before the ceremony, Geum-myeong orders her dad not to cry. Gwan-sik tells her to back down if things go wrong and run straight to him.

The same offer echoes through the years. On her first school day, Gwan-sik wants to keep her home another year, then says she can come home if she hates it. On sports day she need not win, and if she falls, he will be right behind her. On college exam day, she tells him she never guesses answers, and he admits she does everything well but still offers a way out. Her dad held the net under every tightrope, the narration says, and she never once told him how much it comforted her.

As the bride enters, Gwan-sik says, "Dad's still right here." The narration says she grew green in her father's winter and became a tree. Guests say Ae-sun's late mother, Jeon Gwang-rye, must be beaming. The groom hurries out in case the bride is too busy crying to come, and asked whether to call it off, she says no. The narration jumps ahead: only the day before her dad left her did she pour out apologies, and he told her he had lived in heaven since she was born.

At the reception, Gwan-sik drinks past his limit and tells Chung-seop that she is his daughter forever. "I am giving you… my heaven," he adds, to a man who did nothing for her in 30 years. Someone dubs him Yang Heaven. During the bows, guests say he is being robbed of his greatest treasure.

After the wedding, a stranger comes looking for one of the family. Life never lets you savor such moments, the narration says. The visitor calls for Yang Eun-myeong, then asks where Cheol-yong is. When Mom warns you off a friend, the narration adds, there is always a reason.

Thoughts

The wedding is the best stretch of the hour, and the flashbacks are why. Every one of them makes the same offer, back down if you need to and I'll be right here, and by the exam-day version you can feel how much Geum-myeong needed that net. The end card makes it the episode's motto. Gwan-sik calling her his heaven while drunk at the reception is funny and devastating at once, and the narration's leap to the day before he left her pulls the floor out from under it.

The Jeju visit is pure comedy, and Chung-seop trailing Geum-myeong to the toilet so she will not fall into the water is a perfect courtship move for this family. I also liked Yeong-ran getting her due. Her envy of a husband who fans his wife on sports day explains years of her marriage in two sentences, and Ae-sun's refusal to scold Hyeon-suk makes her the mother-in-law she never had.

The warnings are stacking up around Eun-myeong. He was told to stay out of pawnshops, the narration mentions a postdated check, and Cheol-yong's name shows up at a first birthday and again at the wedding. I expect whatever Cheol-yong has done to land on Eun-myeong's doorstep soon.

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