When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 14 Recap

Who's in the cast:
IU as Oh Ae-sun (young)
Park Bo-gum as Yang Gwan-sik (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
Kim Seon-ho as Park Chung-seop (special appearance)
Jang Hye-jin as Park Yeong-ran (older)

In the late 1990s, deep in the IMF crisis, named for Korea's International Monetary Fund bailout, the pawnshop Yang Eun-myeong opened with his friend Park Cheol-yong has collapsed. Cheol-yong has run, and Eun-myeong, the son of Oh Ae-sun and Yang Gwan-sik, is in custody. At the center of the case is a customer's buncheong, a traditional Korean stoneware she swears was valued at 70 million won on Authentic Masterpieces. Eun-myeong blames easy credit cards and the national gold drive. He took the loan, he says, so he would never have to live like his parents. Nobody ever called him the best; his sister, Yang Geum-myeong, always heard she does everything well. Money was the one contest he thought he could win.

As a boy, Eun-myeong wants a birthday party like his sister's. An adult tells him his little brother, Yang Dong-myeong, died three days after Eun-myeong's birthday, so as the eldest son he must do without and live for two. His sister explains that their parents carry a hole left by Dong-myeong, filled daily by tiny well-done stamps. The pork cutlets go into his father's and sister's lunch boxes, and his promise of a Mercedes only gets him called a windbag. Careless words left him hungry, the narration says, and a child loved a little less stops growing.

Long before, a pregnant young Ae-sun confesses that she fears not the birth but hurting a child, because nobody taught her how to be a mom. The voice beside her says she could not scar that child if she tried.

In the present, Eun-myeong says he named his son Yang Che-il, meaning number one, because he never was. Someone asks whether his mother ever was, and how many pork cutlets she got. Told to leave, he says not to get him out; he will pay the debt himself.

Hyeon-suk begs and Ae-sun fights

Bu Hyeon-suk, Eun-myeong's wife, begs her father, Bu Sang-gil, for her inheritance now. She will not be a prisoner's wife or let Che-il grow up a criminal's son. Sang-gil says the police should catch the real culprit, and money comes before her a hundred times over. A voice tells him that no money pulls out a peg driven into a child's heart. His boat got its price the day it was built, but a person's worth is settled at death, so from tonight he can lie awake wondering about his own.

At Cheol-yong Salon, Ae-sun and a few women confront Cheol-yong's mother, who swears she does not know where her son is and blames Eun-myeong's influence. Asked whether the stoneware paid for her new television, she demands evidence. She then says Eun-myeong landed in jail because he turned out like his mother, a high-school dropout. Ae-sun grabs her by the hair. Someone remarks that she really is the daughter of Jeon Gwang-rye, her late mother, and the narration says Mom has never pulled hair before.

Gwan-sik sells the Geumeundong

Gwan-sik, too, does something for the first time: he asks for a loan, and is sent off with reasons. Captain Yang's knees ache in bad weather, trawlers sweep up everything, and a fisherman who throws back small fish never gets rich. Asked how such a reserved man came to this, a voice says parents carry their children. His son just turned 26, a crooked finger he cannot walk away from.

An old fishing log marks the August of Dong-myeong's death: the 15th, Eun-myeong's birthday, and the 18th, Typhoon Carmen. Dad went back to sea three days after losing Dong-myeong, the narration recalls. Now he sells twenty years of his life, the Geumeundong, the boat named for all three children.

Years earlier, young Gwan-sik asks for a poem titled with his own name. He reads M.F.L., by Oh Ae-sun of class 1-5 at Dodong Girls' High, over and over. It describes someone annoying up close and wondered about when away, the reason a heart stays in spring. He guesses the letters mean My First Love; she denies it is about him and bans further questions. Afterward, someone scoffs that it is not spring at all.

At the harbor, the buyer brings his family to see their boat. It will be renamed Eunyeong, for his little girl, Eun-yeong. Gwan-sik tells her the boat raised his three children and will do the same for her. He hands over his fishing logs and says he doubts he will captain again.

Released, Eun-myeong asks whether they sold the apartment or the boat, and rages at the sacrifice. "We sold it because you're our number one!" The narration says Eun-myeong already had a bucket that stays full however many holes it has. Ae-sun tells him he may resent her but never his father, who needed five meals daily through his whole working life, so brutal was the labor. Whatever she does now, she says, she does well.

Ae-sun's brag

At the market, the Literary Girl has changed, the narration says, the way Squirtle evolves into Blastoise. Ae-sun fillets squid on the spot, 20 for 2,000 won, and another vendor accuses her of poaching. Praised for her quick hands, she starts her brag. Verse one: her husband used to fillet everything for her, and he is a boat captain. Someone asks whether he still is. Verse two arrives by phone: her daughter from Seoul National University, calling at mealtime. The less she had, the narration says, the more she bragged; it was how she guarded her heart.

At the stall, Ae-sun fumes that Mi-suk, the real estate agent, keeps asking after her son, though she surely knows. Gwan-sik offers her a good face cream, then cries. He granted none of her three wishes, college, poetry or the mainland, and took her life from her. He cannot give her everything, he says, but one thing he will do, whatever it takes. Without him, she answers, she would be an orphan.

Rice cakes in the cold

Over beer, Hyeon-suk says living with her in-laws is not that hard. What wears on her is Eun-myeong, and she asks her father-in-law if he knows what his son has been doing.

Sang-gil is told to quit the ping-pong club, where people say he plays mixed doubles. Someone marvels at a first grandchild, and an offer of secret visits with the baby draws suspicion. Elsewhere, an older woman hands her daughter-in-law a tangerine field, saying her late husband's philandering wrecked her health.

One night Eun-myeong heads out, supposedly to see friends, with hot chestnuts against the below-zero cold. The old winter street cry, sticky rice cakes and buckwheat jelly, is easy for a father to tune out, the narration says, until it comes in his own child's voice. No one will hire a man who has been to jail, Gwan-sik learns, so his son walks six or seven hours in the cold, selling. Hyeon-suk asks her father-in-law to feed three more for a while. He says a head of household must do something, but the narration says a wall of his heart quietly crumbles.

TV news reports record suicides among heads of household. Someone begs their dad to find Eun-myeong, and word comes through Mi-suk that he has boarded a deep-sea fishing boat. On the phone, its captain refuses to burn fuel turning back. Then the caller introduces himself as Bu Sang-gil of Dodong-ri, his fishing village, gets mocked, and offers double.

Gwan-sik tells his son how men die out there: drowned, caught in net haulers, missing hands. Eun-myeong says his father did it all anyway, and he only wanted to win the boat back. Gwan-sik does not want it back; he wants his son off boats. On his rounds, Eun-myeong says, buyers refused change and told him to be good to his father. His father and father-in-law had paid neighbors and the ping-pong club to buy. He was embarrassed, he says, and sorry.

In a flashback, Gwan-sik asks Sang-gil for exactly that. The boy needs earnings to get up in the cold, he argues, and he is not only Gwan-sik's son. Sang-gil grumbles that he has disliked Gwan-sik since the day he came aboard with a little floral lunch box. He thought Gwan-sik was coasting on luck and a smart, frugal wife, once Sang-gil's own blind date. Then he concedes it was not the wife. "Turns out you were different from me."

Eun-myeong asks why his father keeps cleaning up after a grown man. Gwan-sik answers, "I'm not done raising you yet." Maybe there are no grown-ups, the narration says, only kids. At home, Ae-sun scolds Eun-myeong for the deep-sea boat and the rice cakes. When he is urged to apologize, she insists the fault is hers and promises him pork cutlets every day.

An employer hires Eun-myeong when no one else would, because he is a premium horse's foal: nobody should sneer at his father's diligence. When someone starts on how he soured his business, Eun-myeong blames the IMF crisis.

A new millennium

A TV countdown brings in the new millennium. Someone notes that the two of them have been together since the 1950s and predicts something big because all four in the family are jobless. A cat crouches small before it springs, so something is about to leap.

At home, after a Natasha noodles ad, one of them wonders how Song Bu-seon is handling the noodles. Park Chung-seop, Geum-myeong's husband and Bu-seon's ex, asks why his past should become a joke. Over one last pot of ramyeon, one argues that a crash, with everyone broke, is the time to grab an ace, and the other agrees.

Next, a woman passes an exam that the IMF crisis has made an annual test, and her child asks why she keeps saying she won. Published coverage names her as Park Yeong-ran, Sang-gil's wife, and the test as a real estate exam; the episode does not. A friend says the whole island knew Ae-sun wanted to be a poet and asks why she does not write. If every literary girl became one, comes the reply, everyone would be a poet. In Ae-sun's place, the friend says, she would have filled a thousand poems with bragging.

Under a card reading 2000 HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNT BOOK, the narration says a closed door means another is bound to creak open, and M.F.L. heads a first page white as new snow. Elsewhere, someone pitches Gwan-sik on high risk and high return in a part of Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, that is about to boom. It would end his wife's struggles, and his daughter, who has started a business, will need backup. The pitch ends on a single lucky strike making a good father. The narrator closes on the first winter of the new millennium, each of them getting ready to move.

Thoughts

The episode puts Eun-myeong's grievance on the table and lets it stand. The flashbacks do not excuse the pawnshop, but the birthday he lost to Dong-myeong and the cutlets he never got make his plea to be noticed land. Ae-sun's answer is the most painful moment of the hour. She does not argue. She takes the blame and promises cutlets every day, as if the fear she confessed while pregnant has come due.

Sang-gil gets his best stretch yet. Mocked by the deep-sea captain, he answers by doubling the offer, which is the most Sang-gil way to save a life. His floral-lunch-box grudge and his admission that Gwan-sik was simply different turn a long rivalry into something close to respect. The rice cake scheme, with the ping-pong club paid to buy, is the funniest way the show has found to break a son's pride and mend it at once.

The ending worries me. Gwan-sik promised Ae-sun one thing he would do whatever it takes, and the closing pitch sells him a risky bet with Eun-myeong's own phrase, a lucky strike. Ae-sun with a blank first page and Gwan-sik without a boat are both getting ready to move, and only one of those moves looks safe to me.

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