When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 2 Recap

Who's in the cast:
IU as Oh Ae-sun (young)
Park Bo-gum as Yang Gwan-sik (young)
Oh Jung-se as Yeom Byeong-cheol (special appearance)
Uhm Ji-won as Na Min-ok (special appearance)
Na Moon-hee as Kim Chun-ok

In the late 1960s, at a village market on Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, the row that closed episode 1 is still going. Park Mak-cheon, a village shaman, is yelling at Oh Ae-sun, and her grandson, Yang Gwan-sik, wants to know why she wrecked Ae-sun's cabbages. Ae-sun shouts back that she wants nothing to do with him. The two families get called barnacles and whelks: a fishmonger's son and the daughter of a haenyeo, one of Jeju's women free-divers.

Walking home, Ae-sun lays out her plan to marry a man from Seoul. She even claims Seoul roots, thanks to an uncle whose noodle shop is named after Gyeonggi, the province around the capital. The sea took her father and mother. She will not marry an island boy who has never heard the word nostalgia, and she would sooner live with a dolhareubang, one of Jeju's stone grandfather statues. Her hand is in Gwan-sik's pocket as she says it.

At the Yang house, Mak-cheon and Gwan-sik's mother, Kwon Gye-ok, argue about the pair. Mak-cheon reminds Gye-ok that she came into the family already pregnant and warns that the youngsters may run off by night just as she did. Gye-ok asks whether her mother-in-law is accusing her of stealing her son. The household advice is to leave the two alone until the novelty wears off. The argument ends on a hard line: people pity a beggar, but they do not love one.

Ae-sun asks why

Gwan-sik turns up with fish for Ae-sun again, mackerel this time, and she decides to have it out. She calls being pitiful wonderful and her life full of freebies, down to the school's spare powdered milk. She wants to know if his fish are pity too, and whether his grandmother told him to hand them over and keep quiet. He answers with a kiss that lands on the groove above her lip, then says he will not live with his grandmother; he wants to live with her. She has already put something shiny on her lips. "I've been ready since I was 14!"

Decades later, a TV report on the Jeju Canola Flower Festival catches a visitor saying the flowers remind them of their first love. A family watching at home asks their mother whether their father was hers, and she claims to have forgotten. In voice-over, someone wishes they had known back then that spring was really spring. Back in the 1960s, Ae-sun still swears she will not marry Gwan-sik, and the voice-over warns that spring turns cold just when it feels warm.

Na Min-ok moves in

At the house of Ae-sun's stepfather, Yeom Byeong-cheol, there is a new partner, Na Min-ok. He assures her that his legal marriage record is spotless. Min-ok sees no reason to look after his late wife's daughter.

At the cramped house of Ae-sun's paternal grandmother, Kim Chun-ok, the talk is all about Oh Jong-gu, the eldest grandson. He drains the family's money, but he will one day perform the ancestral rites. The family cannot see why Ae-sun keeps house for another family when she could earn factory wages. They laugh off her hope of college, since even Jong-gu did not go, and someone sneers that they would not give spoiled rice even to a dog that ran away.

Back at Byeong-cheol's house, Min-ok has taken down the picture of Ae-sun's mother. Ae-sun is furious, and angrier still that her half-siblings, Sun-nam and Sun-bong, let it happen for ice pops; Min-ok bought four, none for Ae-sun. Ae-sun demands her tuition money. Byeong-cheol borrowed what she earned selling cabbages and promised her college if she raised his children. Min-ok sets her straight: he is broke, he lives with her because he owes her, and next year he will have three children of his own. Ae-sun is on her own.

A card reads December 1967. Her uncle, Oh Han-moo, has a plan: a soldering apprenticeship at a factory on the mainland, with food and a bed, 15,000 won a month after training, and half of it sent home, because Jong-gu's debt is hers too. Ae-sun remembers her mother saying a cow has a better life than a Jeju woman. She refuses to clean up after anyone, siblings or eldest grandson, because living that way would make her mother cry. The reply is blunt: her mother is gone, and no warm place is waiting for her anywhere.

Gwan-sik learns a word

Ae-sun takes it all to Gwan-sik, from the factory plan to the ice pops. He is the only person who cares about her, she says, and she sounds annoyed about it.

Gwan-sik answers by reciting a poem about a silent outcry and a handkerchief of eternal nostalgia, so he knows the word now. He admits he cannot hand her college, poetry or the mainland, but there is one thing he will do for her no matter what. She wants him to at least promise her the moon and the stars. He says he cannot lie. She taunts him that he would lose to his grandmother anyway, and he keeps reciting until she tells him to shut up.

A card reads February 1968, and the plan is set. Its logic borrows from Kim Il, the Korean pro wrestler famous for his headbutt: even he would rather avoid a fight than win one. Running away is fine, but Ae-sun intends to collect what she is owed on the way out. Once the boat leaves Jeju there is no going back, so they agree to stick it out together, live or die, and anyone scared can go home now. Nobody goes home. A quick check of Ae-sun's 100-meter time, 24 seconds, does not slow them down.

Runaways on the Busan ferry

The ferry carries a banner for a campaign against runaway women. On the radio, the country prepares events honoring the May 16 coup and worries about Kim Shin-jo's North Korean infiltrators. Officials checking IDs spot two minors huddled in a corner. The runaways dare the officials to throw them overboard, then announce that they are husband and wife. The narrator notes that their own little coup is less revolutionary than they hoped.

In Busan, a gold dealer eyes what they want to sell and asks whether it is stolen. They say it belongs to Gwan-sik's grandmother. They have no IDs, and a claim to have been born in early 1949 falls apart over the wrong zodiac animal. Their final answer is that they are not thieves, just runaways.

At the Nampojang Inn, they claim their wallets were stolen and offer a piece of jewelry as a deposit. The innkeeper decides they are honeymooners and lets them pay tomorrow, over her husband's protests. Busan people, she assures them, are the most generous around.

The most generous inn in Busan

In their room, Ae-sun asks why Gwan-sik never stands up to his grandmother. He says he is not afraid of her; he is afraid of what she would do to Ae-sun. He is giving up athletics, which he only did for the free milk and bread. She will study for the high school equivalency exam while he works at a factory. Then she explains why she picked the dullest boy on Jeju: "You're like steel." Like the woodcutter in the fairy tale, she will take the steel axe over gold or silver, because Gwan-sik will never break her heart.

On Jeju, the gossip runs ahead of them. Min-ok seems strangely cheerful even though Ae-sun made off with her rings and her yellow dress. Gye-ok has lost her gold frog and her son, Mak-cheon nearly fainted, and word is that Ae-sun led a whole scene on the ferry. Talk turns to whether young love survives an empty stomach, and to the picture of two kids eating tangerines on a heated floor. Byeong-cheol and Min-ok trade quips about whether they ever did that themselves. When Gye-ok asks what Ae-sun was wearing, Min-ok, who sells clothes door to door, says she owns far too many to know.

That night, the innkeeper brings soju and food, all free. She cranks up the floor heating and loads the couple with hints about their wedding night. Both turn bright red.

In the morning, a vendor outside calls out jaecheop-guk, a clam soup. The fan mount in the room has come loose, and the bill comes to 640 won, even though everything was on the house. Then they realize their bags are gone. The innkeepers swear the pair arrived empty-handed and add charges for room service and the broken fan. When the pair push back, the innkeepers offer to call the police and mention that these two are runaways.

At a Busan police station, a missing-persons notice describes Gwan-sik, 19, as handsome and Ae-sun, 18, as a vixen. An officer tells Gye-ok she might as well hunt for a needle in a haystack. From a pay phone, she begs her mother-in-law to stop describing her dreams, including a conception dream and a rooster that kidnaps the kids.

Hansel and Gretel

Back at the inn, Ae-sun catches the slip: the innkeepers knew the pair came from Jeju, which only the boat tickets in the stolen bags could have told them. She spots her suitcase, which holds her mother's picture, along with towels lifted from local saunas. The innkeepers demand proof, threaten to sell them somewhere far away and throw them out.

Outside, Ae-sun grieves for her only picture of her mother and for the gold frog. She compares the two of them to the children in Hansel and Gretel, which Gwan-sik has never heard of. He asks whether the children survived, and her answer goes further. "They killed her." The children burned the witch in her own oven, took her treasure and lived happily ever after.

That night, the innkeepers give a new guest the same welcome. Ae-sun climbs onto Gwan-sik's back, and the guest gets a quiet warning not to drink and not to turn off the light. The plan is simple: the gold frog and the picture first, the cashbox if those cannot be found. Ae-sun tells Gwan-sik he is head of the family now and calls him honey.

The search turns up nothing, and Gwan-sik urges her to leave, promising to buy her another. Ae-sun grabs the cashbox instead and is caught. With 24 seconds to cover 100 meters, she never had a chance. The innkeepers threaten to beat her and sell her, and she yells at Gwan-sik to run. They jeer at him to go, until something he does has them asking what on earth he is doing. The narrator, one of Ae-sun's children, closes on two heroes: Mom's first love, the karate master Choi Bae-dal, and Mom herself, the wrestler Kim Il.

Thoughts

The philtrum kiss is the most Gwan-sik move imaginable: ten years of silent fish deliveries, then a confession that misses the target by a centimeter. Ae-sun turns the scene with one line about shiny lips, and the pair snap into focus. She does the talking and the planning; he does the showing up. The barnacles-and-whelks line deflates the whole feud, and the elopement history Mak-cheon flings at Gye-ok shows the fear underneath it.

The middle stretch is brutal in a very ordinary way. Nobody at home is a villain on the scale of the Busan innkeepers. Ae-sun's relatives simply count her as a paycheck, and her stepfather borrows her cabbage money and moves on. That turns the run to Busan into less of a romance and more of the only exit left. Then the episode spends twenty minutes showing how little two Jeju teenagers know about a city that greets them with free soju.

Hansel and Gretel is the best scene here. Ae-sun tells the story to a boy who has never heard it, ends on the witch in the oven, and Gwan-sik can only answer by saying her full name. The closing narration promises a fight with karate and headbutts, and a dream relayed from Jeju has already been called a conception dream. Somebody back on Jeju may know more than these two do.

Previous: When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 1 Recap. Up next: When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 3 Recap. See every episode in the When Life Gives You Tangerines episode guide.