When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 3 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)
Choi Dae-hoon as Bu Sang-gil
Na Moon-hee as Kim Chun-ok

At a Busan police station in the late 1960s, the officers have fun with their two runaways from Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast. They wonder aloud whether the boy is a spy and threaten to ship both kids to Namsan, home of the feared intelligence agency. Oh Ae-sun does not lower her head. She points out that they hit no one and stole nothing, and that they are minors waiting quietly for their guardians. One officer laughs that she belongs in the National Assembly. Another mentions that the boy's mother has been camping outside the door.

Yang Gwan-sik's mother, Kwon Gye-ok, walks in, and her first words are not about her son. She wants the bag, her jewelry and above all her gold frog. Across town, the innkeeper of the Nampojang Inn, who robbed the pair in episode 2, is trying to sell that frog at a jewelry shop. She calls it an anniversary present from a doting husband. The jeweler remembers her selling another anniversary bracelet last summer.

Back at the inn, Gye-ok sets up camp and pockets the room money that guests hand over. Her explanation for why Jeju has no thieves is simple: islanders keep coming back until the thief gives up. The innkeeper calls her a lunatic, and the gold frog grows into a gold toad as the fight goes on. Then the police arrive and lead the innkeeper away for what one officer calls her tenth offense. Someone still wants the runaways to pay for the broken wall fan.

On the way out, Gye-ok learns that her son's first-birthday rings went into the stolen bag too. She tells Gwan-sik that a dog is worth more than him and his father. Then they head home, and the title card follows: Yesterday Was Your Spring.

Expelled, and a match with the captain

In the faculty office on Jeju, teachers gossip that Ae-sun has dragged down another family's eldest grandson, one of the island's top four athletes. A notice on the desk makes it official: Ae-sun is expelled for running away and disruptive behavior. Later, Gwan-sik learns he is only suspended. When he asks why only Ae-sun is punished, the answer is blunt. The boy who runs off is a hero, and the girl who runs with him is shameless.

At home, her relatives say she has shamed them at the market. With no factory job and no marriage in sight, they wonder what is left for her. At the Yang house, the elders cannot believe Gwan-sik wants an orphan with only a middle-school diploma, and someone calls for him to be struck from the family registry. Park Mak-cheon, his grandmother and the village shaman, refuses to lose her grandson. The household settles on a gentler plan: you catch a chicken with a worm, not a stick.

The worm turns out to be Gye-ok's visit. She asks if Ae-sun has eaten and mentions that Gwan-sik has had nothing, because his father has ordered that nobody feed him. She reminds Ae-sun of the fish he stole for her for ten years. Gye-ok admits she once eloped with her own husband, then warns that Yang sons forget their wives and serve their mothers. Ae-sun, she predicts, would end up alone in that house.

Gwan-sik makes his own appeal to Ae-sun's family. He has no money, he says, but she will never go hungry. They ask whether his family approves, since Mak-cheon has declared that Ae-sun is bound to her widowed mother's spirit. He promises Ae-sun will live with him, not his grandmother. Ae-sun refuses to be taken on the cheap, swears she will marry someone richer, and tells him she will never marry him.

At a tea room, Ae-sun meets the man she has been matched with: Bu Sang-gil, a boat owner of 30 with two children and a broken first marriage. He likes that she raised two siblings, calls himself nearly a Seoul man, and says he can overlook her past. He also wants to know if she plans to finish the 50-won tea.

At home, the selling points pile up. Every boat in Dodong-ri, his fishing village, belongs to his family. He might pay for college within ten years, and he might even publish her poems. Ae-sun concludes she was born to be a maid. When the spring rain will not stop, she wonders if her mother is crying.

The haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers, who worked beside her late mother, Jeon Gwang-rye, are furious. They tell Mak-cheon that Gwang-rye must be turning in her grave, and that a shaman has no business scolding other families. If Ae-sun marries that man, one of them vows, she is done with the Dragon King, the sea god.

At Madam Baek Gi-nam's 60th birthday party, Sang-gil dismisses weddings as robbery and white dresses as being for first marriages. Neither of them is new to this, he hints, and he asks about Busan. Meanwhile, Gwan-sik arrives at the home of Ae-sun's paternal grandmother, Kim Chun-ok, with gifts from his family's store. He offers Ae-sun a mackerel every day and asks Chun-ok and Ae-sun's uncle, Oh Han-moo, how they can throw her away on a married man. They tell him the girl will not budge, and that he should ask his own mother how she was persuaded.

Back at the party, Sang-gil asks whether the runaways were caught on the first day. Ae-sun asks whether he and his wife split early or late, and he explodes. She tells him her temper is exactly why Gwan-sik likes her. On cue, Gwan-sik storms in and tells her to come with him. She asks where exactly they would go.

Ae-sun sends Gwan-sik away

Outside, Gwan-sik begs her not to marry, pointing out that she still wears his ring. Ae-sun pours out everything. She alone was expelled and branded shameless, and college, poetry and even a soldering job are gone. She asks what he has ever done for her since she was ten, besides handing her fish. He promises to work on boats or lay bricks.

She says life with him would be one losing throw after another, and that she is tired of being stubborn in houses that do not want her. A memory surfaces of a boy at the fish stall who noticed she always bought five fish for a family of six and threw in one free. He has seen all her shame, she says, and that is the problem. She tells him he has to leave so she can live.

Decades later, at a family dinner over chicken, the older Ae-sun listens to her grown children squabble. One vows to marry a Seoul man who at least knows what the word nostalgia means. They ask whether Oh Ae-sun, the woman rather than the mother, regrets anything. She tells them to eat their chicken. The narrator says only that the spring of the Busan escape broke her.

Back in the late 1960s, the worm plan earns praise as almost frighteningly effective, and the rest of Gye-ok's visit plays out. Ae-sun asks whether Gwan-sik was truly one of Jeju's best, and Gye-ok says he was practically third. He always claimed he went to training for the free milk and bread. Then Gye-ok makes her real request: Ae-sun would cost him his dreams and his household, so she should let him go. Ae-sun asks if she is standing in his way, echoing the question Gwan-sik put to her.

At the sports ground, Gwan-sik tells his coach he no longer wants a medal that is not even real gold. He ran 100 laps only because Ae-sun wanted off the island. Asked how much of his life she takes up, he answers, "My whole damn life." He even admits he hates athletics. Yet he is leaving for Seoul, because she told him to.

Ae-sun runs for the harbor

Sang-gil sneers at the Yang family's tiny fish shop, and Ae-sun snaps back in its defense. She tells him she does not want his money or his tuition. She is marrying him only because she has nowhere else to go. In a flashback, a young Ae-sun announces to the haenyeo that she will run the fishing co-op and be president five times. When the women ask a little boy what he wants to be, he answers the First Lady.

Now Ae-sun asks Sang-gil to hire her as a maid instead. He refuses, since a wife does the housework for free. All he wants is a docile daughter-in-law for his mother and a thrifty mother for his children.

At the rain-soaked harbor, Gye-ok steers her small daughter, Yang Gyeong-ok, home through the downpour. Someone declares that out of sight is out of mind. Ae-sun is already running. She screams Gwan-sik's name along the pier, begs him not to go, and ignores the neighbors telling her to stop. Then she sobs for her mother.

On the boat, the wind is against them. Gwan-sik begs the crew to turn around, and the owner wonders why that punk is on his boat again. On shore, someone insists a broken heart never killed anyone. Little Gyeong-ok pipes up, "Mommy, brother go splash." Gwan-sik has jumped. He swims back so fast the villagers mistake him for a whale, and they cheer him all the way in.

Gyeong-ok tells the family story

Back at the family dinner, a grown and very drunk Gyeong-ok spills the story to her niece. The couple eloped, they were caught in two days, and the baby arrived eight months after the wedding. That makes Busan her true hometown, Gyeong-ok jokes. A flashback shows the young pair planning three children, a daughter first. General MacArthur gets invoked to justify the order.

A photo card reads May 4, 1969. Baby Yang Geum-myeong is the center of the young couple's world, and someone marvels at a smile never seen before. Ae-sun says college no longer matters and calls her daughter her nostalgia.

In a news broadcast, the swimmer Jo O-ryeon wins at the National Sports Festival. Asked if he minds, Gwan-sik says, "Who cares about a gold medal when I've got my golden girl?" The narrator, Geum-myeong, notes that her mother became a mother at 18 and her father gave up his medal at 19. They broke their dreams willingly, she says.

After the title card, a last scene turns to wedding preparations. Someone tells Gwan-sik that his first-birthday ring belongs to his mother, but he still wants Ae-sun to have a ring. She chooses a new dress and a hat, and brushes off a warning that she may one day find it embarrassing. When she is ready, she is told she looks beautiful. A voice then asks Mom why she wore a hat like that.

Thoughts

The episode is built on a trick of order, and it works. We watch Ae-sun cut Gwan-sik down before we see Gye-ok's visit. Her cruelty plays as cruelty for several minutes and then turns into a sacrifice. Sang-gil is played mostly for laughs, which keeps the matchmaking from tipping into misery. His fussing over 50-won tea and his pocket-size worldview tell you everything about the life she is choosing.

The quiet star is Gye-ok. She is the woman who once eloped herself, and now she talks her son's girlfriend into giving him up. She also plants herself in a Busan inn until the police haul the thief off. The show never asks us to like her, but it shows exactly where Gwan-sik's stubbornness comes from.

The frame dinner asks the question the whole series seems built on: does Oh Ae-sun, not the mother, regret it? She dodges, and the 1969 news broadcast answers for both of them. Jo O-ryeon gets the headlines, and Gwan-sik gets the girl and the baby. Gye-ok's warning about Yang sons and their mothers is the line to watch.

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