When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 4 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
Uhm Ji-won as Na Min-ok (special appearance)
Choi Dae-hoon as Bu Sang-gil
Chae Seo-an as Park Yeong-ran (young)

In the early 1970s, some years after the wedding, Oh Ae-sun lives with her husband Yang Gwan-sik's family on Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, and the house still has no grandson. Gwan-sik's mother, Kwon Gye-ok, wants Ae-sun to make 3,000 prostrations, the full-body bows of Buddhist prayer, to ask for a boy. His grandmother, Park Mak-cheon, calls that heartless. Gye-ok sneers that Ae-sun brought not even a silver spoon, and Mak-cheon asks whether she brought one herself, and whether that is why she had only two children. Ae-sun refuses to carry tales to Gwan-sik, who already groans in pain every night. A husband sticks by the wife he loves, whatever he thinks of her family, she adds, and she feels the same about hers.

A card names Ae-sun's young half-siblings, Yeom Sun-nam and Yeom Sun-bong. Ae-sun grumbles that even the government praises small families while the Yangs talk only of sons. Mak-cheon, a shaman, has taken to throwing red beans at her, convinced that the spirit of Ae-sun's late mother, Jeon Gwang-rye, follows her around. Ae-sun talks to her mother and says she misses her even more now that she is a mother herself.

On the shore, Mak-cheon brings little Yang Geum-myeong to the haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers, to start learning. The divers refuse. They pray before every dive to come back alive, they say, and Gwang-rye told Ae-sun every day never to dive. Asked whether Ae-sun has agreed, Mak-cheon says she needs nobody's permission and storms off with the child.

A tricycle for Geum-myeong

At her stepfather's house, Ae-sun packs for Sun-nam and Sun-bong, whose family moves to the mainland in two weeks. Na Min-ok, the wife her stepfather Yeom Byeong-cheol took after Gwang-rye, mocks her for still acting like the household maid. Ae-sun warns her to feed the children properly and brags that her in-laws know someone in the Jeju provincial office. Min-ok asks whether that pull reaches across the sea. Still, she admits the kids have won her over: ten years under one roof makes children yours, whatever their blood.

Min-ok insists she was never a mistress, needles Ae-sun about the yellow dress she took the night she ran away, then says she admires her. Ae-sun asks for the one thing she came for: keep her siblings in school. Min-ok's parting gift is a used tricycle for Geum-myeong, which she grandly calls a moral scholarship.

At the Yang house, the elders fume that Ae-sun keeps carrying their corn to people who are barely family. Gwan-sik says he left a tilefish to pay for it, and his mother asks who will take her side if her only son takes his wife's. Ae-sun comes home loaded with hand-me-downs and the tricycle. The elders rule that girls have no business on tricycles and send it to the junk dealer for candy.

That night, a college entrance exam workbook and a general equivalency diploma with Ae-sun's name on them sit among her things. Gwan-sik asks whether he should keep quiet. If the young master of the house speaks up for her, Ae-sun answers, the family will want her dead. She asks for one thing: let Geum-myeong ride the tricycle. A girl denied even that will spend her life in a kitchen, and Ae-sun wants a daughter who turns the table over rather than lays it.

Gwan-sik tells her to turn it over herself, and he will clean up afterward. He only wants a warning first, since he will be the one the family punishes. When he starts to apologize for being a bad son, she gives the signal. "Ready, go."

The morning routine resumes: a prayer for a son, flying beans, and Mak-cheon warning Ae-sun not to tell Gwan-sik about them. The tricycle comes back from the junk dealer for 2,000 won, and Geum-myeong rides it, chanting a call-and-response game about peas. At mealtime, Gwan-sik moves to the other table to eat with the women of the house, to the elders' disgust. Geum-myeong's narration says her mother spent her whole twenties in that cramped kitchen, smiling anyway.

Shoes in Seoul

Decades later in Seoul, an older Ae-sun visits the adult Geum-myeong's apartment and is horrified by the shoes piled everywhere. Geum-myeong has just started a job and is dating Park Yeong-beom. His mother asks whether she means to keep working after the wedding and talks about vanity that grows out of emptiness. She cannot see why the wife of a talented eldest son, in a family about to have a vice minister, would need a job.

Geum-myeong answers that she is as capable as Yeong-beom and the eldest in her own family. She wants to support them with her own pay, and she wants every title up to CEO. When the mother says pretty faces come with good hearts, Geum-myeong calls herself the plain, twisted eldest daughter. She tells Yeong-beom he can go live with his mother and her indoor plants.

Back in the apartment, Ae-sun calls the shoes vanity; Geum-myeong throws the emptiness line back. She buys them because she grew up wanting everything, she says, down to the three days she spent begging for new school-trip clothes. When Ae-sun suggests she quit and marry if work is this bad, Geum-myeong asks whether she should live like her mother and marry into another poor family. Ae-sun agrees she should not, but says her life had sunshine too, and she wants her daughter to grant that it counted. Geum-myeong's narration observes that parents fixate on what they failed to give, and children on what they went without.

Ae-sun draws a line

Back on Jeju, years earlier, Ae-sun is told to bow at a rite where Mak-cheon lays out her plan: a haenyeo would be the family's pillar, since no girl will ever become a president or a judge. Ae-sun snatches Geum-myeong away and shouts that the girl is her daughter, not the household's breadwinner, and will never dive. Her own mother died young of a lung illness from diving, she says, and begged her never to dive or live like a maid.

The word maid sets off the elders, who say she cannot take a Yang daughter with her. Ae-sun tells them to send their own daughter into the sea instead. The elders call on the Dragon King, the sea god, insist Gwang-rye's spirit has possessed her, and sneer at the family that raised her. When Gwan-sik arrives, they demand he throw her out, which is how he learns about the red beans. He tells his mother and grandmother that Ae-sun came to live with him, not to be their daughter-in-law, and that they will never see her again.

In Seoul, Geum-myeong presses her mother to keep a pair of shoes that fits perfectly and asks whether she regrets not marrying rich. Ae-sun says she would marry Gwan-sik all over again. Her father has also brought two bags of peas and a whistle, over her mother's protest.

A room in Dodong-ri

As newcomers to Dodong-ri, a fishing village on Jeju, the young family rents a single room with a kitchen at the Dodong-ri Variety Shop, a village general store. Ae-sun teaches Geum-myeong the Korean alphabet and adds squid to the peas game. Gwan-sik asks the landlord to wait for the rent while he looks for fishing work. He learns that someone named Mo has already paid three months. A card reads Mo O-ran Scholarship, 10,000 won.

Ae-sun wants to know who O-ran is. Gwan-sik protests that he has been at her side since she was ten, and she agrees, a little too quickly, that no woman ever had a crush on him. They run through the relatives they can think of, from her grandmother Kim Chun-ok and aunt Hyeon Yi-suk to his grandmother and mother, and find no Mo. Ae-sun jokes that her mother's spirit must have slipped into a rich woman and stolen her bankbook.

The haenyeo aunties visit and tease the couple about how early their light goes out. The baby came once she left her in-laws, one says: Ae-sun is pregnant again. Then they ask whether she knows whom Gwan-sik works for. He walks in with a broken finger and gets scolded for not demanding that the boat turn back. Every boat in Dodong-ri belongs to one family: that of the man Ae-sun was once matched with.

At home, Gwan-sik again falls asleep without eating, in long sleeves despite the heat. Ae-sun asks whether he really must work the squid boats when he barely sleeps. Geum-myeong orders a hundred squid, and mother and daughter wave him off to sea.

The captain and the whistle

Later, the captain's wife visits Ae-sun to ask about the finger. Two crewmen asked her husband to turn back, she explains, but the nets were full and he got greedy. Ae-sun realizes the captain refused, and says Gwan-sik still cannot open his hand. The wife means to reassure her: her husband says he has stopped beating Mr. Yang. She cannot understand why he picks on only one man.

On the boat, Captain Bu Sang-gil himself bullies Gwan-sik for always rushing home with his packed lunch. He orders him to wait while he drinks and then drive him home, because no one leaves before the captain. He dares Gwan-sik to refuse and get his own boat. Gwan-sik admits he would rather not stay, because he can't lie. Sang-gil barks that Gwan-sik takes nothing home, squid included, unless the captain allows it, and needles him about his wife until Gwan-sik shouts, "I love her that damn much." When someone asks whether the captain avoids home because nobody respects him there, Sang-gil goes for them with his fists.

Geum-myeong's narration recalls that her father called her mother more of a whistle than a cosmos flower. Ae-sun marches up to Sang-gil and tells him her husband is done working for him. He reminds her that his brother heads the fishing co-op and swears Gwan-sik will never board a boat in Dodong-ri again. Ae-sun throws his talk about beatings knocking sense into people back at him, and kicks him. Afterward she cries that it hurts, and Gwan-sik calls her a human whistle, puzzled that the one doing the kicking is the one in tears.

Decades later, the older couple frets over whether Geum-myeong's apartment is drafty. Gwan-sik has heard that Ae-sun would marry him again; asked directly, she says it sounds exhausting. Geum-myeong's narration says her mother felt sorrier for her father than for her children. Ae-sun worries that even steel wears down, and that he has carried a heavy load since he was ten. He promises to outlive her, since he could never leave her behind. He would rather see her off properly and follow.

Thoughts

The best scene of the hour is the quietest. Gwan-sik does not storm into the kitchen to defend his wife. He asks for a signal, and when Ae-sun gives it, he moves to her table and the tricycle finds its way home. The last scene calls him steel, and here the steel is in how he follows her lead. The whistle line pays off the same idea from her side: she is the one who makes the noise, and he is the one who stands behind it.

The Seoul scenes sting because nobody in them is wrong. Geum-myeong picks up Yeong-beom's mother's lecture about emptiness and turns it on her own mother. Ae-sun answers with the one thing she wants, which is credit for a life that had sunshine in it. Cutting from that fight straight to Ae-sun snatching her small daughter out of the haenyeo plan makes her case better than any speech could.

My guess on the mystery rent money is Min-ok. Mo O-ran sounds a lot like the moral scholarship she promised, and paying for a stepdaughter's room fits a woman who admits she finds it hard to be mean to the children. The bigger worry is the bill coming due: a second baby on the way, a finger that will not open, and a captain who has just threatened to close every boat in Dodong-ri to Gwan-sik.

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