When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 5 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)
IU as Yang Geum-myeong
Na Moon-hee as Kim Chun-ok
Yeom Hye-ran as Jeon Gwang-rye
Choi Dae-hoon as Bu Sang-gil
Chae Seo-an as Park Yeong-ran (young)

In the 1970s, the threat that closed episode 4 has come true. Oh Ae-sun and her husband, Yang Gwan-sik, now rent a room in Dodong-ri, their fishing village on Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast. At the market, Hong Gyeong-ja, one of the haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers, spells it out between calls to buy her conches. The Bu family owns six of the village's ten boats, and Bu Sang-gil's brother is the village chief. Gwan-sik is first at the docks every morning and still gets turned away. He tries other work and comes back with a hurt arm, saying he lacks the skills.

At home he repairs a roof that needed no repair and finishes three days of work at once. The narrator, their daughter Yang Geum-myeong, looking back as an adult, says her father was wilting. In their room at the Dodong-ri Variety Shop, a village general store, Ae-sun tells him he is no plow ox and should treat this as a vacation. He has never had one, he says, and a family of four eats only on the days he works. When she offers to earn the money herself, he teases the bookworm who never sold a cabbage.

Over an empty rice jar, Ae-sun puts on the forced smile her late mother, Jeon Gwang-rye, wore to sell one more conch, and asks to borrow rice. She is told plenty of people have it worse. Decades later, an older Ae-sun haggles over a thousand won while the adult Geum-myeong laughs at her. Ae-sun admits she was once too shy to sell a cabbage without a book over her face. Life taught her what real shame is: her family's empty stomachs at night.

Grandmother Chun-ok keeps a promise

At the house of her paternal grandmother, Kim Chun-ok, Ae-sun cries and cannot get her request out. The relatives answer it anyway. She should ask her husband's family, she is as hopeless as her father, and they are buried in debt themselves. Someone grudgingly says to give her the ring. Chun-ok marvels that a mother with nothing to feed her child is still too proud to beg.

That night, Ae-sun tells Gwan-sik she wishes she could get old fast. She thought adults grew calluses on their hearts, like Auntie Gyeong-ja, but everything still burns. The answer she gets is that grown-ups are only pretending. Learning motherhood, marriage and adulthood in one go is too much. She asks him to hold her and pat her back while Gwang-rye's voice sings a lullaby.

Later, Chun-ok wakes her, and Ae-sun guesses she lost sleep over the ring. Instead, Chun-ok hands over her savings. "Buy a boat, and don't say a word." The money comes from the gukbap stand, a rice-soup stall, that she ran before the war, kept hidden so her grandson could not gamble it away. Ae-sun's mother made her promise, she says, and now they are even.

Years earlier, a frightened Gwang-rye takes her mother-in-law to the Forever Young Studio, wearing the outfit Chun-ok bought her for her wedding. Haenyeo believe a photo becomes the funeral portrait, she explains. Chun-ok tells her to wear pink lipstick for her children's sake and begs her to live, having outlived her own son too long already. Gwang-rye promises to find him, Oh Han-gyu, in the afterlife, and Chun-ok asks her to tell him his mother is sorry.

Then Gwang-rye asks Chun-ok to watch over Ae-sun. Chun-ok sees why she was brought here: the girl is only ten and about to be orphaned. Gwang-rye says her daughter is thoughtful and tough enough for any storm. If she ever comes to her grandmother after trying everything, it will mean life has become unbearable, so Chun-ok should help her once, as she would have helped Han-gyu. Gwang-rye says she cannot go yet, and the shutter clicks on two women in tears.

Back in the present, Ae-sun asks whether she will miss her mother less once she is a grandmother. No, Chun-ok says: parents are let go, but children stay alive in your heart. Giving the money to Ae-sun is giving it to her son. Ae-sun promises to make her proud.

Captain Yang

At the boat's launch, Gwan-sik's mother, Kwon Gye-ok, cannot stop calling her son Captain Yang. A villager prays to the sea god for full nets, and makgeolli, the milky rice wine, goes around. Chun-ok swears to report her wayward eldest grandson, Oh Jong-gu, for theft if he shows up, since Ae-sun is the one who will restore the family.

Gye-ok announces that the Yangs have Jeju's newest captain after four generations. Ae-sun corrects her: the honor goes to the eldest daughter of the Ohs, whose grandmother bought the boat. Someone reminds Gye-ok of her old complaint that Ae-sun married in without a silver spoon, and Gye-ok ends up leading a chant of Ae-sun's full name. Mid-party, a child's voice informs Ae-sun that she is peeing. Her water has broken far too early, and the women hustle her away.

The baby is a boy, Yang Eun-myeong. Later, over jeon, the pan-fried savory pancakes Gwan-sik made for the Yang ancestral rite, Ae-sun tells the elders her scary husband forbids her to attend. Gwan-sik's grandmother, Park Mak-cheon, is thrilled that her granddaughter-in-law outclasses her daughter-in-law and blames the zodiac: Gye-ok is a rabbit, Ae-sun a baby tiger. When Gwan-sik comes home and asks whether his family is bothering his wife, Ae-sun says Gye-ok likes her now. She has given her a grandson, a captain and silver spoons.

A house on the hill

The landlord at the Variety Shop shoos the family off before Ae-sun can finish thanking him, while his wife says a family deserves a house of its own. Gwan-sik leads Ae-sun up a hill she used to climb alone every morning when she was six. A flashback shows little Ae-sun running to Gwang-rye with a gift, and later with a perfect spelling test. The house at the top is the one Gwang-rye bought by diving for abalone, and now it belongs to them, with no lease.

Ae-sun breaks down. Her mother's, her uncle's, her stepfather's: none of the houses she lived in was home, though even conches and crabs have one. Gwan-sik promises a bigger house someday, and she says this one beats a palace because it is hers. Moving in, she shows off a new mother-of-pearl wardrobe from Tongyeong, a southern port known for the craft. The narrator says her parents kept it many years later, even in an apartment with a built-in closet.

Heavily pregnant again, Ae-sun dreams of Gwang-rye scrubbing the drain and grumbling about renters. Asked whether she is proud, Gwang-rye talks instead about the neighbor, who owns a truck and has a license, while Gwan-sik is off catching squid. After a warning about persimmon branches over the fence, she repeats herself. "She has a truck." Ae-sun wakes in labor, sends Geum-myeong next door, and a horn honks.

With a TV campaign urging families to stop at two children, the elders count Ae-sun's three: a daughter and now two sons. Mak-cheon decides that an ancestor visiting in a dream makes the new boy, Yang Dong-myeong, a blessing. He will bring Gwan-sik full nets, she says, and someone reminds her that she once said Gwang-rye's ghost haunted Ae-sun. Soon Gwan-sik's boat does come in full.

Deputy chief Oh Ae-sun

Some years on, President Park Chung-hee wins on TV as the only candidate. At the village meeting, the chief also runs unopposed, and villagers nominate Ae-sun, Gwang-rye's daughter and a former class vice president, as deputy chief. The chief vetoes it, saying a president picks his own cabinet and that standards keep everyone's mom and dog from running.

The reply turns his words around: if a dog can run, why not a mom? Ae-sun says she never meant to run, but she could not stand being anyone's deputy, and people deserve a choice. The chief sputters at her nerve until someone advises him to make her deputy rather than lose in public. He laughs it off, and the narrator reports Dodong-ri's first female deputy chief.

A raid on the dance class

Under a card for a social dance class, Gyeong-ja and Sang-gil round up dancers while a photographer snaps away. Sang-gil claims the ladies' room as his jurisdiction and needles Ae-sun that she must have a crush on him, since she turns up wherever he goes. He lectures about the New Community Movement, Park Chung-hee's rural modernization drive, and how dancing makes people soft. Meanwhile Ae-sun finds his wife, Park Yeong-ran, and their little daughter, Bu Hyeon-suk, hiding in a stall. She sneaks them out the window, then joins the chase herself.

Once they are alone, Yeong-ran explains that only the jitterbug burns off the rage she feels at home. Her husband has not changed; she might as well be named "How dare you!" A similar pair of shoes replaces the one she lost. Yeong-ran has heard that Gwan-sik buys Ae-sun hairpins. When Ae-sun suggests she leave Sang-gil, Yeong-ran asks whether that is why Ae-sun turned him down, and whether she has second thoughts.

In a shoe shop, Yeong-ran confronts Ae-sun about her past with Sang-gil. Ae-sun swears it was one blind date. Yeong-ran wishes Ae-sun had kept him, and tells Hyeon-suk to marry a man like Ae-sun's husband.

Ae-sun boards the boat

Gwan-sik wants Ae-sun to paint the boat's name, since her handwriting beats his. She balks: a woman aboard is bad luck, and the Dragon King, the sea god, will sink it. Gwan-sik believes in no gods except her and their children, Geum-myeong, Eun-myeong and Dong-myeong. Because of them, he says, he will make it home through any typhoon. She calls him her Steelheart.

The narrator recalls that her mother always called a girl on a boat bad luck. That day, though, Ae-sun could not bring herself to say so to her own daughter, so she defied the superstition. Out on the water, she tells the Dragon King she believes in herself and threatens him with the government's campaign against shamanism. The boat's name, Geumeundong, is built from the first syllables of the children's names. Ae-sun marvels at having a house and a boat, and tells Gwan-sik she is happy. The narrator says they wanted only for the summer to last, unaware of what else it might bring.

Thoughts

The photo studio is the heart of the hour. In episode 2, relatives at Chun-ok's house sized Ae-sun up as a wage earner. Here, the same grandmother turns out to have sat on a hidden fund for years because of one exact promise. Gwang-rye does not ask for much, only that Chun-ok help once, and Chun-ok pays it out in a single night. Her answer about parents and children lands harder because we watched Gwang-rye fight to stay.

The comedy is just as sure-footed. Gwang-rye's ghost, given one visit to her daughter, spends it nagging about the neighbor's truck, and moments later a horn honks next door. Mak-cheon promoting that same ghost to a blessed ancestor the moment a great-grandson arrives tells you everything about her. Yeong-ran's offhand nickname does more to shrink Sang-gil than any kick could. It is nice, too, to see Ae-sun choose to protect his wife rather than score a point off him.

The closing stretch is where I got nervous. Ae-sun breaks the taboo about women on boats, and Gwan-sik swears he will come home through any typhoon. Then the narrator ends a sunny episode by hinting that summer carries more than full nets. The show has spent a whole episode loading that boat with meaning, and I suspect it will not stay a simple source of income for long.

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