When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 7 Recap

Who's in the cast:
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
Choi Dae-hoon as Bu Sang-gil
Jang Hye-jin as Park Yeong-ran (older)
Yeom Hye-ran as Jeon Gwang-rye
Lee Jun-young as Park Yeong-beom
Kim Su-an as Oh Jenny (guest)
Lee Mi-do as Mi-suk (special appearance)

In the fall of 1987, banners on Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, hail the coming 1988 Seoul Olympics. Another congratulates Yang Geum-myeong, daughter of Yang Gwan-sik and Oh Ae-sun, on getting into Seoul National University. In Dodong-ri, her parents' fishing village, the stalls selling conch and saury are being tipped over. The torch passes through next September, and the fishing co-op chief, Bu Sang-gil, says the government wants anything unsightly gone before the cameras come. Geum-myeong's narration calls survival her parents' own Olympics, with no medals or pensions.

The vendors accuse Sang-gil of selling out the town, and the crowd shouts for their deputy chief. Ae-sun arrives, drops to the ground in front of the stalls and recites a poem. Someone calls for a forklift, and she dares it: "Roll over me!" Someone asks what became of the girl who called herself Literary Girl. Life happened, comes the answer.

Ae-sun runs for chief

The haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers, hear that Ae-sun will be the next co-op chief. She swears she has no interest in politics, then admits what galls her. Sang-gil skips her proper title and just barks the word deputy at her. One diver wants a chief from their own crew, and another asks whether she will deny Gwan-sik his dream.

Gwan-sik is already campaigning, handing out banana milk to the fishermen. Ae-sun was class president, he tells them, and she is the smartest person he knows. Asked what that makes him if his wife becomes Dodong-ri's first female chief, he says a first too: the first chief's husband. Pride, he adds, tastes best when someone else earns it. It is an old dream. When Ae-sun, as a little girl, vowed to run the co-op and be president five times, Gwan-sik, then a small boy, said he wanted to be "The First Lady."

Sang-gil answers with Jeju black pork for the whole membership, while one co-op member heckles him all evening for a soda he never brings. He insists he only wants to feed everyone, then gets to the point. Ae-sun came from nowhere, he is Dodong-ri born, and voters should weigh family problems. When someone mentions that Gwan-sik saved a drowning person, Sang-gil sniffs that it is only a plaque. The couple ran off at 18, he adds, their second child is another story, and craziness runs in families.

At Yang Eun-myeong's school, Ae-sun turns up fresh from the salon for what her son called a meeting of student leaders' mothers. She is the only mother there. The teacher explains that Eun-myeong pries letters off the teachers' car badges, turning a Sonata into an "Onata", and sells them as charms for getting into university. Outside, Ae-sun says she was never embarrassed at his sister's school and now cannot lift her head. Eun-myeong throws Sang-gil's line about crazy genes back at her and says she only wants to be Geum-myeong's mom.

Morality and the right to know

Sang-gil predicts the Seoul National University girl will end up a dating queen too. A banner celebrates the return of direct presidential elections. Under it, onlookers gossip about a college girl whom a young man keeps collecting in a fancy car, and one wonders if she is a paid escort. Asked whether he has any pledges, Sang-gil says he is not smearing anyone, only discussing morality and the voters' right to know.

At Bada Seafood House, Ae-sun's camp warns Sang-gil that she could fight dirty too, since his father was the first man on Jeju to give up his Korean name under Japanese rule. Someone argues that politics is a dung field anyway, so a black coat beats a white one. Ae-sun answers that a dog in dung is just a dirty dog, and she will win on her pledges. No soap, no pork and no mud, comes the reply, means she will lose. Sang-gil bursts into song, then orders his wife to walk home because the noodles came too slowly. The soda heckler reminds him that his surname, Bu, sounds like the Korean word for deputy.

Sang-gil's cigarette packs carry a Candidate 1 label, and his drinking companions chant that no town in the nation has a female chief. In a seafood restaurant, he sits down with Mi-suk, a real estate agent who hoped the Olympic clearances would bring business, if only the haenyeo would move. Sang-gil promises to handle everything once he is re-elected, for 30 percent, then flirts with seafood puns and ends up rubbing her feet. Ae-sun's supporters burst in, since one of them works there part time and heard every word. When he protests that Mi-suk had a toe cramp, someone answers that his wife has one in her heart. His own slogans come back at him, and they promise the whole village will hear.

Chief Oh

The card reads: the 7th chief of Dodong-ri, Oh Ae-sun. A confetti ball borrowed from the school bursts open, and the narration names her Jeju's first female chief. All evening, people call for Chief Oh. Years later, Geum-myeong adds, it became her mother's username in Lim Young-woong's fan club.

Sang-gil, captioned as the 5th and 6th co-op chief, turns up to grumble about the meat and claims he stepped down of his own accord. Gwan-sik's mother, Kwon Gye-ok, says this makes her son a king consort and her the queen mother. Gwan-sik fries pajeon, savory pancakes, in an apron while guests call him the First Lady.

At the griddle, Ae-sun finds Sang-gil's wife, Park Yeong-ran, and apologizes for the trouble at home. Yeong-ran shrugs off Mi-suk and a woman from the salon and calls herself the island's worst judge of men. She voted for Ae-sun, so she has earned a drink. Ae-sun advises her to tell her husband, for the rest of her life, that she voted for him.

Sang-gil does demand to know who she voted for, until one of their children asks why Mom is always his target. What really eats at him is that the governor came to Ae-sun's inauguration but skipped his. It was the governor who gave Gwan-sik his plaque, and Sang-gil cannot see why everyone likes Gwan-sik.

Late that night, a tipsy Ae-sun dances around a pole, and Gwan-sik carries her home on his back. She is happy. After 30 years she has dropped "deputy" from her title, and the person she most wants to tell is gone. She would live her hard childhood again just to hold her mother's hand. In a memory, young Ae-sun tells her mother, Jeon Gwang-rye, that being runner-up and vice president is practice, the way divers start in the shallows. Gwang-rye wants to be the chief's mother and promises rice cakes piled as high as the mountain.

Back at the party, Ae-sun serves the aunties a mountain of rice cakes. They are from Gwang-rye, she says, so the aunties can brag about her on her mother's behalf. They remember a ten-year-old in mourning clothes on that same floor. Gwang-rye, they say, would have drummed her way around Hallasan, Jeju's central mountain, and her persimmon tree is finally heavy with fruit. The narration calls it harvest season.

A dragon from a stream

In a car, a passenger riding up front says it is fun, and that it really annoys her. The other person asks whether that is the mean girl from her stories. Over jjajangmyeon, black-bean noodles, with Park Yeong-beom, fellow student Oh Ye-rim plays generous: her father says people who rise from nothing turn twisted. A voice at the table notes that Geum-myeong's grades and height both beat Ye-rim's. Geum-myeong was also the first student picked for Japan and gave up the place, which is why Ye-rim is going. When that defender calls Geum-myeong's father a boat captain, he is corrected: a fisherman.

A news card reports that the ban on private tutoring has pushed lessons into moving cars. Geum-myeong tutors Oh Jenny, a rich girl who swears in English but cannot spell Wednesday. No tutor has lasted a month, Geum-myeong has never met the parents, and her pay comes out of a jar of cash. Jenny fusses over Geum-myeong's bangs, and when Geum-myeong wonders whether they really look alike, Jenny insists she is the sexier one. Then her mother wants to see the tutor.

Jenny's mother says money bought her everything but an education, and her daughter inherited her brains. It took two years to find a tutor who looks like Jenny. She wants Geum-myeong to sit the college entrance exam in Jenny's place. A top-three university earns a three-bedroom apartment in Seoul; anything less, two bedrooms.

At the university, a dorm list goes up, and the talk turns to boarding-house rents. On television, the December 16, 1987 election arrives, the first free presidential vote in 16 years. Yeong-beom then greets Gwan-sik, visiting Seoul, as "Father" and reminds him he took the family's photos at the admission ceremony. Gwan-sik wants to know why he is calling him that.

Jenny's mother puts a test identification slip in Jenny's name in front of Geum-myeong. Geum-myeong protests that she would be expelled if caught. The mother will bribe the proctor and calls it a fair trade of talents. She knows the scholarship fell through and that Geum-myeong must leave the dorm. Think of your parents, she says, before answering.

As Geum-myeong leaves the building, a man chases her, asking whether she came from unit 908 and what she took. Earlier, the mother argued that a child who rises like a dragon from a stream drains the stream dry. Because of Geum-myeong, she said, her father will stay on his boat for life. Geum-myeong admits an apartment would be wonderful, but her parents are exactly why she cannot. She was raised to finish last in her class sooner than cheat. Some girl like her would also lose her place to a fraud.

The mother sneers that integrity is for the rich, and in a poor girl it is reckless courage. Geum-myeong answers that sending Jenny to a top school would be the reckless part. Jenny, it turns out, wants to be a singer. Geum-myeong takes four times her fee, double for a dumb student and double again for a rude one, and walks out.

Then she insists she is not a thief. The cash can go, someone says, but there is still a diamond ring. Geum-myeong pounds on the door, calling for Jenny. Her parents hoped the world beyond their arms would be gentle, the narration says, and it was a jungle.

Thoughts

The election half is the most purely fun the show has been, and it still lands on grief. Sang-gil's campaign is a buffet of bad ideas, from the pork to the cigarettes to the seafood puns, and Choi Dae-hoon plays every one of them with total conviction. Even so, the moment I will remember is not the confetti ball. It is Ae-sun on Gwan-sik's back, finally rid of the word deputy, wishing her mother could hear it, followed by a mountain of rice cakes sent in Gwang-rye's name.

The Seoul half mirrors the Jeju half with an edge. Ae-sun beats a man who buys votes with pork and cigarettes without spending a cent herself. Her daughter turns down an apartment for the same reason and gets called a thief for it. Jenny's mother is a cartoon in places, but her line that integrity looks noble on the rich and reckless on the poor is the episode's real argument. Geum-myeong's answer, about the other girl who would lose her seat, is the best thing she has said yet.

Eun-myeong is the loose thread. His badge racket is funny, but his crack about his mother only wanting to be Geum-myeong's mom sounds like something he has believed for a while. The hour ends with a diamond ring in play and Geum-myeong pounding on a locked door. Someone has to answer for that ring, and I doubt a girl this proud will tell her parents on Jeju any of it.

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