When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 8 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
Lee Jun-young as Park Yeong-beom
Kim Su-an as Oh Jenny (guest)
Nam Gwon-a as Jenny's housekeeper (guest)
Kim Gook-hee as Jeon Ae-kyung (guest)
Yeom Hye-ran as Jeon Gwang-rye

In the late 1980s, at a police station in Daechi-dong, a wealthy Seoul district, Yang Geum-myeong refuses to play the thief. A diamond ring has gone missing from the home where she tutors, and the complaint grows as it goes: she kept the books, she took money from a jar, she is an illegal tutor. Geum-myeong asks the officers whether being poor makes a person a thief. She refuses to be searched, and she refuses to give her home number. Hearing his daughter called a thief, she says, would break her father's heart.

Meanwhile, at the bus stop by the dorms, her father, Yang Gwan-sik, is still facing Park Yeong-beom, the young man who greeted him at the end of episode 7. Yeong-beom is a soldier on leave until Friday. Gwan-sik orders him not to date Geum-myeong. Yeong-beom admits she has already dumped him eight times. Until she was five, Gwan-sik explains, his daughter planned to marry her dad, so her standards are high. He tells the young man to move on.

The ring rolls back

At the apartment of Oh Jenny, the girl Geum-myeong tutors, Jenny's mother admits the ring was never stolen. She sent the tutor to the police so that any story about Jenny needing a stand-in for her entrance exam will sound like a thief's revenge. Life, she lectures, is about betting big, and nobody should pity people whose wells have run dry.

The housekeeper, who has lasted longer than anyone in that house, is less impressed. She produces the half-carat flower ring, claiming it rolled there on its own, and tells her employer to call the police and apologize, or she will throw it as far as she can. Asked whether she even knows the girl, the housekeeper says she does.

Geum-myeong phones home to Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast. She wants to cry about how cruel Seoul is, but her mother, Oh Ae-sun, asks whether she has eaten, and the words dry up. Geum-myeong scolds her instead about the street stall and her bad back, and asks why she never has any money. Her narration admits she knew she was the reason. Ae-sun has news: Gwan-sik won a reward for saving someone from drowning, and the governor sent co-op members to a new museum on the mainland. Geum-myeong demands to know which museum, but Ae-sun only promises that Dad will be there.

On a Seoul street loud with election chants, a friend calls the accusation insane. Geum-myeong says the whole world can know so long as her parents never find out. The narration says God hides a child's knots from her parents.

Gwan-sik comes to Seoul

Gwan-sik is waiting for her in the cold. Over jjamppong, a spicy seafood noodle soup, he fires off questions about protests, museums and where she is sleeping, insisting he just stopped by. She snaps that they might as well talk separately. Then it all comes out: she quit her part-time job, she has to leave the dorms and she did not get a scholarship. She was chosen to study abroad and is turning it down, though she hates that her fellow student Oh Ye-rim gets her place. She wants to go, but guilt holds her back. Her narration says every apology she meant came out as a barb.

Gwan-sik's answer is short. "Do it all." He is still here for her, he says, and a flashback pairs the line with the school fees he promised after the death of her little brother, Yang Dong-myeong. On the restaurant TV, Koreans vote for president for the first time in 16 years. Gwan-sik tells her not to worry about rent, because the sea is full of fish, and to stay away from soldiers, hard liquor and protests. Geum-myeong calls him annoying.

Back on the phone call, Ae-sun spells out what Geum-myeong missed: Gwan-sik never goes sightseeing, so the museum trip was an excuse to see his eldest. At the Yongsan intercity bus station, Geum-myeong grumbles that he came all the way up from Cheonan, then sends him off with orders to catch plenty of squid. A line in the same stretch says that for 20 years his love had only run in one direction.

The housekeeper remembers Busan

Back home, a card bearing the name and class of her other brother, Yang Eun-myeong, marks more trouble. A boy is ordered to buy back the "S" letters he sold to classmates, and someone demands to know whether he has any idea what a bottle of scotch costs. The narration says their fall brought no harvest, only more of them picked clean.

In Daechi-dong, Jenny's mother asks whether the tutor is the housekeeper's relative. A flashback answers. At the Busan inn of episode 2, young Ae-sun warns a girl not to drink and not to turn the lights off, because the innkeeper is a thief. Asked why she would help a stranger, Ae-sun says it would be upsetting if the girl's bag were stolen too.

Now the housekeeper says the same about a wrongly accused girl. A girl once protected her mother's inheritance when the housekeeper was young, she says, and the tutor is that girl's spitting image. Jenny's mother points out that the tutor was not even born then. Jenny's mother says she tolerates the housekeeper only because the housekeeper was once her boss at a bar, and begs her not to call her Miss Kim in front of her daughter. A parent's karma lands on the child, the housekeeper warns. Jenny admits her mom made her do it.

At Seoul Station, Geum-myeong sees Yeong-beom off, with 797 days of service still ahead of him. He asks her to marry him in the end; she says it depends on how he does. Her narration says she believed she was different from her mother. A flash of a wedding follows: as the bride is announced, Gwan-sik tells Geum-myeong he is still right here, and her narration wonders whether her story will be a fairy tale like her mother's.

Twenty years at the Halla Chunsa contest

A card reads 1967, the 7th Halla Chunsa Festival. Young Ae-sun writes a poem called "Jeju" about a rock that the waves and winds never wear down. Young Gwan-sik, an athlete with no business in a writing contest, sits beside her and predicts she will be a great poet. He asks for a poem titled "Yang Gwan-sik."

Twenty years later, at the 28th contest, the couple are vendors, and Ae-sun is told to enter a few lines she scribbled on scrap paper. She refuses: she is not in high school anymore. Sports days, their best earners, keep getting canceled for Olympic rehearsals, and someone says they should open a place of their own, debt or not. A former classmate, Go Chang-suk, recognizes her and asks why she skips the reunions. Ae-sun cannot look up, but the narration says the reason is a 15-year-old at the stall: she could never bear to look at children that age. In Gwan-sik's heart, the narration adds, Dong-myeong was still growing up.

At the university, a classmate claims country women who lose children carry on as if nothing happened. Geum-myeong answers that they move on because they have to. Ye-rim asks whether she feels inferior, and says family circumstances count as much as grades. That sends the story back to Ae-sun's class election from episode 1, the 37 votes lost to cream buns, and to her diary noting that she still scored 100.

At a Jeju tea room where she was once set up with Bu Sang-gil, Ae-sun and her partners take over. The name, Sun and the Three Aunties', puts hers first, and the aunties insist she pay a smaller share. The narration warns that while the tap barely drips, a hole somewhere is gushing.

A loan Geum-myeong refuses

In Seoul, a professor offers to lend Geum-myeong the money, since she does not qualify for state funding. Geum-myeong refuses. On the phone, she praises the professor to Ae-sun, who wants to ship tangerines, until Ae-sun hears about the loan and asks what it would cost. "Are you a beggar? Don't you have parents?" Ae-sun snaps. Geum-myeong asks whether she means to pay with stall money and tells her to forget the tangerines. Her narration admits she treated someone she is deeply grateful to like scrap paper. Afterward, someone buys out a street vendor's entire stock of beans, and the narration calls mother and daughter equally kind-hearted.

Later, Ae-sun drinks with Gwan-sik. She hates the stall too, she admits, especially when she meets an old classmate while eating off newspaper in the market. Her daughter has so much she wants to do, and being unable to help is killing her. She now understands how her own mother must have cried over the class presidency she lost, and she asks whether Geum-myeong cried in Seoul.

They sell the house. Over the last persimmons, the couple agree that this time none go to the kids. They are leaving a house that holds Ae-sun's mother, her own childhood and Dong-myeong, the name neither of them dares say.

Ae-sun talks to her mother

In a dream, Ae-sun meets her mother, Jeon Gwang-rye, and is startled by how young she is. Ae-sun is writing a note in case Dong-myeong comes back for the holidays and finds Mommy gone. Gwang-rye asks whether she and Gwan-sik ever talk about him. They never do: some grief, Ae-sun says, can only be buried. Gwang-rye urges her to pour it out, the way even the deep ocean has waves. Ae-sun tells her she can remember her mother, but not her baby. She forgets now and then. "Somehow, life goes on."

A plane lands in Tokyo, and Geum-myeong unpicks a parcel wrapped over and over. Her narration says she swallowed her parents' dreams to spread her wings. Ae-sun says the studying she craved now belongs to her daughter, and that it feels like she is flying too. At Dodong Girls' High, a teacher keeps paging a student named Oh Ae-sun. Her poem has won, and nobody can find her.

Thoughts

The best scene is a phone call that goes wrong. Geum-myeong calls to be comforted, gets asked whether she has eaten, and ends up attacking the stall. Later, Ae-sun hears that someone outside the family will pay for her daughter's dreams and turns the shame into an insult. Neither of them is wrong, and the narration sums it up: two kind women who keep breaking each other's hearts.

The Busan payoff is a neat piece of plotting. A warning Ae-sun gave a stranger in episode 2 comes back 20 years later as the one person in that house willing to stand up for her daughter. I wish the episode had let Geum-myeong learn about it. The Halla Chunsa bookends are lovelier still. Gwan-sik asked for a poem with his name on it in 1967, and two decades on, someone still believes in her verse enough to send it in for her.

The open threads are money and memory. The house is gone and the tap is dripping, and a narrator who warns about a gushing hole is not talking about plumbing. Ae-sun has also finally talked about her son, if only to her mother in a dream. My guess is that Gwan-sik is the next person who needs to hear it.

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