When Life Gives You Tangerines Episode 9 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
Lee Soo-kyung as Bu Hyeon-suk
Kim Seon-ho as Park Chung-seop (special appearance)
Lee Jun-young as Park Yeong-beom
Jung Yi-seo as Song Bu-seon
Jeon Bae-soo as Song Yeong-sam (guest)

On Jeju, the island off Korea's south coast, the house is gone, and Oh Ae-sun and her husband, Yang Gwan-sik, are moving into a small apartment. Movers wrestle a mother-of-pearl wardrobe upstairs while Ae-sun begs them to be gentle. It was her dowry, the first nice thing she ever owned, and genuine Tongyeong work. The narrator, their grown daughter Yang Geum-myeong, observes that however long the road, the worry right in front of you feels biggest. On moving day, someone grumbles that a certain brat gets whatever she wants. A boy complains to his dad, and someone asks what he has done to his hair.

Inside, their son, Yang Eun-myeong, asks why the aunties who came for his circumcision are missing. Ae-sun explains that the government has made the haenyeo, Jeju's women free-divers, the island's representatives for the Olympics. So they are busy, and they have made their peace with the Games. A reminder that he promised to study earns a jab about pricey schools. Then he is asked whether he is off to his friend Park Cheol-yong's again.

Flowered wallpaper and a new sign

In the bedroom, Gwan-sik has hung floral wallpaper, and Ae-sun admits the room looks a little better, though a strip is already peeling. She lost her temper, she explains, only because the wardrobe means so much to her. When he worries she has never lived in an apartment, she says she never lived in houses by choice. "You are my home." He insists she was born to be a rich man's wife. She counters that every wife in Dodong-ri, their fishing village, will envy her new garden.

At the market, the haenyeo have opened their restaurant under a new sign, Aunties' Seafood House, and Ae-sun is back to street vending. One aunt calls her as stubborn as her late mother, Jeon Gwang-rye, for refusing to keep her name on the old sign. Ae-sun will not have her name on a place she did not pay for. She will pay the full vendor fee, sell only tsukidashi, small snacks, and take none of their stock.

Then Eun-myeong turns up with a ball and that hair, and Ae-sun erupts at a boy who skips homework to play ball. In the chaos, Hong Gyeong-ja, one of the aunties, mourns Ae-sun's soaked clock. Another aunt teases Gwan-sik over something big he bought, as if to ask them to be kind to his wife, and he admits it. Outside the shop, he counts everyone down to kimchi, Korea's version of saying cheese, for a photo.

Elsewhere, Geum-myeong sobs while a language tape drills weather phrases. She scolds her absent mother for street vending and hates that she eats on the pavement. Her narration says that once she knew why her mother was back on the street, she vowed her parents would never again be robbed of their dreams.

Geum-myeong's new landlord

In Seoul, in the early 1990s, an address card for Song Yeong-sam marks a house in Bongcheon-dong, a hillside Seoul neighborhood. Geum-myeong asks the landlord for a lock on the door between her room and his family's. He refuses: it is only his kid next door, and rooms are scarcer than tenants. His rule is no boyfriends, since he has a daughter her age. If she were his daughter, she replies, he would put up a latch.

On Jeju, a phone call tells Cheol-yong's family that their son is at the Yangs'. He finished last in his class and ran from his father's temper. Ae-sun knocks on Eun-myeong's locked door. He demands privacy and orders her out. When she reminds him he did not buy the place, he answers with the two-word shrug she is sick of hearing.

Through Geum-myeong's thin wall, a couple fights. The woman wants him to shave, quit his job and sit the teacher certification exam, because she cannot marry a bum whose paintings are worthless. He says he cannot stop loving her. Then someone tells the landlord that a key has been taken, and he pounds on the door, shouting for Song Bu-seon. On Jeju, someone whispers that their boy is only a teenager and recalls the croakers Gwan-sik used to sneak Ae-sun. Inside the locked room, the boy wonders why Mom has sent two forks.

With a thud, a hairy young man is suddenly in Geum-myeong's room, and Bu-seon, the landlord's daughter, begs for help before her father kills them. The narration says he looked like a cornered mole, so she let him in. The landlord soon arrives with jjinbbang, steamed buns, and takes an interest in her closet until Geum-myeong claims her underwear is inside. Then he catches Bu-seon hovering and orders the hidden boy out. On Jeju, the same order goes out to Cheol-yong, and in Seoul someone calls the name Park Chung-seop. Embarrassing as it was, the narration says, that was how they met.

Gwan-sik storms Eun-myeong's room

Gwan-sik bursts in to scold Cheol-yong for running away while his father works his fingers raw. Then he stops, because the runaway has shrunk. The figure coughs, and she is a girl. Gwan-sik gently asks whether she cut her hair herself because money is tight; her parents did it, she says. Ae-sun wants to know why her son's initials are on the girl's backpack. Eun-myeong announces she is his girlfriend, someone adds that it has been 500 days, and someone goes looking for the paddle.

Eun-myeong fires back that his parents dated in elementary school, a fact he got from his aunt Yang Gyeong-ok, Gwan-sik's sister. After a verse in Gwan-sik's voice plays, Eun-myeong explains that the hair on her lip put him off at first, but after ten years it stopped mattering. The narration says he got his weakness for love from Dad. The girl ran away only that morning, and her name is Bu Hyeon-suk. Yes, her father is Bu Sang-gil.

Elsewhere on Jeju, Gyeong-ja marvels at a scandal spanning two generations, and an aunt says small towns guarantee it. Someone sniffs that indecency runs in the Oh family and shouts for Bu Hyeon-suk to come out, and Gyeong-ja is sure Sang-gil still has a crush on Ae-sun. Back at the restaurant, Ae-sun is reminded that she ran wild in her own spring. Someone who calls her daughter-in-law crows that she is finally speechless.

A job at the Cannes Theater

On a Seoul job board, Geum-myeong's poster offers Japanese translation from an exchange student in Tokyo. Chung-seop recognizes her and offers her work. His own job is painting the billboard for Ghost at the Cannes Theater, a Seoul cinema, and she becomes a part-time usher there.

The owner berates Chung-seop for painting Ong-nyeo fully clothed on the poster for Byeon Kang-soe 3, a skin flick, and asks whether he thinks he is Picasso. Chung-seop says he paints her joys and sorrows against the mountains. At the box office, a colleague explains that the basement Picasso is quiet and stubborn. He never gets fired, because the boss always buys him dinner after yelling.

Park Yeong-beom, her boyfriend, then appears at her window, not for Ghost, and asks her to see a later film with him. She slips away, and their embrace in the theater makes it the best Christmas ever. In the projection booth, Chung-seop tells the projectionist he cannot say whether he knows her, given how embarrassingly they keep meeting. He wants no girlfriend from ticket sales. "Life is short, and love is a rare privilege," the projectionist replies.

Up the hill, down to the basement

Yeong-beom confides that his family does not know he is back in Korea early. Geum-myeong leads him up to her place, promising a view of Korea's biggest Christmas tree. They pass threatening graffiti and a poster seeking missing students, and he calls the area worse than Harlem. He wants her to pack tonight and move to his neighborhood. When he calls it a slum where serial murders happen, she tells him to go back to America and not to follow her.

At the theater, the owner has bought dumplings for the boy who never smiles and is told to hand them over himself. Chung-seop seems to sleep in the basement. A collection by Baek Seok, a Korean poet, lies there, with lines about a poor man, the beautiful Natasha and falling snow.

There Bu-seon ends it with Chung-seop. He can be noble about money, she says, because she does all the counting. In three years they have never eaten Western food, only kalguksu and jjolmyeon, cheap noodle dishes. He asks when she will stop rebelling and marry the man her father wants, and brings up her six blind dates. She accuses him of having another girl, and he turns the charge back on her. Geum-myeong's narration dates the landlord's daughter kicking her shoes to that moment.

Geum-myeong arrives with the dumplings, sent by the projectionist. Bu-seon asks whether Chung-seop got her the job and sneers that they deserve each other. She calls Geum-myeong a clueless third wheel, then adds that one of them is a high school dropout and the other goes to Seoul National University. She is told to watch her mouth. The narration says the autumn breeze had become a spring wind howling in Geum-myeong's heart.

Thoughts

The wallpaper scene is the episode in miniature. The Yangs have just given up the house Ae-sun's mother dived for, and the show refuses to play it as tragedy. Instead we get a roll of flowers with a strip already peeling and a wife calling the bedroom her garden. A few scenes later the show cuts to Geum-myeong crying over a language tape, and the cost of that apartment lands where it should.

The rest is a bedroom farce played twice, on two sides of the sea. Gwan-sik storming a room to scold Cheol-yong and finding Bu Sang-gil's daughter is the funniest beat the show has had in a while, and Eun-myeong's ten-year defense of his love is pure Gwan-sik. Geum-myeong, meanwhile, meets Chung-seop in the least dignified way possible, hiding him in her own room from his girlfriend's father.

What the episode sets up is a comparison. Yeong-beom comes home from America early, full of opinions about where she lives, and his answer is to move her into his part of town. Chung-seop paints clothed women for a boss who wants skin and keeps Baek Seok in the basement. Geum-myeong has just sworn to protect her parents' dreams, and one of these men keeps her mother's old dream, poetry, close at hand. I expect the two of them to pull her in different directions.

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