When Life Gives You Tangerines: Episodes 13-16 (Final)
When Life Gives You Tangerines: Episodes 13-16 (Final)
by Dramaddictally
The winter season is upon us and it’s time to say goodbye to our characters. We’ve followed them from birth as they struggled, strained, and prevailed. And now, with new generations arriving, and the next storms to weather, we’ll follow them through their final chapter, with the same grace, strength, and frailty that we’ve come to know and love.
EPISODES 13-16
We begin with a wedding in 1998, and then we go back in time to see how we got there. Financial trouble is stirring as companies start going under and the next thing we know Geum-myeong is out of a job. The political protests that used to fill the streets are taken over by workers protesting layoffs. And then we see the government asking for a bailout due to national bankruptcy. We’ve reached the part of history now known as the IMF crisis.
While Geum-myeong is going on one job interview after another with no results, she decides to go check out the little theater where she used to work with the artist, Chung-Seob. She doesn’t know it at the time, but Chung-seob is there too, sitting only a couple of seats away. We get a repeat of him chasing down her bus through the streets after the movie lets out, but this time he’s determined to catch her.
When he does, it’s destiny. They go to a bar to catch up, where he’s very nerdy and awkward – but all spiffed up from the days she knew him before (he teaches art now) – and he admits he’s been waiting for this day. They get very drunk, hold hands at the table, and that’s a wrap. This is the pair that will be getting married in 1998.
Before that, we see them dating adorably, where it’s all laughter and flirtation. Geum-myeong knows she’s met her match and takes Chung-seob home to meet her parents – where he vomits over the side of Gwan-shik’s fishing boat and Gwan-shik pretends he hates him. The truth is that both parents approve because he’s so head-over-heels in love with their daughter. And at the wedding, we hear Geum-myeong say in voiceover that between Yeong-beom and Chung-seob, it wasn’t the size of the love that was different, but the temperature. With Chung-seob, “It was the temperature that let me be myself.”
The wedding is pivotal not only because Geum-myeong is marrying a guy who’s better suited for her, but because it marks another step in the generational trajectory, and Geum-myeong understands her parents’ sacrifices. We may be in their winter, but this is only her spring. And she realizes that “feeding on their verdant youth, I became a tree.”
Unfortunately, things aren’t all roses for her brother. And just after Geum-myeong’s wedding, Eun-myeong – who’s newly a father – winds up in jail. Given the economic downturn, and the fact that Eun-myeong didn’t have good job prospects to begin with, he was trying to start a business with a “friend.” But his business partner runs off with the goods from the pawnshop they’ve opened, saying that Eun-myeong is the culprit.
Behind bars, Eun-myeong finally tells his parents exactly how he feels. He couldn’t live up to his sister scholastically, and he’s also been living in the shadow of his brother’s death. He wanted the pawnshop so he could finally make some big money and show his parents that he’s worth something too. Ae-soon takes all this in and cries, realizing that her wish to never hurt her kids did not come true.
Gwan-shik swallows his pride and asks for a personal loan to bail out Eun-myeong, but is rejected, hearing that he’s too old to earn the money to pay it back. Times have changed and no one fishes like he does anymore. He stays all day, asking and bowing, but finally we see him clearing out his boat after twenty years of fishing and never taking a day off. He’s selling the thing that gave his family their livelihood, and he weeps, thinking back on his “springtime” with Ae-soon. It’s not spring anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time.
When they use the money to bail Eun-myeong out of jail, Eun-myeong sobs in the street and asks “Why would you do that for me?” They sold the house for Geum-myeong, and now the boat for him, but he’s grown up thinking he wasn’t valued the same as his sister. To his parents, he was – they never meant for it to turn out this way.
Ae-soon sets up shop at the fish market, filleting squid for customers on their way out the door. She feels her life has shrunk, but puts on a bright smile and brags. And Gwan-shik feels awful that she has to do that. “Why is life like this? Why is it like this?!” asks the backbone of the family as he breaks down. He worries that Ae-soon had a terrible life because of him, but she says, “without you I’d be an orphan in the world.”
With Ae-soon, Gwan-shik, and Eun-myeong doing manual labor, Geum-myeong is still the pillar of the family. But she comes home one day to tell them that she’s quit her job and is starting a business of her own. She has the mindset that from the chaos comes opportunity and she wants to ride the waves, not drown in them. However, Ae-soon has a total fit when she hears the news. She can’t understand how at 50 she and Gwan-shik are still just getting by and the trouble never ends.
Hearing how upset Ae-soon is with their life, Gwan-shik goes alone to buy a risky investment property, hoping to turn their luck around. It’s a restaurant, in a newly built commercial center, that’s in the middle of nowhere. Theirs is the only inhabited space in the building, and it’s surrounded by nothing but open land. We’ll soon learn that it’s a real estate scam. He sold their cabbage field to buy this space and it was really the cabbage field that was worth something – he got duped into selling it for cheap, so the land could be developed into expensive properties.
The family is in dire straits with nowhere left to turn and no one is driving out to their restaurant, so they’re about to go fully broke. Geum-myeong comes through the door and tells them she got some money. She went around borrowing it, even though she’s got her own problems, and now it’s her turn to have a total meltdown and tell her parents the truth. She screams at Ae-soon about the pressure they always put on her to succeed and how she can’t take it anymore. “I’m sick of being the poster child! I’m sick of being the one who made it out! The pillar, the noona, the eldest child. I’m sick of it all!”
Gwan-shik suddenly comes from the other room and angrily yells his daughter’s name. It’s the first time he’s ever raised his voice at her. And he doesn’t say another word but she breaks into sobs, covering her face. Geum-myeong leaves her parents’ house and both she and her mother feel awful about the conversation, holding onto both guilt and resentment. We learn that Geum-myeong is actually pregnant in that moment, while Ae-soon has just started menopause.
Geum-myeong goes through a difficult labor and Chung-seob thinks he may lose her or their baby in the process. After a close call, both mom and baby are fine (though Chung-seob is terrified and says there won’t be a second one). It’s 2001, the IMF debt is paid, Korea regains control of its economy, and they name their new baby girl Bom (spring). A new start is truly on the way.
Without any way to sell their business, Gwan-shik and Ae-soon decide to double down and find a way to make it work by doing deliveries. If no one will come to them, they’ll do the fastest delivery in town. And little by little, they make a name for themselves, until customers start venturing out to find them and eat at the restaurant. Finally, a celebrity who owes Gwan-shik a favor does a promo for them, and that’s the last push to make their restaurant packed and popular.
With money coming in, Ae-soon is happy and Geum-myeong tells us that her parents, who once plowed the fields, became people who built landmarks. Suddenly, the commercial center starts filling in around them. At the same time, Geum-myeong’s own business is taking off and we see her on TV promoting it. She’s built a company that’s democratizing the way people study through recorded lessons. No matter where you are, or who you are, you can have classes in your hand. She tells the audience that she was inspired by her mother, who had the talent but not the resources to go to college.
But just as things are looking up and struggles get pushed to the side, Geum-myeong takes her parents for health exams, and they learn that Gwan-shik has cancer. It’s already advanced, but they begin treatments anyway, and he has to stay at the hospital, where the doctors and staff treat him and Ae-soon like absolute shit, as they’re cattle-prodded and ignored.
Throughout all this, Ae-soon has started writing poetry again and one of her poems is published in a journal. It’s about Gwan-shik, her love for him, and her letting him go. He’s still alive to read it and see that she achieved her dream of becoming a published poet. They have a joyful moment. But when he dies, after being together their whole lives, Ae-soon doesn’t know what to do with her days.
She fills her notebook with poems and another twenty years go by. Her grandkids are teens, Geum-myeong and Eun-myeong are both living well by working for Geum-myeong’s business, and finally Ae-soon publishes an entire poetry book. Geum-myeong had sent the collection to an editor with the note “I’m sending you the 70 years of my parents’ life, I think it’s a story worth telling.”
And that’s the story we’ve just witnessed, filled with love and tears and heartache and laughter, which Ae-soon has memorialized in her poems. And which Geum-myeong has memorialized by telling us this story and getting Ae-soon’s work out into the world. Her final voiceover is a thank you to her parents, with gratitude and respect (and a nod to the show’s original Korean title: “Thank you for your hard work”).
This is a masterpiece, detailing the epic and the ordinary in ways that make it relatable, authentic, and affecting. And all I can say is that if you haven’t yet started it, do so now. In the end, while Geum-myeong is the narrator, this remained Ae-soon and Gwan-shik’s story, with little about Geum-myeong after her wedding. It maintained the focus on women, generational struggles, and what we pass off to our kids, with humor and heartbreak that showed bad breaks and lucky strokes usually come in even numbers. Regrets, mistakes, and everyday struggle are what make heroes. And these characters, from start to finish, were heroes I wanted to follow.
The performances here are phenomenal, but IU and Moon So-ri deserve special recognition. IU stepped into both her characters believably and I am already looking forward to anything she does next. The sweeping nature of the show meant that the actors had to step into multiple roles at varying points in time, and they all did an amazing job embodying their aging characters.
This is a heavy watch that I won’t be replaying again just yet. But when the time comes that I need some inspiration and reflections on life, loss, and resilience, I’ll come back to this drama and let it take me through its currents again. Maybe next season.
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