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Pierce Conran

This article contains mild spoilers.
5/5 stars
Lead cast: IU, Moon So-ri, Park Bo-gum, Park Hae-joon
The march of time continues through the final episodes of When Life Gives You Tangerines, a series that has deftly chronicled the swift but turbulent evolution of South Korea through the lives of one hardy Jeju Island family.
Fishmonger Oh Ae-sun (IU, My Mister) and fisherman Yang Gwan-sik (Park Bo-gum, Record of Youth) grew up on Jeju’s rocky shores in the 1950s, fell in love in its sweeping canola fields in the 1960s and raised their family in an old countryside house in the 1970s and beyond.
By the 1990s, Ae-sun (now Moon So-ri of Queenmaker) and Gwan-sik (now Park Hae-joon of The World of the Married) have abandoned the house for a flat in a nearby city.


Their eldest child, the brilliant Yang Geum-myeong (IU again), lives in Seoul, while her younger brother, wastrel Yang Eun-myeong (Kang You-seok, Black Knight), remains with them, where he soon starts his own family.
In her youth, Ae-sun dreamed of being a poet, but the circumstances of the times did not allow for such lofty aspirations.
Instead, she lives vicariously through her daughter Geum-myeong, who shares her brilliant mind, obstinate tenacity and penchant for sudden tearful outbursts.
She continually sacrifices for Geum-myeong, which included selling the house and moving to a flat. It is the kind of suffocating love that is all too familiar to anyone who grew up with Korean parents: endless sacrifice and towering expectations.

Yet, in fiction just as in reality, this tactic proves effective. Ae-sun’s generation moved away from the staunch Confucian views on female roles in society and, armed with her mother’s unwavering support, Geum-myeong finds her way through Korea’s evolving society.
She experiences plenty of her own setbacks along the way, until she becomes a tech entrepreneur in the online education industry.
Her success allows her to build a charming new house on Jeju for her mother, where she can bask in her long-delayed but well-earned triumph. The elderly Ae-sun even has a book of her poetry published.
Yet Ae-sun still berates her daughter for being too busy and only visiting her 10 times a year – Korea may not be a big country, but Jeju is still a plane ride away from Seoul.
Ae-sun achieved her dream in the end, but Gwan-sik realised his far earlier and held on to it until his dying breath. As a child, he only ever had eyes for Ae-sun and after falling in love as teens that love never wavered.

However, there were other difficulties. They lost their youngest child during a big storm in the 1970s, a death that the stoic Gwan-sik in particular never really recovered from, still experiencing guilt-stricken nightmares about it in his old age.
There were many financial ups and downs, often precipitated by their feeling of responsibility towards their children. Ae-sun gave up her mother’s house for Geum-myeong’s studies, and Gwan-sik sold his beloved boat to raise the cash to bail his son Eun-myeong out of jail after he is scammed by a friend.
It is Gwan-sik’s turn to be scammed when he uses the remaining money he has to open a small restaurant in a development that turns out to be a scheme devised by an unscrupulous speculator.
Yet the hardy Gwan-sik perseveres, and he eventually turns the restaurant into a success despite its terrible location.
It was with details like this that When Life Gives You Tangerines masterfully bridged past and present, blurring the line between nostalgic reverie and pressing reality.

Poverty after the Korean war (1950-1953) and the IMF financial crisis of 1997 seem like worlds apart, but for those who experienced them, all that really separates them is a generation or two.
Among the show’s many emotional highlights, saying goodbye to Gwan-sik might have been the hardest, the character magnificently performed in his middle age and later years by Park Hae-joon.
He never aspired to leave Jeju, yet when an undiagnosed blood cancer caught up with him, it was in a Seoul hospital that he bowed out, symbolic of the heaving metropolis’ mighty gravitational pull.
From creator Im Sang-choon’s rich scripts to the wonderful cast led by a magnetic IU and a sensational Moon, not to mention all the extraordinary technical contributors of this ambitious and sumptuously realised production, this is a gripping and rewarding show from start to finish.
Boasting far too many highlights for us to do justice to here, When Life Gives You Tangerines has simply earned itself the distinction of being one of the very best K-dramas of all time – and quite possibly the most Korean of them all.
When Life Gives You Tangerines is streaming on Netflix.


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An emotionally rich script and a sensational cast make this series a gripping and rewarding watch from start to finish. Have tissues on hand


An emotionally rich script and a sensational cast make this series a gripping and rewarding watch from start to finish. Have tissues on hand.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}An emotionally rich script and a sensational cast make this series a gripping and rewarding watch from start to finish. Have tissues on hand

An emotionally rich script and a sensational cast make this series a gripping and rewarding watch from start to finish. Have tissues on hand