Yep, you read it correctly: AZN will be going off the air April 9. No more endless loops of Coffee Prince. No more seven days a week of the half-hour, completely batshit serial Here Comes Ajumma! (which I never even got a chance to write about, it was so hard to keep up). No more thirty second spots telling me not to let "them" tell me how to define myself as an Asian American (duly noted! Oh, wait.) If I want my fix of low-budget commercials for Kinoki Footpads, Mighty Putty and the AARP, I'll have to get it from NY1 - though I don't think I've ever seen those Tanya Roberts timeshare ads on any other channel. Does anyone care but me?
To be honest, it's kind of a relief. Don't get me wrong - I like TV. I like TV a lot. But seven days a week of K-Dramas is just too rich for my blood. I had to watch 4 episodes in a row of Bride From Vietnam last night because my I spent the past week's TV time trying to catch up on the increasingly boring Love Truly. 4 episodes in a row - that's 4 hours. I can't live like this, people! Maybe the TV Gods just took pity on me.
Anyway... highlights from the latest quartet of BFV:
Jun-wu has Sung-il's number. He keeps denying he's Jin-ju's father at first, but eventually breaks down and admits it. However, he refuses to reveal his identity to Jin-ju or meet with her soon-to-be-blind mother, for the sake of his family, career, social standing, etc. Jun-wu is not having it. He goes off and basically calls him a selfish coward. He tells Jin-ju that her father contacted him but doesn't want to meet her, and that she should forget about him and move on with her life. She freaks out and they fight, but then she calms down and tries to make peace with the situation. When Mrs. Huh gets wind of this she is furious and confronts her nephew, but he still won't budge. Sung-il's character becomes less and less sympathetic with each episode, especially regarding...
Young-su and Se-mi, who have been sticking it out working in a noodle shop and freezing their asses off in their rooftop apartment, waiting for the parents to say yes. Young-su has matured (I think it only took one episode) and is now a hardworking young man, willing to go to the mat for Se-mi - literally. He's taken a job as a hired sparring partner at a gym, essentially getting beat up for money. I didn't know there was such a job. The way he was so secretive about it - everything led up to a big reveal when Sung-il gets photos from his investigator friends of what his son has been up to - made me think he had become a male prostitute, or at least a stripper. I guess my mind's in the gutter. Anyway, the investigators find the kids and lead Sung-il right to Se-mi. Once again, he tries to get her to leave Young-su, but she's more determined than ever. Sung-il has heard that Se-mi's family is willing to take the couple in and allow them to marry without his permission, so he's desperate to stop them. Se-mi and Young-su go back on the run. Han-suk, who was all set to bring Se-mi home on good terms, is furious at Sung-il for making them disappear again. Once Se-mi talks to Won-mi and hears the news that her parents will take them in, she's ecstatic and starts packing her bags. But now Young-su is upset because he doesn't want to be disowned by his family. They argue, Se-mi leaves, Young-su runs after her, she runs into the street and into the path of an oncoming truck, Young-su pushes her out of the way and is hit. He doesn't die, but it's not good. At the hospital, the surgery is successful, but he might be crippled, we don't know yet. Sung-il blames Se-mi, Han-suk blames Sung-il. Se-mi finally goes home and is reunited with her family. She goes to the hospital to visit Young-su, but when Sung-il shows up he makes her leave. He's a total asshole. He's also increasingly unfathomable to his wife, who now feels like no one listens to her (at the beginning of the series, she pretty much controlled everything and everyone). She keeps asking what the hell is the matter with him, but he doesn't even bother trying to explain, or lie. It's not a good tactic.
Ji-young saw Sung-il and Jun-wu arguing in the parking lot, so she knows something is going on between them. She also knows, thanks to her mother (who left town, again, for good this time - there was a truly awesome montage featuring the best and worst of Scary Mom) that there's something going on between Sung-il and Jun-wu's father's business - remember, he secretly tried to help them for Jin-ju's sake. And, she overheard Jin-ju telling Mrs. Huh that Jun-wu had been in contact with her father, and that she was depressed about it. She's starting to put it together. Meanwhile, for reasons I really don't understand, Young-min has not only agreed to delay the divorce, he's let Ji-young move back into the house. He was going to move out (really a long overdue move, it seems to me) and let her live with him, but Mother wouldn't have it. He's said something to the effect that he only agreed to delay the divorce so he can get revenge - torture her, basically - but is this really the reason? It seems kind of absurd that he'd put himself through that, although he does seem to be enjoying it. He makes Ji-young sleep in a closet-sized guest room, and when she complains he gets her with a real zinger: "A good husband treats his wife the way she deserves." OHH, snap! Also, he keeps warning her "not to upset Mother." He's actually kind of a creepy character.
Jin-ju and Ji-young face off in their first rice cake test. Ji-young makes her company's product development team come up with a recipe for her, but she still loses to Jin-ju. Why? Jin-ju makes persimmon rice cakes, which are "easier to digest" and are good for children and the elderly. Ji-young makes some coconut rice cakes, but Mrs. Huh points out that while they taste good, brown rice flour and coconut are hard to digest, and would not be good for her target market. She should think about someone else for once. It's really very interesting how on three different shows - BFV, Love Truly, and Here Comes Ajumma! - a female character masters cooking and faces off against a rival who has the skills but not the heart. Coincidence that these are shows I keep coming back to, and not the historical dramas? That's not really the interesting part, though - it's that on all these shows, when learning the art of cooking/rice cake making in Korea, what's emphasized more than anything else is knowing how the ingredients you use will affect the person meant to eat them. Are they easily digestible? What diseases and conditions are they good for? Thinking of food as medicinal as well as pleasurable seems to be the prevailing school of thought when it comes to Korean TV cooking. It's probably the last thing most Americans would think of - although Americans certainly eat foods because they are supposed to be healthy, I doubt that the primary concern of people cooking in fine restaurants here is whether the beef carpaccio is good for anemia.
Another thing I learned from BFV this weekend: I always wondered why men in K-Dramas enjoy insulting the women in their lives so much. As a means of expressing affection, they will often tell their beloved that they have an ugly face or fat legs. This kind of shit would get your balls kicked in in America. Well, Gun-ja explains it all: apparently, when a man insults your appearance, it means he's at least paying attention. Got that, ladies?
As I mentioned, Love Truly has kind of gone off the rails. It's not unwatchable, but it's really dragging. Everyone has started being nice to each other. Boring! Dementia wife has started making a miraculous recovery - yawn. Bong-soon's mom is not a winner - yes, got it. The subplots involving the kitchen staff are so tedious that I just fast forward through them. The Gordon Ramsay-like second in command chef and his bitchy bitch bitch assistant, who live to torture Bong-soon, need to get fired. I still have a few epsiodes from last week to catch up on, so maybe things picked up, who knows. It's all over come Wednesday.
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