When life gives you tangerines, lemons, or dalandans….
Life isn’t many things. It isn’t a picnic. It isn’t a bed of roses. It isn’t a walk in the park. It isn’t a harvest of tangerines.
But it is also the sweetest, most precious thing you can give to anyone—which you can give yourself. Life, and a life.
When Life Gives You Tangerines, a 16-episode Korean drama series on Netflix written by Lim Sang-choon and directed by Kim Won-seok, uses tangerines as the peg for the unexpected joys and sorrows life throws at you. But unlike lemons, tangerines aren’t usually sour.
The limited series, described as an “emotional pilgrimage” by a viewer, is a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the tides and times of our life, of sun-kissed mornings and moonlit evenings; of dark days and moonless nights.
But unlike a calendar with fixed holidays and anticipated full moons, life isn’t predictable. Just when you thought you knew what life is all about, a curve ball is thrown your way.
The only thing unyielding and predictable from beginning to end of When Life Gives You Tangerines is the love of Gwan-sik (portrayed oh-so-soulfully by Park Bo-gum as the young Gwan-sik and Park Hae-joon as the older Gwan-sik) for Ae-sun (masterfully brought to life by IU as the young Ae-sun and by Moon So-ri as her older self). It’s a love that does not ebb. It just flows. It’s a sweet tangerine. It’s a canola flower in perpetual bloom.
When grade schooler Ae-sun declares she wants to be president one day, the adults turn to Gwan-sik, who is her age, and asks what he wants to be if Ae-sun wants to be president. And the little boy says without batting an eyelash, “First lady.”
And he meant that—throughout their lives, Gwan-sik was content to let his Ae-sun soar, even if it meant he was the one on the ground, holding on to the string. As their only daughter (portrayed again by IU) says later on, her father gave her (the daughter) everything. She was Number One in his life. “But my mother is Number Zero.”
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There is a mug for sale online with this saying, “K-Drama is my coping mechanism.”
My high school batch mate Dolly Pangan-Specht soundly agrees, saying, “It’s cheaper than therapy!”
Women (and some men) watch it because it dives into corners of their heart and souls. You feel better when you know someone’s been in the same boat you are rocking in right now. When Life Gives You Tangerines, based on online comments on Rotten Tomatoes, seems to be one of the most relatable to the majority, if not the most relatable. I would compare it to the 2000 Filipino movie Tanging Yaman, written and directed by Laurice Guillen.
Largely set in the island of Jeju where tangerines abound, When Life Gives You Tangerines begins epic. The opening cry in the series is “‘Omma!” (“Mother!”) in the most searing way, the way Pinoys call out “Nanay!” when in the peaks and valleys of their lives.
Told in a non-linear way, the series shows the depth of a mother’s love and grief, as essayed by the hardworking haenyeo (deep-sea diver) Yeom Hye-ran as Jeon Gwang-rye.
Her tenacity and sacrifices spur her daughter Ae-sun to go on in good times and bad. This same willingness to sacrifice virtually everything for one’s children is passed on to Ae-sun, who later has two children of her own. The mother is the pillar of the home in this limited series, which also reflects the tides of South Korea as a nation, while the father lays the foundation. Children are expected to provide the roof.
“Our dreams are not just ours. They carry the hopes and happiness of the people who raised us,” says a character in hit series, showing that especially among Asians, an entire clan, nay, an entire village, pins its hopes on the next generation, sometimes a burden too high for the next generation’s standard bearer.
And yet despite the dominant role given to self-sacrificing, tenacious mothers, my takeaway from the series is my admiration for the father Gwan-sik, whom Ae-sun calls “Steelheart.”
He tells Ae-sun in their twilight years that she should live for her unfulfilled dream of becoming a poet, because he has already achieved his dream—loving her.
There is a scene involving Gwan-sik and Ae-sun in Episode 3 that is a mix of the visual intensity of the romantic love in Titanic and Crash Landing on You—even without a kiss between them. You have to watch it to know what I mean. Yes, intense even without a kiss.
When Life Gives You Tangerines makes us ride the waves of emotion. There are jubilant graduations, joyful weddings, and heartbreaking funerals.
“Be ready with your tissue paper,” I was warned. A colleague told me, “The series should have been titled When Life Gives You Onions.” Indeed, your tears will flow like the water gathered in the crevices of the rocks by Jeju’s seas.
So what do you do when life gives you tangerines, lemons, or dalandans?
You take them piece by piece, ear by ear. A wise man once told me you don’t take life like it were an apple. You take life as if it were an orange or a tangerine. Piece by piece.
That way, you get over the moonless nights, day by day.
