CHAPTER 60

Original (published on Evergreen News): 2004-01-08

Rewritten: 2025-06-25

By watching Korean dramas, I followed the protagonist into another world, completely forgetting the entanglements of words and numbers during the day.

The social service agency I work for is conducting its first comprehensive service review. Because of its reputation, all colleagues worked hard and made the final sprint at the end of last year (2003). Everyone worked overtime frequently and was physically and mentally exhausted. When I got home, my mind was still full of work, so I had to find a way to relieve stress.

My wife just started watching Korean TV series. From time to time, she introduced the content of certain dramas and her impressions to me. She saw that I was tense, so she played Korean dramas for me to watch to try to relieve stress. It doesn't matter if I don't watch it, I can't help myself after watching it.

I watched a classic love drama that describes the first love of a young man and woman and their reunion ten years later. I won't go into detail here, but I was surprised that the whole series was able to capture the pure mood of poetry. The plot follows the emotional entanglement of the four protagonists, and tells the twists and turns of love, the inevitable encounters of lovers, and the destined reunions. I followed the protagonist into another world, completely forgetting the entanglements of words and numbers during the day.

To be honest, the plots of love stories are all the same, encounters, infatuation, lingering, misunderstandings, separations, being harmed by villains, reunions, and finally never parting. Every plot of this series is perfectly laid out, pushing the plot to a climax wave after wave, which is the best TV series I have watched.

Korean dramas are delicately shot, the dialogues are well-made, and they are accompanied by romantic and slightly sad music, providing enough time for the audience to immerse themselves in the feeling of love, like hypnosis to help me get through the difficult winter. (Postscript: Later, the production was sloppy and the quality dropped. One episode could be dragged out to three episodes. My wife often watched a few episodes ahead of time and found that the plot had not progressed.)

My wife saw how devoted I was to watching, and she was more convinced that watching Korean dramas was good for my body and mind. So she searched for popular Korean dramas and songs everywhere, and then selected them according to my taste before letting me watch them. My wife collected several versions of the excellent Korean dramas mentioned above. She randomly selected two episodes every day, just like Lun, our eldest son with autism, and played them repeatedly. She never got tired of watching them, and they are still being shown in my house.

My younger son was 11 years old at the time and watched them passively. He was a "knowledgeable" person who knew how to appreciate them. He criticized Hollywood romances for being superficial and having too many intimate scenes, and Hong Kong dramas for being too noisy, with enemies becoming lovers all the time. His taste was very high, enough to prevent him from wasting time on the production with low quality.  

We didn't like the dubbed version, which weakened the original flavor. We tried to watch the Korean version and understand the plot with the subtitles. We found that some Korean pronunciations were very similar to Cantonese, which was an unexpected gain. South Korea recovered the fastest after the financial crisis, and its performance in the World Cup was also amazing. Korean dramas have increased our understanding of Korea and the Korean people. We really admire the ability of this nation. In contrast, Hong Kong dramas in recent years are all the same, stagnant, noisy and irritating, which disturbs my mind.

My wife also made friends with some Japanese, American, Taiwanese and mainland Korean drama fans in the online fan club. They sometimes help each other to order souvenirs, and they also argue constantly. My way of survival is to keep distance from gossip and ignore women's affairs.