What You Might’ve Missed In The Show

One of the most talked about K-dramas so far this year is Netflix’s When Life Gives You Tangerines, a moving, intergenerational family saga that follows the trials and triumphs of Oh Ae-sun and her devoted childhood sweetheart Yang Gwan-sik from the 1960s to present-day South Korea.

Directed by Kim Won-suk—known for helming other K-drama classics like Sungkyunkwan Scandal, Misaeng: Incomplete Life, Signal, My Mister and Arthdal Chronicles—and written by Lim Sang-choon (Fight for My Way, When the Camellia Blooms), the 16-episode K-drama also features a star-studded cast led by IU, Park Bo-gum, Moon So-ri and Park Hae-joon.

Upon its March 7^th premiere, When Life Gives You Tangerines became an instant domestic and international hit, earning rave reviews from audiences and critics across the globe.

Admittedly I was very late to watching this series, but I couldn’t skip writing about this masterpiece because it’s one of the best K-dramas I’ve seen in a long while—maybe ever. (I also can’t remember the last time I cried so much while watching a K-drama, except maybe during Twenty Five Twenty One and 49 Days.)

That said, I still hesitated whether or not to attempt a piece like this because one could probably write an entire book explaining all the historical and cultural references found in the show (Pierce Conran of the South China Morning Post even called it “one of the very best K-dramas of all time—and quite possibly the most Korean of them all”).

Yet despite its “Koreanness,” the fact that this show still resonated with so many viewers around the world speaks volumes about how it was able to effectively tell a story through compelling performances, masterful direction and a beautifully written script that subtly encourages us to reflect on our own dreams, struggles and family relationships.

Whether you’re about to stream the show for the first time or are planning a rewatch, below are six ways in which When Life Gives You Tangerines offers glimpses into South Korea’s dynamic history and culture. And while none of these details are essential to understanding the overall story, they might make you appreciate this masterpiece even more.

Warning: Some spoilers ahead for When Life Gives You Tangerines!

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1. When Life Gives You Tangerines showcases the beauty and uniqueness of Jeju Island. (Well, sort of.)

Much of the series takes place on South Korea’s Jeju Island, located off the southwestern tip of the Korean Peninsula. The island setting lends some pretty interesting characteristics to the show—including its title.

When the show premiered, many Koreans failed to comprehend the real meaning of the Korean title because it’s an expression used only in the Jeju dialect, which is quite different from standard Korean. The title, <폭싹 속았수다> (“pohk-ssak soh-gat-su-da”), can be translated as “Thank you for your hard work” and would be the equivalent of the standard Korean phrase “수고 많으셨습니다.”

The show’s English title When Life Gives You Tangerines is, of course, a twist on the saying “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Netflix’s globalization team cleverly decided to swap out “lemons” for “tangerines” since Jeju is known for its delicious homegrown tangerines.

Other things that Jeju is known for include its fields of bright yellow canola flowers and haenyeo (women divers that harvest seafood without using any oxygen tanks; the Korean term literally means “sea women”)—both of which are prominently featured throughout the series. However, as some Korean media outlets have pointed out, many of the scenes set on Jeju Island were actually filmed elsewhere in South Korea (for example, the canola field where Ae-sun and Gwan-sik share their first kiss is located in North Jeolla province).

Also, the dialogue spoken by Jeju residents in the show is in reality a mix of the Jeju dialect, standard Korean and the Jeolla dialect—a decision that was likely intentional given how difficult it would’ve been for both the actors and Korean viewers if most of the dialogue had been in an authentic Jeju dialect.

Nevertheless, the popularity of When Life Gives You Tangerines has sparked a renewed interest in the Jeju dialect (which is in danger of becoming extinct), and you can bet that Jeju Island will see an uptick in tourists this year!

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2. When Life Gives You Tangerines features a plethora of Korean traditions that were once commonly practiced.

South Korea—especially its urban centers like Seoul and Busan—is a place that changes dramatically every year, and as the country continuously evolves, many of its customs and traditions are also quickly fading. Thankfully, some of these are memorialized in When Life Gives You Tangerines. Below are just a few examples:

In the first episode, Korean children can be seen cleaning in the background when Gwang-rye, Ae-sun’s mother, walks into her daughter’s school. Back then, Korean students were expected to clean their classrooms and many other parts of their school, partly because Korean schools at the time were too poor to hire cleaning staff or purchase proper cleaning equipment, and partly because the practice was believed to instill order and cleanliness among young Koreans. The custom carried on through the decades, even after South Korea joined the ranks of advanced countries. These days, however, many—if not most—Korean schools leave the cleaning up to janitors and teachers.

If you’re wondering what Gwang-rye is putting on her daughter Ae-sun’s fingernails, it’s the crushed leaves and petals of the balsam plant [called 봉숭아 (“bong-soong-ah”) in Korean], which Korean women and girls used in the past to dye their nails. The tradition shows up in other K-dramas like Love Next Door.

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These suspended bricks of fermented soybean, called meju (메주) in Korean, might look (and smell) unpleasant, but they’re used to make many of the sauces and pastes essential to Korean cuisine, including soy sauce, gochujang, doenjang (used in dishes like Korean soybean paste stew) and ssamjang (the reddish-brown paste served at Korean BBQ restaurants). Due to meju’s pungent odor and complex fermentation process, most Koreans these days don’t make meju at home but simply buy pre-made sauces and pastes from grocery stores.

Sadly, the haenyeo of Jeju Island are a dying breed, which the show so poignantly captures. Designated as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, the numbers of these formidable women have shrunk from about 20,000 in the 1960s to a little over 3,000 today.

3. When Life Gives You Tangerines shows how the lives of South Koreans have changed over six decades.

Much of the series takes place against the backdrop of South Korea’s economic development during the 1960s and 1970s, when the country was rapidly transformed under the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee. Shoddy thatched roofs were replaced with those made of slate as part of the Park regime’s New Community Movement (Saemaul Undong, 새마을 운동), which substantially improved the country’s economy and infrastructure.

It was also a time when authorities restricted individual freedoms and clamped down on those who didn’t conform to rigid rules and norms. Nationwide nighttime curfews were implemented (as evidenced by the blaring of sirens in Episode 2 when Ae-sun and Gwan-sik attempt to escape Jeju Island), and social dancing was deemed immoral and counterproductive to Korea’s economic development and was hence prohibited.

One of the most creative ways in which the series illustrates how Koreans lived in the past is through its depiction of culinary practices. For instance, before the advent of modern rice processing facilities, Korean housewives used a ladle-shaped bamboo sieve called a jori (조리) to separate small pebbles and other debris from grains of rice.

When Life Gives You Tangerines shows the traditional method of preparing dalgona, the sugar candy popularized by the blockbuster K-drama Squid Game: by using a regular ladle and a metal chopstick, as demonstrated by the grown-up Ae-sun.

4. When Life Gives You Tangerines offers insights into South Korea’s turbulent history through television, radio and print media.

Although the K-drama largely focuses on the enduring love between Ae-sun and Gwan-sik, it also provides a sweeping overview of key moments throughout South Korea’s history, including the March 15 election fraud that led to the April Revolution of 1960, the May 16^th coup that brought Park Chung-hee to power the following year, the 1988 Summer Olympics hosted in Seoul and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (known as the IMF Crisis in Korea) that devastated the South Korean economy.

In the first episode, as Gwang-rye sits down to chat with Ae-sun’s teacher, she notices that the newspaper on his desk mentions the March 15^th election fraud—a historical event that’s obviously meant to draw a parallel with Ae-sun’s own experience of losing the class election.

On March 15, 1960, Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first president, was re-elected for the fourth time, while his partymate Lee Ki-poong won the vice presidency, sparking a public outcry over the rigged elections. Nationwide protests in April led to Rhee’s resignation and exile. The interior minister Choi In-kyu, the mastermind behind the election fraud (seen wearing glasses in the image above), was later hanged.

On May 16, 1961, Major General Park Chung-hee and his military allies successfully staged a coup that installed Park as South Korea’s leader. In 1963 he was elected as the country’s president—a position he occupied until his assassination in 1979.

In January 1968 a team of elite North Korean soldiers infiltrated the South and attempted but failed to assassinate President Park. After a shootout with South Korean forces, only two of the North Korean soldiers survived. One of them was Kim Shin-jo, who, after being captured and interrogated for over a year, was released into South Korean society and allowed to adopt South Korean citizenship. His wife converted him to Christianity, after which he went on to become a prominent pastor and a fervent anti-Communist. Kim passed away earlier this month on April 9^th.

Kim once shared that had he and his squad succeeded in killing President Park, “South Koreans would be living under communism now.” Pretty crazy to imagine, right?

To help counteract the threat from North Korea, Park’s government launched a two-month “Spy Detection Campaign,” which encouraged South Korean citizens to report anyone they suspected of being a North Korean spy to the police.

5. When Life Gives You Tangerines contains plenty of traditional Korean beliefs and superstitions.

As seen in Episode 4, Gwan-sik’s shaman grandmother keeps throwing red beans at Ae-sun because she believes that she is possessed by her late mother’s spirit. According to an old Korean superstition, red beans were believed to chase away evil spirits.

Similarly to the West, in the past, women were often not allowed to ride a boat because they were thought to bring bad luck, which is why Ae-sun initially hesitates to board Gwan-sik’s new boat, even though she was the one who convinced her grandmother to pay for it.

In large families or during family gatherings, women generally dined at a separate table from the men, partly because men were historically the main or sole breadwinner in their family and hence were treated with more respect. That’s why Gwan-sik’s decision to sit with his wife, mother and daughter in the scene below was considered revolutionary at the time, as Geum-myeong later mentions in Episode 11. (Gwan-sik’s grandmother is sitting at the men’s table presumably because she’s the eldest in the household and the matriarch, which grants her an elevated status.)

You can even see the differences in the amount and quality of the food on the two tables:

Besides sitting at a different table (or eating after the men finished), women also prepared the food, ate leftovers (as seen in the above screenshot) and cleaned up afterwards. This custom is still practiced in many conservative households in Korea today when families get together for the holidays.

In the past a sticky, taffy-like candy called yeot (엿) was often given to Korean high school students taking college entrance exams. Some parents would melt yeot and stick it onto the gate of the testing center or the university their child wanted to attend in hopes that their kid would get into (or “stick to”) their dream school.

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6. When Life Gives You Tangerines contains a trove of Korean pop culture references as well as songs by some of the most iconic Korean artists of the 20^th century.

Some of those references, however, likely wouldn’t have resonated with most viewers outside of Korea, so props to the show’s English subtitler Sung In Jang for finding ways to convey the essence of the dialogue to an international audience.

One of the funnier references perhaps is the remark Gwan-sik’s mother makes when Ae-sun is shopping for a wedding dress. The English subtitles show her as saying, “This must be a top celebrity’s wedding,” but in the original Korean dialogue, she actually compares Ae-sun to the Korean actress Eom Aeng-ran, who famously married fellow top star Shin Seong-il in 1964 in what was dubbed Korea’s “wedding of the century.”

Since Eom and Shin were two of the biggest actors in Korea at the time, their wedding at Seoul’s Walkerhill Hotel seemed more like a movie premiere or film festival, with scalpers even selling invitations to the spectacle and over a thousand cars arriving at or near the hotel. The lavish ceremony drew more than 4,000 guests and onlookers, and the venue experienced so much overcrowding that the wedding gift table was inadvertently pushed into the hotel’s pond by the swarming throng.

While exquisite storytelling and powerful acting performances primarily drive the show, its background music also greatly enhances the overall viewing experience. When Life Gives You Tangerines features classic songs by some of South Korea’s most famous artists, such as the legendary Korean rock band Sanullim; Korean soul icon Kim Choo-ja; trot king Nam Jin; singer-songwriter Cho Yong-pil, who’s still regarded by many Koreans as the “king of Korean pop”; Seo Taiji and Boys, credited as one of K-pop’s pioneers; H.O.T, the first K-pop idol group; and so many more. The show’s opening theme track is “Spring” by 1970s Korean psychedelic singer Kim Jung-mi, whose other songs “Wind” and “Haenim” are also played in the series.

Numerous Korean viewers and pop culture critics have noted that the series’ background songs appear to have been carefully selected to not only suit every scene but also reflect the broader sentiments of the era, evoking a strong sense of nostalgia for those who lived during that time period.

Below are just a few of the beloved hits played in When Life Gives You Tangerines:

When Life Gives You Tangerines is streaming on Netflix.