K-drama review: Descendants of the Sun

From left: Captain Yoo Si-jin, Dr Kang Mo-yeong, Sergeant Seo Dae-young and Lt Yoon Myung-ju.

I know, it’s barely two weeks since my last K-drama review and this show is 16 hours long. No wonder I haven’t read much. My excuses are twofold: I was a bit brain foggy and I found this series addictive. From the first episode of Descendants of the Sun (KBS 2016), I knew I was in trouble.

After the low stakes of Coffee Prince, this drama was much more serious, but still sweet. It opens with an impressive set piece in the DMZ between North and South Korea. After soldiers from both sides of the border fight with knives in a stand-off that the public can never be told about, the triumphant leader of the South Korean commandos removes the scarf covering his face to reveal our hero: Captain Yoo Si-jin (Song Joong-ki).

Our heroine has a slightly less violent introduction but is still instantly impressive. Dr Kang Mo-yeong (Song Hye-kyo) is a surgeon at a big hospital in Seoul. She’s great at her job but keeps getting overlooked for promotions because she doesn’t have connections. She doesn’t take any shit from patients but does get on well with her colleagues and is willing to suck up to her superiors so long as it doesn’t break her moral code.

Si-jin and his best bud Sergeant Seo Dae-young (Jin Goo) are on leave and enjoying a funfair when they foil a robbery. The thief, Kim Gi-bum (Kim Min-seok, who I know from Doctors and Hello, My Twenties) is taken to hospital, with Si-jin and Dae-young in pursuit when they realise he still has one of their phones. Dr Kang initially thinks they are hoodlums harassing her patient and refuses to let them near Gi-bum (who, for reasons that I could never figure out, has as his next-of-kin Dae-young’s on-off girlfriend Lt Yoon Myung-ju – a military doctor who trained with Dr Kang). But when Gi-bum tries to run away from the hospital, he runs into a real gang and ends up being saved by Si-jin and Dae-young in the pilot’s second excellent set piece.

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October is #LupusAwarenessMonth

Lupus UK 2019 posterRoughly once a year I write a post about having lupus (SLE), partly to raise awareness of the disease, but also because it helps me to talk about it in a space where I’m not worried about boring the same poor people who hear about it all the time! Here in the UK, October is Lupus Awareness Month so this seems like a good time.

The symptoms of lupus that I struggle with most are fatigue and brain fog. I had a really dispiriting experience with my rheumatologist earlier this year when I asked him if there is anything I can do medically to help with this and he responded “Everyone gets tired.” That’s so incredibly unhelpful and frankly offensive, though I didn’t have the words to explain that to him at the time.

For one thing, chronic fatigue is not just “feeling tired”, it is extreme and long-term and has a lot of side-effects that can make daily life really hard. Think about the most tired you have ever been. You may have experienced headache, sore eyes, double vision, dizziness, nausea or confusion. You might find yourself unable to think clearly or concentrate. You might find lights too bright, or noises hard to distinguish. Now imagine some or all of that happening every day, no matter how much sleep you get or how careful you are to eat healthily and do regular exercise.

A medical professional should know that’s what chronic fatigue means. So did he not believe me, or was he just being glib without realising how rude and dismissive it sounded? I’m annoyed at myself for not speaking up but then one of the things that I find especially hard is conversation with strangers. I often can’t manage to say what I want to because either I can’t find the right words, or I’m too tired to judge the right moment to jump in and speak.

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K-drama review: Coffee Prince

Coffee Prince advert

I haven’t written about the last few TV shows I’ve watched, but this one had some interesting quirks that I thought were worth a blog post. Coffee Prince (MBC 2007) was a successful enough show that it’s been remade in at least four other countries and the old cafe used for the main set was turned into a real coffee shop that’s a popular tourist attraction in Seoul.

The set-up is that our heroine, Go Eun-chan (played by Yoon Eun-hye), is a 24-year-old androgynous-looking woman who is often mistaken for a man and rarely bothers to correct people. She is the sole wage-earner in her family since her father died, and is determined to earn enough to send her younger sister Eun-sae to college, which means that she works several low-paying jobs. In the first episode, she meets the two men who will be rivals for her love, and of course they are cousins and close friends.

Choi Han-gyul (Gong Yoo) is the heir to a major food corporation and after spending a few years in America “dabbling” with being a toy designer, his grandmother is keen to get him suitably settled down. Her first aim is to find him a wife, so Han-gyul hires Eun-chan – who he thinks is a man – to play his boyfriend who breaks up every blind date. Eun-chan doesn’t like Han-gyul but she has just lost one of her jobs and needs the money.

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What exactly about the bag is Jewish?

Chasing the King of HeartsChasing the King of Hearts
by Hanna Krall
translated from Polish by Philip Boehm

This is my Poland choice for the EU Reading Challenge, one of several I bought from Peirene Press. It’s a true story from World War Two, retold by a journalist who herself survived the war by hiding in a cupboard. Which sounds like quite a story itself, but possibly not one as eventful as that of Izolda.

Izolda Regensberg is a Jewish woman whose history took her from the ghetto in Warsaw, to working for the Underground, to various workcamps and even Auschwitz. But we know early on this book that she survived, thanks to interspersed chapters about her attempts to communicate with her Israeli grandchildren.

Language is key to this amazing story. Language and love. Izolda speaks Polish, Yiddish, Russian and French, and during the war learns German, which helps her to fake her identity, make friends and make money. But in her old age she can’t speak even a sentence of Hebrew and can only communicate with her granddaughters through her own children. It’s an interesting comment on the reduced capacity for new language as we get older, even in people who are polyglots.

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September 2019 reading round-up

Edouard Manet - The Railway
Edouard Manet – The Railway, 1873

Like most years, September started with sunshine and ended with rain. Lots of it. We had another weekend in London and a week off work doing DIY, but the most book-related non-reading activity I did was going to see Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort of) at Bristol Old Vic. It’s an excellent production, using a small all-female cast to great effect. It made me laugh and it made me think, which isn’t bad going for a play based on a book I don’t especially like.

Happy autumn!

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All of us who survived on the street could not renounce the charm of the stories we told

Dry SeasonDry Season
by Gabriela Babnik
translated from Slovene by Rawley Grau

This is a strange book, difficult to follow at times, but always lyrical and occasionally outstanding. It’s my Slovenia book for the EU Reading Challenge, written by a Slovene author and starring a Slovene main character, but actually set in Burkina Faso. It seems extra appropriate for this project as its publication was co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

The book opens with two people in bed together in a hotel room in Ouagadougou. They are Ana – a 62-year-old artist here on holiday – and Ismael, a 27-year-old local who spent much of his life living on the street. It’s an unlikely pairing and one that doesn’t seem destined to last, but as the narrative alternates between their points of view, we discover things they have in common. In a way they are both running away from their daily lives, and as they gradually open up to each other, we learn that neither of them is quite what you expect.

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Our father refused to compromise, and live a life of silence in the face of oppression

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burying the typewriter coverBurying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police
by Carmen Bugan

This is my Romania selection for the EU Reading Challenge, and it’s so far my only book in this challenge that was originally written in English. I remember adding this to my wishlist when it was first published. Past me was smart.

It’s a memoir of the author’s first 18 years, when she lived in Romania. She and her family left Romania in late 1989 under threat of death and this is Bugan’s story of how they reached that point. It’s very much told from her own point of view, as the oldest child of Ion Bugan, who was twice imprisoned for protesting Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime.

The book opens with Carmen’s early childhood, which was idyllically happy. Though her father was an activist long before his marriage and her birth, and never stopped secretly protesting, she was oblivious for many years. As the 1970s turn into the 1980s, the warning signs appear (with of course decades of hindsight). When Carmen turns 11 she begins to pay attention to the radio programmes her parents listen to; to the food shortages and fights over rationing on the streets; to the arguments her parents have about moving near to the border and becoming self-sufficient.

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August 2019 reading round-up

bookshop on a barge
Word on the Water is a bookshop on a barge moored on Regent’s Canal near Kings Cross.

Oh dear, I bought far more books than I read this month. Too many great bookshops and publishers, too much of my time filled with stuff other than reading. Such as celebrating mine and Tim’s 17th anniversary with an awesome weekend in London, a few minutes’ walk from the British Library and Word on the Water. Or a trip to the giant secondhand bookshop Bookbarn. Or a night at the theatre to see the Malory Towers musical, which faithfully reproduces the tone and feel of the books (by which I mean it was a bit twee but still enjoyable).

I did also lose some time this month to being unwell, of the head too foggy to read variety. It always happens during summer. I try to take plenty of precautions but lupus will find a way.

I am currently halfway through two books, so hopefully my September list will look a little healthier. How was your August?

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The male and female together make the world

One Part Woman coverOne Part Woman
by Perumal Murugan
translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan

This novel is set in early 20th century India, focusing on a couple who are farmers in a rural area, steeped in religion and superstition. So it is perhaps surprising to find that it is one of the most relatable stories I have read in a while.

Kali and Ponna have been married for 12 years. They love each other and their little corner of Tamil Nadu, but their inability to conceive a child has come to overwhelm everything else. Ponna is excluded from the community, and even family flinch if she touches a child. Kali is alternately mocked and advised to take a second wife. They’re not sure they even want a child, but it seems to be all that the rest of the world cares about.

Their simple lifestyle means that the exact date when this is set was unclear to me, though references to British rule give at least some clue. (There are mentions of certain politicians and events that apparently reveal to those with better historical knowledge than mine that this is the 1940s.) So fertility treatment is limited even for those who have money and access to doctors.

For Kali and Ponna there are no doctors to help. Their only recourse is religion. They endlessly pray, visit shrines and temples, perform rituals. They search their family histories for wrongs done by their ancestors that they can put right. They spend their meagre income on offerings to deities. Hundreds of deities.

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K-drama review: Don’t Dare to Dream

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Don't Dare to Dream poster

I loved this show so much. It’s not groundbreaking or original, but what it does, it does well. Don’t Dare to Dream, also known as Jealousy Incarnate (SBS 2016) is about TV news, family, love, jealousy and…cancer. It’s well acted, hits both light humour and real emotional moments in every episode and the credits feature cartoon aliens. It truly has everything.

Pyo Na-ri (played by Gong Hyo-jin) is a weather broadcaster who is frustrated by her TV station refusing to give her a permanent job and treating her as a general dogsbody, but can’t risk quitting as she needs to earn good money to support her younger brother Chi-yeol, who is still in high school. At work she is always professional, but at home she’s a bit of a mess, constantly behind on rent and shouting at Chi-yeol.

She jumps at an opportunity to work on a shoot with news reporter Lee Hwa-sin (Jo Jung-suk, who was the lead man in Oh My Ghost – another K-drama that I rate highly), who she used to have a crush on. She had hoped this was finally her chance with him, but instead meets another man who takes Hwa-sin’s place in her affections – businessman Go Jeung-won (played by Go Kyung-po, who I swear looks like Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is Hwa-sin’s childhood best friend. Na-ri and Jeung-won begin dating, much to the despair of his mother, who is hoping to use his marriage as a business deal.

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