The End?? ( Donot read if you are not in Chicago

[zorro]

Did anyone else know this was the last episode? I had no clue until the last minute when Hajin started talking about her "next life".
I wasn't ready for this show to end yet, too many issues I wanted to see resolved.

I guess in the writers' mind, Mom coming home was the end of story. Too bad. I was liking most of these characters and thinking we had another 20 episodes or so to go.

"Kim Hanja" won best actress award for a K Drama on the 2008 awards show they had on a couple days ago, but the whole cast was excellent.

[PippiBella]

I agree! I wanted to see the babies and some other things resolved. It was a little too abrupt. I was shocked to see it end too. I also thought we had some more time to go.

[soapygrams]

DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE WATCHED THE LAST EPISODE WHICH AIRED N CHICAGO ON SATURDAY JANUARY 3, 2008
Contains possible spoilers for those behind Chicago airings.

;D I liked the way it ended. We are assured that Miyeoung will have the baby; her husband will consider actually studying this time; the lawyer and her husband have shown they love each other and are happy together and Sora has shown she feels part of her stepmother's family; grandfather and his mate are happy the way the chose to live; Youngmi and her mil actually get along okay now, Euna finally having been put "in her place" by her husband LOL ; the sister is still the way she always is; her daughter has sold her book and is looking forward to getting married. I'm not sure about the younger brother but I think he is back with his wife and living his life as before, mostly away from the family except for a few brief visits every year.

The ending scene of all of the family enjoying a wonderful time together left me feeling very good about this show. As I have said before, I didn't even LIKE this show at first but after watching it for a few more episodes, I had to admit that this show is well-written with realistic actions and reactions of the characters; and a very believable script overall.
I really Liked this show and will be anxious to see if the next one can come close to being as well written and acted.
I still don't like the title though LOL . .

[jinju0]

i agree with you pippibella, i wanted to see the babies! atleast the lawyers baby. she took forever to start showing. oh well. typical k-drama lol

[sayuri]

I was kinda sad it ended so soon as well. I wanted to see the babies too.I was curious to see how Euna would be with a baby around and them all calling her "Grandmother". That would have been very interesting!Oh well.I really enjoyed Hanja.She does so much for her family and the only one that really appreciated her was her father-in law.Mom's do so much for their families and sacrifice themselves in the process.She was the best!

[Lucy]

I agree this ending was unexpected. It seemed a little rushed to me, and unless I’m mistaken, the fast-forward was not even labeled. Usually it says “Two Years Later,” or whatever, but maybe since it was just a couple of months they thought we would catch on easily.

I was very saddened by the ending. No matter how many times she tried to explain herself to her children, they refused to try to understand her. She never had more than a day without them calling her for something—usually to complain that she’d left the house—and no more than 4 days together without having to go back to the house. Some vacation. I kept wanting her to promise she'd come back to the house only after they stopped pestering her to. Honestly, when she said, “In my next life, I want to be called by my name,” it made me cry. Poor Hanja.

I was also so ANGRY at her son (and almost everyone else, for that matter) acting as though she was shirking her responsibilities and making Miyeon work too hard. Thank you, Patriarchy! Where else can you find a social order pitting two women against each other because one of them isn’t acting enough like a workhorse to make it easier for the other one? If Mom doesn’t act like the full-time maid, the DIL has to—and yet it’s the MIL’s fault, not a society that says women exist to serve their families like waitresses.

[soapygrams]

Lucy, the expectation that mom is to do everything for the family is not limited to the Korean society. For centuries, in rural Ireland. the wife/mother was expected to take care of all of the household chores, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the vegetable garden, the hens, the pigs, do the milking, give birth to the babies, take care of the children, and take care of her husband. In some instances, she was sent out to work in addition to her home chores and the husband collected her pay. It's hard to believe those conditions actually existed into the 1900s.

Modern women do MOST of the housework, childcare, shopping in addition to holding a job outside the home. So what's really changed?

In many instances the only change is in women's attitude toward men's role; we expect HELP from our husbands. Of course, we don't always get it though LOL

Here in our country, we think of housework as a shared burden; also with the care of the children. We want the father to share in the care of our children, to be a part of their lives, not just the breadwinner, provider of the home and the ultimate authority.

A lot of men are agreeable to this change and take great pride in their expanded role in the family dynamics. I think that was shown in this drama when the youngest son started doing many of the cleaning chores for his wife and told her to rest. Yes, he was sort of cussing out his mom for her not being there, but the fact is that he actually DID the work because he cared for his wife and wanted to help.

I guess we wanted this show to continue for a few more episodes to see the babies, the changed attitude of the family toward Hanja, etc. However, considering the way so many other dramas have ended, we did see resolutions of most all of the problems. We even saw the softening of Euna's attitude toward her DIL; I will miss this show and hope the next one will be as well written as this was. ;D

[Lucy]

Soapy, I didn't intend for my criticism to be specific to Korea. The patriarchal system is international.

Right, "Help" from the husbands and male partners = it's a woman's job, and the guys are just "pitching in." Yeah, thanks a lot for that. LOL

I like your rundown on what all this means for women, but I would disagree that the son's excoriation of his mother is soft-pedaled by the fact that he took some of the burden off his wife. Yes, it was very nice of him to do so when he technically "shouldn't have to," but the fact that he blamed his mother so bitterly--in fact, blamed the threat of miscarriage on her having taken some time for herself--reveals that "blame the woman first" is a very ugly reality. In other words, he didn't get mad or realize that that amount of work is burdensome for any woman. He just got mad that HIS woman had to do it, when Mom was supposed to keep slaving away to spare her.

[Lila]

The ending may have been more abrupt than I liked, but it tied things up much better than many other k-dramas I’ve seen, so I’m OK with that.

There’s no way to tell if the writers intended the raving son to be speaking for any segment of society, but I wasn’t as bothered by his hysterics as I might’ve been, had we not already been shown and told that he was a bit mentally and emotionally challenged, and had his reactions to many other situations not been lesser versions of the same hyper-over-reaction. It might be nice if the drama/soap opera worlds would stop operating on ancient beliefs with regard to conception, miscarriages, and determination of fetal gender identity, but what would they write about, eh?

I, too, really felt for Hanja. Even though there had been a bit of welcome growth/change among her family members within their own relationships, and even though she had gained a new appreciation of her husband, she was essentially right back where she had been before – in “her place”, where most of the others wanted her to be -- and as much as acknowledged that she was pretty well beaten in her quest for a life of her own, after 60 years of being what others wanted her to be. Saying that she hoped in her next life to be called by her name was so poignant to me. Can you imagine only existing in your society in relation to your connection to some other person/people, even to the point of being referred to solely as So-and-So’s mother/father/spouse/child/older sibling/younger sibling, etc.? Hanja wanted to be seen as an individual, a person in her own right, and that’s probably more difficult in a Confucian/conformist culture than I can even imagine. I wonder if women’s male counterparts have the same issue. Probably so. Even though in my own lifetime I’ve seen plenty of “unenlightened thinking” here in America – and still do, of course – it still smarted to see the camera take Hanja out of the others’ scene to sum up her situation in that tiny little enervated voice, believing that she largely has to just give up on this life and hope for something better in the next (nonexistent) one. Talk about screwed!

I wonder if this drama wouldn’t have been more aptly entitled, “Get Over It, You Big Babies.”

[brooklyn]

Lucy, I don't think Yeongil is mentally stable, to term it nicely, he over reacts for the stupidest things and whines and throws tantrums like a toddler. He needs a box in the face, as we say in Jamaica lol.

[zorro]

Lucy, it was more a matter of months, because Yeongsu was "about to burst" so hadn't had her baby yet. But Hanja's remark that she was 63 made me think 3 years had gone by, but that must have been a writer's (or my) oversight.

I think my title for this series would have been:"My Frustrated Family!". Every one of them (with the possible exception of Grandpa's lady friend and the workaholic father in law) that I can think of exhibited this quality to one degree or another. Naturally I found myself relating to some individual's pain and frustrations with more empathy, but could also see how the others I didn't care for too much were within their rights to feel put upon as well. It helped make it a more believable story for me.

The problem is I got too comfortable with them and then they all ran out on me!

Why those little…!!

[Lucy]

No, I did say that the flash-forward was a matter of months, zorro.

Wow, I had no idea everyone thought Yeongil was mentally challenged! I thought he was just hot-headed. I don't see how we were supposed to think he was anything but merely maladjusted. After all, at the end he was saying that he wished he had studied harder, and his father didn't seem to think that it was beyond his capabilities. Yeongil was just the black sheep, is all, and prone to blaming his mother for his problems.

At any rate, he's far from the only one who never stopped trying to force Hanja back into the box. There was some Olympic-level thwarting going on there. Everyone was so challenged by the changes in her, and they refused to adapt. (Except for her husband, basically.) Finally they got her back in the box, happy ending, woo-hoo.

[Lila]

Lucy -- wrt Yeongil's capacities, I can't recall any other specific mentions of it although I'm pretty sure there were some, but in this last episode, after his father had slapped him a bit and sent him out, he (the father) then went in to Hanja, and did mention to her -- seemingly as a reason for her to consider the source -- that Yeongil was "slow". That's the word he used. And somewhere within one of the final 2 episodes the father, in talking directly with Yeongil, IIRC cautioned Yeongil to not blame his inferiority complex on others; that inferiority complexes are a form of mental illness, and he was a "patient". I didn't sense that he meant that Yeongil was in treatment, but rather that he was characterizing Yeongil's inner torture in a way that it could actually be addressed and perhaps remedied, rather than seeing himself as a perpetually helpless victim -- which is actually a very modern way of looking at things.

I ended up liking Hanja's husband quite a lot. He was kind of a fooler -- coming across as a little dim in some ways, but very sharp when it counted, and not at all afraid of showing his soft, caring side. A real good guy, I thought.

[zorro]

I have to say that I had no inclination that Yeongil was supposedly "slow" either.

I think "black sheep" is the perfect description. He was rebellious throughout his childhood, running away from home more than once, and did have a lot of pent up anger which he displayed in an immature manner at times, but for the writers to label him with an "inferiority complex" and describe him as a "patient" was a cheap shot in my opinion. If that were a real issue, it should have been established early on, and not thrown in in the last episode like it was.

Yeongil may not have been my favorite, but he ran the family business, navigated the internet, taught his dad and grandpa how to text message, and tricked his wife into looking at earrings so she wouldn't notice Grandpa out on a date.

Yes, he had his demons, but in no way did I think he was mentally challenged.