I usually just lurk around to read other Beannies’ posts, comments, but Crash Landing On You pulls me out of my lurkdom 🙂
At the beginning, with its synopsis, I expected CLOY to be slaptick. I wanted something fun to turn off my brain and I like Son Ye Jin, so I started watching without much expectation. Never expect it to tug at my heartstrings like this.
First, it was the village life in a communist country. I grew up in the capital of a communist country which used to be separated into the North and the South, just like NK and SK. The unification of my country happened more than a decade before I was born. The village people and their life portrayed in CLOY have such resemblance to the village life that I saw every summer of my childhood when I went to the countryside to visit relatives. No make-up, no screen, no internet, sometimes no electricity, no luxury like hot bath or even a TV. Life was very different, so simple and content that way.
Then the scene where Manbok and his wife rushed their infant son to the hospital. I cried so hard because it reminded me of my mom. She told me this story of us basically lived in the hospital for the first few months of my life, shared the bed with other mom-infant (there was not even one private bed for each family). She was so scared that I would die. Years after that, sometimes she still had nightmare that someone from the hospital would come and take her infant daughter to the corpse room. Even now when I become a mother myself, I still can’t fathom the heartbreak of that nightmare alone.
And finally, the “final” goodbye scene at the border between SR and JH. It’s a Kdrama, we all know they will meet again, but at that moment, SR and JH didn’t. To them, it’s the final, forever goodbye. It transports me back to my farewell with my boyfriend 12 years ago. We were both young, and got scholarships for grad schools in different countries, different continents. Our goodbye was much less dramatic 🙂 I remember seeing his image getting smaller, and smaller once the bus left its stop, and we wondered if this was just a long separation, would we ever see each other again, would I let go of my soulmate just like that, what does this mean to us… Many questions that only time could answer, and many tears along the way.
Oh CLOY, look what you did to me.
#CrashLandingOnYou