Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.
Her Private Life
(그녀의 사생활 / Geunyeoui Sasaenghwal)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10
Hi everyone! Here I am coming back to you with a new review before the month is officially over! I’m kind of going back and forth between my 2019/2020 batch watchlist items and series which were released in the last two years, so please bear with me! This one was also on my list for a while, ever since I saw these two actors would be the mains and I was really curious to see them in a romantic drama together. It didn’t take me a long time to go through this, especially the first half of the show since I personally found it very addicting. I took some breaks in-between the final episodes for no particular reason but I did still want to finish it by the end of the month, also for no particular reason, lol. It just felt like a nice way to conclude my drama reviews for this month. Anyways, I really can’t wait to write my thoughts and feelings about this drama, so let’s get into it without further ado.
Her Private Life is a 16-episode K-Drama with episodes of about 1 hour and 10 minutes each. It’s about Sung Deok Mi (played by Park Min Young), a woman who is the head curator at an art gallery called Cheum Gallery. She’s been into art ever since she was a child. First she wanted to be an artist herself, but after sustaining an injury to her wrist and having to give up making art herself as a profession, she went to work on the other side, the researching and collecting side. On the outside, she seems like a very hard-working and respectable curator who puts in all the possible effort even though at the end of the day all the credit always goes to the gallery’s eccentric but negligent director. Deok Mi pulls through it just because she loves her job so much and she also has a good relationship with her team mates.
Deok Mi’s family consists of her father (played by Maeng Sang Hoon), her mother (played by Kim Mi Kyung), and Nam Eun Gi (played by Ahn Bo Hyun). Eun Gi is not related to her by blood, but he was raised by her parents as their own child when Eun Gi’s own mother (played by Park Myung Shin) had some personal issues after giving birth to him. He’s like Deok Mi’s best male friend and brother figure, even though Eun Gi has actually developed romantic feelings for Deok Mi in the meantime. Besides Eun Gi, Deok Mi’s other closest friend is Lee Sun Joo (played by Park Jin Joo), and these two are truly inseperable. Even though Sun Joo already has a family of her own, the two women always make time to meet up and talk every single day, mostly about their shared passion: fangirling.
Coming to the fangirling, you could say Deok Mi actually lives a double life. On the outside, she just seems to be this esteemed curator, but once she’s done with work and she goes home, it’s time to divulge into her favorite pastime. The way she explains it, she’s been a fangirl all her life, and this was something born inside her. Like her mother is always knitting and her father’s always caring for his stone collection, Deok Mi finds her solace in fangirling. While the object of her obsession has changed over the years, Deok Mi’s current fixation lies with Cha Shi An (played by Jung Jae Won), a member of the K-Pop group White Ocean. Her entire room is filled with fanart, merchandise and even a lifesize cardboard figure of Shi An, and even within the fandom she’s quite famous as she runs one of his biggest fansites under the name ‘Shi An is My Life’. As she is well-informed about his work schedule, Deok Mi always manages to find out where he’s going to appear, and then she always makes sure she’s there with her camera lens to take as many clear close-up shots of him as she can. She then edits those pictures and posts them on her fansite, so she can contribute to the joy of fellow fans who may not be able to attend his events. It’s interesting to see how this fangirling life just makes sense to Deok Mi, even though she’s aware of how it may come across to other people. She’s not ashamed about her passion towards her closest friends, but she does keep it a secret from her colleagues at work, for example. She knows it will make her look unprofessional and she doesn’t want it to influence her career. On the other hand, nothing can stop her from supporting Shi An in whatever way possible, whether it’s continuing her fansite, buying him gifts or otherwise promoting his talents. The only people who know about Deok Mi’s secret identity as fangirl Shi An is My Life are Eun Gi and Sun Joo, the latter being a major Shi An fangirl herself as well.
Moving on the male lead of the drama, there’s Ryan Gold (played by Kim Jae Wook). He’s originally Korean but was adopted in the US, and there he’s been making a name for himself as a very influential and critical artist. However, for a while now he’s not been able to paint anymore, so he’s just been making appearances at galleries to judge other people’s artworks. You could say that now he’s become more of a collector than an artist himself. No one knows what the reason is that he stopped painting, and he won’t release any information about it, or about when he might be making a comeback as an artist. In any case, Ryan Gold ends up travelling back to South Korea and, as it happens, becomes the new director at Cheum Gallery. By then, he and Deok Mi have already met once before and haven’t gotten along very well from the start, so of course there’s initial tension between them. However, it doesn’t take long before they’re drawn to each other more and more and from there on their relationship evolves not only into a strong partnership as director and head curator at work, but also as mutually supportive partners in life.
Let me just say right off the bat that I really liked how relatively uncomplicated this drama was. I mean, yes, there were some childhood traumas to dissect and some misunderstandings to get through, but it all happened quite smoothly and it all ended very wholesomely. I really liked that, even when the heavier themes came to light, overall they weren’t made much heavier than they were, and people handled them like real adults without dwelling too much on past regrets or memories. There were just a couple of things that bugged me, which I will of course explain in this review, but other than that I really don’t have anything critical to say about this show. I really enjoyed watching it.
I realized that in my synopsis, I wrote way more about Deok Mi than I did about Ryan, but that’s because in the beginning of the show, we really don’t know much about Ryan yet while Deok Mi is very much introduced as the main character. Throughout the series, we get to see Ryan’s side of the story more and more. It’s like the more he becomes an occupying presence in Deok Mi’s life, the more we get to see of him in the whole series as well. I found it really nice to see their relationship develop, it became such a healthy one. Deok Mi ends up pulling him through all his traumas and painful childhood memories and they really become the most supportive partners to each other, both at work as in their personal lives. It was really comforting to see.
I have to say that as someone who also listens to a lot of K-Pop and who has an inkling of how stuff can go down in fandoms, it was really interesting to get an insight from someone like Deok Mi. It’s like, it comforts her to support someone, it makes her feel good to share Shi An’s talents and beauty with the world and get other people to appreciate him as much as she does. She’s not obsessive as in that she wants him for herself or anything like that, even as a major fan she still is reasonable enough to distinguish between different kinds of fans. The way she talks about him to me seemed like she was just proud of her own son or something, there wasn’t even romantical interest involved. Even though she would completely lose herself when just looking at his pictures, she would always explain it as being content with just watching him from a distance. So when an occasion should arise where she would actually get a chance to meet him in real life, she would completely tense up and not know what to say or do with herself. How do you meet someone in a professional setting without revealing that you actually already know everything about them? As it happens, an occasion DOES arise for Deok Mi to meet with Shi An in real life, and this is all thanks to Ryan Gold.
Deok Mi and Ryan meet for the first time at an auction abroad. Deok Mi has been sent there by her director to collect some paintings for the gallery, and Ryan is there for a more personal interest in one of the auction items. They happen to be sat next to one another and as soon as Ryan catches her eye, Deok Mi is taken by his looks, muttering that he ‘looks just like Shi An’. When Ryan’s interest auction item appears, it just happens to be a painting that Shi An featured in a program that Deok Mi recently watched, making her interested in it as well as she immediately thinks of gifting it to Shi An as a present. However, she loses it to Ryan.
(Fun foreshadowing fact, by the way: the moment Deok Mi sets eyes on Ryan and mutters that he looks just like Shi An, I just had this feeling that there might indeed be a connection between Ryan and Shi An, although I wasn’t quite sure yet what kind of connection. When it turns out that Ryan and Shi An also live in the same building, one floor apart, and Shi An starts familiarizing with Ryan, calling him ‘hyung’ and just being so comfortable around him, I felt more and more that there was something peculiar about it. So yeah, when the whole half-brother plot twist was revealed, I wasn’t actually that surprised.)
Not long after that, they meet again at the airport, where Ryan just happens to be arriving at the same time as Shi An. Deok Mi is there as Shi An is My Life, incognito, and they accidentally bump into each other as a horde of fans storms toward Shi An while Deok Mi is trying to get some good pictures. Neither of them make the connection right away as Deok Mi’s face is hidden behind her mask and she also doesn’t recognize Ryan right away (they met abroad after all, she doesn’t expect to meet him in Korea). After she flees to avoid confrontation, Ryan picks up her Shi An schedule notebook that she leaves behind.
The next time they meet and fully recognize one another again, is when Ryan appears at Cheum Gallery as the new director. This is initially a stab in the back for Deok Mi, as the previous director had hinted that she would be appointed the next director.
While the two of them don’t get along very well in the beginning, they are kind of ‘forced’ to work together when Deok Mi accidentally becomes involved in a scandal involving Shi An. Ryan takes her with him to meet with Shi An – the gallery wants him to participate in a new exhibition, and someone manages to sneak a shot of Deok Mi and Shi An in the same room. In order to protect her, Ryan proposes that they start a ‘fake dating’ rumor between the two of them to get the rumors of her and Shi An out of the way. For him this doesn’t have any heavy intentions yet because at this point he still believes Deok Mi is in a secret relationship with Sun Joo – he’s misinterpreting a couple of occasions where he’s seen them get all excited together without knowing the context of their apparent (friendly) intimacy. Deok Mi initially refuses, but after being seriously harrassed by some Shi An fans, she agrees to do it. The pressure to perform their fake dating becomes even higher when another big Shi An fan suddenly starts working at the gallery as an intern, the former director’s daughter Kim Hyo Jin (played by Kim Bo Ra), nicknamed Sindy. Sindy is a rival figure to Shi An is My Life and Deok Mi recognizes her immediately. In order to convince mostly Sindy that she’s actually dating Ryan, and that the whole deal with Shi An was a misunderstanding, Ryan and Deok Mi really put in a lot of effort to maintain their fake relationship and it works so well that they actually start developing some feelings for each other for real, to the point that they want to stop pretending.
Now here I will stop briefly to make a point about the single moment in this show that REALLY pissed me off. I was enjoying it so much up until episode 6, I was really excited about the growing tensions between the main leads. I’d already been disappointed once by a fake kiss from Ryan’s side – he did it just because he saw Sindy was watching – but I was able to let it slide because it still added to the romantic tension between them. And then the scene came where Ryan visits Deok Mi’s house and she puts a blindfold on him because she doesn’t want him to see her house interior (because, you know, Shi An is everywhere). By this time, her feelings for him have already reached a significant high point and when she accidentally falls on top of him on the couch, she literally narrates that she will follow her true feelings from now on and she kisses him, resulting in a responding kiss and just a very romantic and sexy first makeout scene to end the episode. I was beyond excited that this was already happening so soon in the story (should’ve known better). But honestly. To give us this whole scene including build-up, even play the whole thing AGAIN in the next episode and then just undoing it like that?! They were making out so passionately like that on the couch and then suddenly it was like ‘Ms. Deok Mi?’ and she snapped out of her IMAGINATION. As in, they really gave us crumbs and then took them away from us again and I was SO pissed, lol. I was so pissed that whole episode after that because Deok Mi just wouldn’t be honest about her feelings and didn’t give Ryan any chance to explain that he was only telling her he wanted to stop the fake relationship because he wanted to start a REAL one. When they had their actual real makeout scene, I honestly waited again until they replayed it in the next episode just to make sure they didn’t pull the same trick again, I just wanted to save myself another disappointment, lol. No but seriously, that was uncalled for. It was such a cute moment they had, and I would’ve loved it to be real, that Ryan would’ve just taken off his blindfold and kissed her back without even caring about how her room looked.
For sure, by that time, Ryan had already figured out that Deok Mi was Shi An is My Life, as he had recognized her handwriting from the writing in the notebook he picked up at the airport. He even went so far as to register on her fansite, just to get to know more about her fangirling identity, which I think shows just how interested he was in her. He literally didn’t even mind, he wasn’t freaked out or repulsed by it, he was only fascinated by it. Seeing Deok Mi get all excited about Shi An, seeing her expression when she was all into that just made her that much more attractive to him and honestly – wouldn’t we all want someone to accept us like that? Anyways, so yeah, the only part that frustrated me was around episodes 7-8 when there was suddenly so much unnecessary confusion about their feelings when Ryan started saying he wanted to end their fake relationship. He really needed to spell it out to her what he meant by it. I liked that while Deok Mi wasn’t sure about his real feelings for her, Ryan seemed to be convinced that it was mutual between them, he just knew and that’s why he was able to keep calm about it, I think. He knew he just had to explain it to her and all would be well. Admittedly, their REAL first makeout scene at that carpentry shop was satisfying as hell, so it made up for the disappointment of the first one being fake. Still pissed about it, though. xD
So yeah, once they become an official couple, it really only seems to be going upwards for them. They never argue, they support each other through everything and they manage to still keep everything professional at work.
As a team, Cheum Gallery starts preparing for a special new exhibition that features some works collected by several artists, not just painters but also writers, dancers, etc. With the paintings he’s been featuring in his program, Shi An also becomes someone the gallery would like to enter in this exhibition. Shi An initially doesn’t seem too interested, but then he agrees on the condition that he wants to exhibit all nine of artist Lee Sol’s paintings. This poses a challenge since most of these paintings have been lost and there’s too little personal information on the artist herself to find them all with ease. Both Shi An and Ryan seem to have a connection with these paintings, and the auction item from when Deok Mi and Ryan first met was also one of these paintings.
What characterizes these paintings is that they display soap bubbles in different color shades and sizes, and in some of the bubbles there’s an additional imagery displayed. While continually looking for additional Lee Sol paintings to pop up, Deok Mi and Ryan’s relationship deepens as the secrets between them decrease and Ryan starts opening up to Deok Mi more and more.
Then there’s the issue of Eun Gi. As I mentioned before. Eun Gi was raised as Deok Mi’s twin brother by her parents. By now he’s already been reunited with his real mom and they get along quite well, but for some unexplained reasons his mom wasn’t immediately able to take care of him as soon as he was born. Deok Mi’s mother is a mother figure by nature, she likes being called ‘mother’ and she likes taking care of youngsters when they need a place to stay for a while. So as a friend, she naturally agreed to take care of Eun Gi for as long as his mom needed to get back on her feet.
Honestly, I found these circumstances a bit weird. It wasn’t clear to me from the start what exactly was Eun Gi’s position in Deok Mi’s family. In the first few episodes, I actually thought he was her real brother. As I’d just finished a drama in which one of the FL’s love interests was her direct cousin, I literally went ‘oh god, not again’, but then Eun Gi seemed to care for Deok Mi more than just as a brother and I went, ‘Ok wait, what’s going on here?’. He even went around telling people he was her brother, so what was the deal? Anyways, okay, so he isn’t her actual brother. But also the deal with his mom leaving him to be raised by Deok Mi’s family while dealing with some unexplained ‘personal issues’… I don’t know, it seemed a little weird. How everyone just accepted the situation and didn’t make a big deal out of it was also interesting to me. And then after a while Eun Gi’s mom just reappeared and everything was right in the world again even though Eun Gi still kept calling Deok Mi’s parents ‘Mom and Dad’… I would be confused too, is all I’m saying. I’m also wondering why, if he immediately saw Ryan as a threat, he didn’t just explain to him right away that he wasn’t actually Deok Mi’s brother, because that’s how he introduced himself as to Ryan the first time they met.
Either way, Eun Gi runs a taekwondo school for kids. Sun Joo’s kid is also one of his students. I believe he’s had a crush on Deok Mi ever since high school, and it just grew and grew but he never got to tell her in a serious context what his true feelings towards her were. I think he also had a harder time because deep down he knew that Deok Mi didn’t see him the same way and he may have been worried how their relationship would change after he told her. As a matter of fact, at some point literally everyone except Deok Mi knows how Eun Gi feels about her, but she won’t accept it as the truth until Eun Gi himself confronts her. When that happens, she rejects him as expected, but I was really happy about the way Eun Gi dealt with it. I guess he saw it coming, as by then Deok Mi was already dating Ryan openly as well. But I’m just so glad he didn’t get petty and jealous, instead he realized that he just didn’t want to lose Deok Mi as his sister-like friend whom he grew up with and just decided to get over it and support her so their friendship didn’t have to change. That was really admirable of him.
On Ryan’s side, there’s also the appearance of a potential love rival, at least before Deok Mi and Ryan actually confess their feelings toward each other. Choi Da In (played by Hong Seo Young), an acquaintance of Ryan from New York, is a designer/visual artist he’s worked with before, who’s now in a bit of a slump. She’s been romantically interested in Ryan for a while and doesn’t hide it either, even though Ryan has rejected her approaches continuously. She also comes back to Korea, both to get out of her slump and to get to work more with Ryan again. Even though she makes it clear from the start to Deok Mi that she’s interested in Ryan, she also doesn’t get petty and jealous when the two leads get together. She doesn’t actively stand in their way, and she’s pretty chill about it altogether, which I also appreciated. She gets to bond with Eun Gi over their mutual one-sided romantic feelings, and they become drinking buddies. She ends up becoming the new visual director for Shi An’s new MV as well as for his contribution to the exhibition, and manages to get out of her slump. At the end of the series she decides to move back to the US.
In the meantime, we also get a storyline about Sun Joo and how she deals with a major event in her personal life as well. Sun Joo owns a café and this café is also a recurring place where many of the characters meet. Deok Mi always comes by the café before she goes to work, and she visits Sun Joo there all the time. Sun Joo is married to Kang Seung Min (Im Ji Gyu) and they have a kid together named Geon Woo (Jung Shi Yool – THE CUTEST THING). Unlike Ryan’s acceptance of Deok Mi’s fangirl identity, Seung Min has always felt a little bit uncomfortable by Sun Joo’s fangirling tendencies, but as he knows how much it means to her, he never stopped her from doing anything. Although she feels like marrying and having a kid (actually she married Seung Min because she got pregnant first) has limited her possibilities in fangirling, Sun Joo still grabs whatever opportunity she has to join Deok Mi in her fangirling. As she has some money (her father is also the landlord of the café she runs and Seung Min is a TV show producer), Sun Joo is even sometimes able to indulge into the fandom with Deok Mi even more, for example when she suggests renting a specific hotel suite that Shi An once stayed in to embark on a ‘fan pilgrimmage’, as they call it.
Seung Min is struggling at work since he wants to change from detective stories to variety shows, but in order to do that he’s forced to participate in a documentary that kind of puts idol fandoms in a bad light. Knowing fully well how much his wife will hate him for doing it, he still ends up working on it, and this really breaks something in their relationship. More than him contributing to something that criticizes something she’s so passionate about, Sun Joo feels really betrayed by the fact that he uses their marriage and their child as a defense to her anger towards him, which, I mean, fair enough.
They do manage to make up eventually, though, after Seung Min makes clear how much he loves her. While Seung Min is in the background, Sun Joo finds out that her café part-timer Joo Hyuk (Yoo Yong Min) is actually a really talented singer of a band, and he becomes kind of a new fixation for her. She starts supporting him and his band, starts playing his music in her café and even starts up a fansite for him. Seung Min ultimately wins back Sun Joo’s affection when he reaches out to Joo Hyuk and proposes to introduce him to a friend of his who is a music producer who can help him with making his first album. In the context of still supporting Sun Joo in her fangirling, he keeps making clear that he loves her nonetheless, and Sun Joo can’t help but fall for him again.
Moving back to Cheum Gallery, I’ve mentioned Sindy before, or Kim Hyo Jin. She initially starts working as an intern at Cheum because she’s the person who snapped that shot of Deok Mi with Shi An, creating the scandal, and she wants to figure out by herself what the nature of the situation is. She is really suspicious of Deok Mi and Ryan’s relationship at first. I first thought she was a pretty careless lady, also taking the intern job while not seeming very interested in the job itself, as she had ulterior motives. She really just got in because her mom was the former director. While she may initially have been introduced as a rival-figure to Deok Mi, I did like how she matured and how she did get to become more interested in her work at the gallery as well. She got to design the merchandise for the exhibition and to see Shi An in real life was of course the biggest reward for her. I guess she may have been a little more of an ‘intrusive’ fan than Deok Mi, as Deok Mi was never interested in digging up or creating scandals, but Sindy was always rivalling against Shi An is My Life for being the biggest Shi An fan, I guess.
As for her relationship with her mother, Hyo Jin also had some stuff to work through. The former director of the Cheum gallery – let me introduce her officially now, is Eom So Hye (Kim Sun Young). She’s the wife of a politician (or something?) who basically just got this art gallery to take care of to have something to do in her free time. Even though she never really extends a finger to actually make things happen – as I mentioned before Deok Mi was doing all the work – she unfortunately still got all the credit for successful events. When her husband gets locked up in jail for using the gallery as a slush fund, Eom So Hye is forced to resign from the director’s position and while she enjoys bullying Deok Mi by suddenly appointing Ryan Gold instead of her as she’d indicated, she doesn’t like how Ryan Gold dismisses her decisions from the side. I guess she’d hoped he’d still listen to her, but once he takes charge he just gives her the ‘you’re not the director anymore, stay out of it’ attitude, and she doesn’t like that. One more thing she doesn’t like is idols – all the more because her daughter Hyo Jin is so obsessed with them. In fact, Deok Mi managed to get her job in the first place because the other candidate is brutally rejected after expressing to have some interest in idols, and Deok Mi therefore really has to keep her secret life a secret from work.
Anyways, there is some tension between Hyo Jin and her mother when Eom So Hye realizes Hyo Jin has still been continuing her idol fangirling activities rather than taking her work at the gallery seriously, Hyo Jin has her mom’s card taken away from her and is told to survive on her own for a while. Hyo Jin ends up at Deok Mi’s parents’ house (I don’t fully remember how but I recall she visited there before and Deok Mi’s mom told her she was always welcome to visit again). Deok Mi’s mom takes her in without too much questioning after understanding that she just needs to have a break from her mom. Despite her eccentricity, Eom So Hye does realize her true feelings of attachment toward her daughter and after a confrontation with Deok Mi’s parents, Hyo Jin is able to go home and make up with her mom. In the final episode, the husband is also released from prison and all’s well with Eom So Hye, as well. She even becomes kind of a Shi An fangirl herself after seeing him at the exhibition and being taken by how handsome he is.
I want to give a brief shoutout to Deok Mi’s team at the gallery before moving onto the more serious themes/storylines of this show. Yoo Kyung Ah (Seo Ye Hwa) and Kim Yoo Seob (Jung Won Chang) are Deok Mi’s colleagues who also go through the whole ordeal with Eom So Hye and Ryan Gold being appointed as the new director and all. It’s clear from the start that these two have the hots for each other, but they only admit they are officially dating at the end of the series. Anyways, even though they are just side characters, and despite Kyung Ah’s initial attachments to Eom So Hye even after she’s not the director anymore, these two have always been loyal to Deok Mi and they have always been supportive of her relationship with Ryan as well. They never bore any ill intentions toward Deok Mi, just appreciation, especially when Eom So Hye would get all the credit for their hard work. It was nice having them as a kind of loyal team that Deok Mi could always fall back on at work. I liked them.
Okay, so now I have summarized most of the characters and storylines that happen throughout the series while Deok Mi and Ryan get together, and now it’s time to move onto the main storyline which carries the ‘heaviest’ aspect of this drama – Ryan’s childhood.
As established in the beginning of this review, we don’t really know much about Ryan when he is first introduced. What his background is, how he got adopted in the US, why he can’t paint anymore, there are a lot of question marks there. Even though he seems to be a pretty easygoing person once he and Deok Mi get together, he starts showing his vulnerable sides to Deok Mi more and more and we learn through his recurring nightmares that he went through something harsh as a kid.
In his memory, he was abandoned by his mom when he was seven years old. She left him alone and that’s how he ended up at an orphanage through which he was adopted by a couple living in the US. He’s always had these recurring dreams of the moment his mom abandoned him, and this is why holding people’s hands has become a sensitive thing to him. Or rather, letting go of people’s hands. He dislikes holding people’s hands because he loathes the moment of letting go – it reminds him of being abandoned by his mom. While being confronted with Lee Sol’s soap bubble painting series on the one hand mentally disables him to paint, they also seem to unlock some new suppressed memories in him, as he suddenly remembers being in the same room as the person painting these pictures. Connecting the dots, he starts believing that artist Lee Sol might be his mother. So his memories are basically of his mother neglecting him over her paintings and abandoning him, not a very positive remembrance altogether, I’d say.
At first, it seems like a coincidence that he is brought into contact with Shi An, that they live in the same building and that there’s a kind of familiarity between them. Shi An somehow feels like he wants to become closer with him, he calls him ‘hyung’ and Ryan just feels like an older brother to him. One time, Shi An’s mother (played by Lee Il Hwa) comes to visit him and it’s revealed that she is actually artist Lee Sol and that Shi An has known this all along. He even tells his mom upfront that he’s been collecting her paintings for her and that he wants to honor her paintings at this exhibition, also to give her back the name ‘Lee Sol’, as a tribute to her as an artist. She expresses her discomfort with these paintings being displayed, and it’s clear that she has some very sorrowful associations with them.
As her visiting and the revelation that she’s Shi An’s mother happens around the same time Ryan starts believing Lee Sol is his mother, it’s not hard to connect the dots that she must also be Ryan’s mother and that he and Shi An are actually half brothers. Still, we need to fill in the story of the past. When Ryan confronts her with the news that he is her son, it takes some time before they can actually sit down and talk together. But when they do, the truth is revealed and it is NOT what we have been led to think.
All in all, Ryan’s original Korean name is Heo Yoon Je. He lived with his mom (I’ll just call her Lee Sol even though it’s not her real name) and they were actually really happy together. She based her soap bubble paintings on the image of Yoon Je blowing bubbles and added several of his favorite childhood memories (amusement park attractions etc.) as easter eggs within the bubbles. One time, she was going to meet with someone who might help her promote her paintings, and she just told Yoon Je to wait for her at the playground until she got back. Unfortunately, she got into a car accident on the way back and her injuries were so severe that she wasn’t immediately able to communicate to anybody that her child was still waiting for her at the playground. So by the time she was able to do so, Yoon Je had already disappeared from the place where he’d been waiting. She looked for him for a long time, but by then he’d probably already been taken to an orphanage and gotten adopted and shipped off to the US. It’s an incredibly sad thing that happened.
Either way, both Ryan and his mom get their closure as they don’t blame each other for anything that happened, and they manage to make amends. Lee Sol agrees to the exhibition once all the paintings are found and the whole imagery of all the paintings combined show the beautiful full image of her son blowing all those bubbles. I personally like the paintings so much, I’ll just share a picture here.
But then, there’s another part of the story, the part of how Yoon Je ended up at the orphanage. And here, surprisingly (or not), Deok Mi’s family turns out to be involved. Incidentally, Deok Mi and Eun Gi were playing at the playground where Yoon Je was waiting for his mother, and the three started playing together as they were all the same age. When Yoon Je walked along with the other two to their home, Deok Mi’s mother decided to take him in for dinner as she would go to the playground to check if his mother would come back. When she didn’t, Deok Mi’s mom kind of naturally took Yoon Je in, as she did with Eun Gi. However, at some point, something major happened and it became financially tight for the family. Deok Mi’s mother became desperate and in a fragile state of mind, she took Yoon Je to the orphanage as she couldn’t take care of him anymore and his mother never showed up. By the time she changed her mind and went back for him, he’d already been adopted and sent to the US. Deok Mi’s mom never truly let go of this event, and felt sorry for that little boy all these years.
It isn’t until Eun Gi coincidentally hears mention of Ryan’s Korean name Yoon Je that his memory is triggered and he realizes he must be that boy. He tells Deok Mi’s mother as well, as the whole family somehow has accepted that Deok Mi is the only one who doesn’t have any memories from that time. It’s a shock at first, to find out the guy their daughter is dating is actually the same boy they left at the orphanage all those years ago and who they never thought they’d see again. Deok Mi’s mom is very apologetic toward Ryan, but luckily he’s grown into a very mature adult and tells her it’s all in the past. He thanks her for taking him in for as long as she did and tells her he bears no grudges towards her decision from that time whatsoever. This was one of those cases that I mentioned in the beginning, where I was glad they didn’t make the past events heavier than they should be. If Ryan had still born a grudge and it would’ve created tension between him and Deok Mi’s family, it would’ve been even more painful, but now he was literally like, ‘As a 7-year old child I would never have understood, but thinking back on it now as an adult, I can clearly see why you did what you did’ and I was like… Wow. Thank the lord for Ryan Gold’s maturity. I was a bit worried about Deok Mi’s response though, because she reacted in a much more dramatic way than Ryan himself did. I kind of feared that, even though she herself wasn’t even remotely aware of what went down as a kid, she would still blame herself or her mother for the whole thing.
And now to my final piece of criticim on this show: Deok Soo. When the whole issue of Deok Mi’s family’s involvement in Ryan’s past is explained, in the second-to-last episode the writers of this series found it necessary to create one additional plot tool to explain A. why Deok Mi doesn’t have any memories from that time and B. to create an additional reason for Deok Mi’s mom to be desperate enough to take Yoon Je to the orphanage. This plot tool goes by the name of Deok Soo, Deok Mi’s younger brother. He was also there at the time of Yoon Je’s arrival and temporary stay with Deok Mi’s family, but he is never mentioned before. Deok Mi’s parents and Eun Gi are the only ones who seem to remember him. Deok Mi and Deok Soo got into a car accident together one day and Deok Soo didn’t survive it. Deok Mi consequently forgot everything about her younger brother, as a coping mechanism or suppressive reaction, I suppose. Anyways, after this happened, Deok Mi’s parents were of course completely derailed for a while. Deok Mi’s father started obsessively collecting stones and secluded himself from the rest of the family, and Deok Mi’s mother couldn’t deal with the consequences of losing her youngest child, probably in combination with still having these other children in the house, and this probably also dealt the family with a hard financial blow, so she must have felt like she had no other choice but to take Yoon Je away. By the time things had settled down and she realized she made a mistake, Yoon Je had already been adopted.
It may have already been obvious from the way I introduced this segment, but honestly, I found it kind of unnecessary to suddenly introduce this plot tool of a forgotten younger brother in the second-to-last episode. Most of all because Deok Mi was just trying to process that her family had been involved in Ryan’s past, and now she also suddenly had to face this other painful truth. It was like, ‘Hi, sorry, I know you’re grieving and processing right now, but there’s actually one more thing: you used to have a little brother and he died and you forgot all about him. Just so you know.’ That’s what it came across as to me. For me, they didn’t have to add this reason to justify the fact that Deok Mi didn’t have all of her childhood memories (I mean, who does?), or that the mom needed an extra reason to be distraught enough to push Yoon Je away. Financial issues would’ve sufficed for me as a good enough reason, she was already raising two additional children that weren’t hers, after all. The only reason that remained in the end was that the cause of Deok Mi’s father’s obsession with collecting stones – on the day they brought Deok Soo to a temple to be buried, he found a warm stone that reminded him of the warmth of Deok Soo’s hands and ever since then he’d been travelling around looking for more reminders of him – that in itself I found a very heartwarming reasoning. However, in that case, I would’ve liked to have Deok Soo introduced or at least hinted at earlier on the series. Now it just came out of the blue, last minute, and I really found myself thinking, what’s the point in revealing all this extra pain now, especially since Deok Mi was already dealing with enough as it was, without also adding to it the guilt of forgetting about her little brother.
Through all of the above-mentioned happenings and storylines, Deok Mi and Ryan remain as close as ever, nothing seems to be able to break them apart. On the contrary, it’s like neither can do anything to upset the other. At some points I felt a bit anxious when Deok Mi would try to help Ryan get out of something, thinking that it might be too much too soon, but in the end it may have been exactly the kind of push Ryan needed. For example, when she starts trying to get him to draw again. As we’ve seen in the beginning, his mental block is so large that he can barely pick up a brush, let alone put a stroke on the canvas, but Deok Mi starts by helping him draw a contour of their hands during a volunteering day at an orphanage. After that, she asks him to paint a portrait of her, even if it’s just drawing a line to contour her profile’s shadow on the canvas. I kept feeling like she was treading on thin ice, as personally I didn’t feel like he’d be up to it yet, but in the end she really did get him to paint again. Of course it must’ve also helped that his trauma involving his mom’s memory was resolved, and Deok Mi also comments at seeing his new portraits that they’ve become much ‘warmer’ than before.
I just really loved this couple. Not only was their intimate chemistry AMAZING, they just seemed so at ease with each other, and I also really loved the simple scenes in which they just held hands and hugged. The whole ‘holding hands’ story was really sweet, all the more when Deok Mi told him that if he ever needed it, he could always hold her hand because she would never let go. I loved how they came clean about all their secrets, that Ryan also confessed that he had ‘infiltrated’ Deok Mi’s fansite and that he’d already known she was Shi An is My Life for a while. Speaking of secrets, the only thing I would’ve liked to see was Deok Mi confessing to Shi An that she was Shi An is My Life, because Shi An was definitely very fond of this fan, he always checked what she posted on her fansite and was seemingly worried when he saw she put her site on hiatus – this is when Deok Mi decides to go to the US with Ryan. I would’ve liked to see his reaction, especially because I think he might already have figured something out – he did believe Deok Mi to be a fan at some point, after all.
It did occur to me that throughout the series, Deok Mi became more and more at ease around Shi An. Like, at the end of the show she was definitely not on the same level anymore as she was when Ryan took her to meet Shi An the very first time and all she could do was just stare at him, smiling creepily. Towards the end, probably also because she found love in her personal life and a lot of things happened in the meantime, it seemed like she didn’t go out anonymously to take pictures as much anymore. She was able to calm down and become more put-together when facing Shi An in professional settings, so I guess there was a bit of character development for her as well, even though she remained pretty consistent throughout the series, all in all.
I think by now I’ve mentioned all that I wanted to say about the series story-wise, so I’m going on to the cast comments now. Overall, I really liked the casting, they all did a really great job in portraying all these cool and interesting characters.
As soon as I saw Park Min Young on the poster, I knew that chemistry-wise, this would be a worthwhile drama to watch. She always delivers on the romance part and I just generally like her as an actress. So far I’ve seen her in Sungkyunkwan Scandal, Healer, What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim? and the variety show Busted!. I couldn’t help but admire once more how freaking stylish she looks, her fashion style did kind of remind me of Secretary Kim in a way, but it was nice to see her in a different kind of character, one that had more leadership within her own career, rather than a secretary. Overall, I really enjoyed her performance, she always manages to make her characters so likeable and uncomplicated, even after some suppressed memories resurface. I will keep watching her dramas because I always like seeing her in these kinds of genres. I really liked to see a more goofy side to her in the beginning, because she always seems so graceful, and now she really was that squealing fangirl – it was a side I hadn’t seen of her before, so that was neat.
My oh my, how FINE is Kim Jae Wook, SERIOUSLY. I haven’t even seen that much of him in dramas, I just remember being in love with him in Coffee Prince, and since then I’ve only seen him in Mary Stayed Out All Night (also ages ago) and Temperature of Love, in which his characters wasn’t particularly sympathetic. I’m also really curious to see him in Crazy Love alongside Crystal Jung! Anyways, I liked him so much in this drama. It was nice to see him as a likeable character again, haha. But he was so great in expressing his emotions towards the FL, he showed a variety of emotions that I hadn’t seen from him before, he’s usually pretty stoic in my experience, but here he really went all the way in being that passionate ML and I loved it.
The only thing I’ve seen of Ahn Bo Hyun so far is Itaewon Class (oh, and Descendants of the Sun, apparently), but there he was such a jerk that I kind of had to get used to him being a likeable character here. At first I was a bit anxious that he would get a little petty in his rivalry with the ML over the FL, but I’m really glad they kept his character to be the true friend to the FL that he always was. I also liked that he came to the conclusion by himself that he didn’t want to ruin their friendship and got over his feelings all by himself, moving on without getting involved any further. I thought it was sweet that at the end, it was hinted that he got something going on with Hyo Jin, I would like to see where that was going, haha. Overall, I think that in a sympathetic character role, he’s just really sweet. You could also see how well he was doing for himself in the final episode, and I was genuinely happy for him. By the way, I recently saw that he’s now filming for a drama adaptation of See You in My 19th Life together with Shin Hye Sun! I JUST finished the webtoon, so I’m really curious as to what part he’s going to play and how that will be. Looking forward to seeing more of his acting!
I don’t really remember where I recognized Deok Mi’s father from, but he did look familiar to me. After looking it up, it seems that I know him from Rooftop Prince and Hyde, Jekyll, Me. Anyways, I liked that, even though the stone collection aspect seemed so random in the beginning, they ended up explaining it as such a beautiful way to remember his youngest child. I still would’ve liked to see more of Deok Mi’s parents’ relationship or how it used to be, because now it just seemed like he could never so anything right to his wife anymore, so that was a bit sad for him. He deserved a bit more recognition, in my opinion.
As always, all my love for Kim Mi Kyung. Actually, she has played Park Min Young’s mother before in Sungkyunkwan Scandal, I was wondering why the combination of these two women looked so familiar, haha. Other than that, I’ve seen her in a bunch of stuff, like Secret Garden, Baby-faced Beauty, I Miss You, I Hear Your Voice, The Master’s Sun, The Heirs, Healer, Another Oh Hae Young, The Sound of Your Heart, Sensitive Boss, 20th Century Boy and Girl, Go Back Couple, It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, and still a lot more of here dramas are on my to watch list. This woman will always have my heart, she’s just such a natural mother figure. I just want to give her a big hug.
Park Jin Joo, honestly what is left to say. She’s an icon. She’s literally in everything, but she has yet to land a main role and I really hope she gets one someday, even though she always aces the side character/best friend roles. She’s also an AMAZING singer, so I think it would be so cool if she could show her skills off in a drama one day, as well. Anyways, I know her from countless appearances in dramas, such as The Girl Who Sees Smells, Jealousy Incarnate, Reunited Worlds, While You Were Sleeping, Encounter, It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, Lovestruck in the City, Our Beloved Summer, and cameos in Legend of the Blue Sea, Hotel Del Luna and Backstreet Rookie. I really liked her as Sun Joo, especially since it wasn’t just a comical role, but she also really got a serious family situation to deal with and I liked to see her (I believe for the first time) as a mother, as well. She was so cute with her little son and her husband, she once again managed to show a new side to her, and I think that’s a gift she has.
Kim Sun Young, another icon and one of my favorite actresses. The thing with her is, I find her AMAZING in serious roles, or when she gets the chance to do a serious scene, but I tend to get a little annoyed with her performance when she’s cast as a comical role, because it seems like she sometimes puts in too much effort to be funny, even though she is already funny enough without making the extra effort. This role of Eom So Hye was such a character. As if her appearance wasn’t already extravagant enough, she will just go the extra mile to make the character not just funny, but kind of obnoxious, haha. I don’t want to sound too negative because I still really like her as an actress, but sometimes I feel it’s a shame when she’s cast as just funny roles, because her serious acting always gives me goosebumps. Actually, the drama I’m watching after this is a more serious drama and she’s also in it, so I’m really curious to her performance there. I’ve seen her so far in Shopping King Louie, Legend of the Blue Sea, Lookout, Because This is My First Life, Romance is a Bonus Book, Crash Landing on You and Backstreet Rookie. Can’t wait for my next drama!
I was wondering what I recognized Seo Ye Hwa from, but of course she was the best friend in Backstreet Rookie! Her appearance and behavior was so drastically different it took me a while to recognize her, haha. So good job for her on that already! Besides that I haven’t seen anything with her yet, but I liked that, in contrast to her performance in BR, she also pulled off a more ‘normal’ person, haha. I liked that, even though she was just a side character and didn’t have a backstory in particular, she still made the most of her scenes, like I could still see how she had comical talent even though her character wasn’t even specifically meant to be funny. I would like to see more of her acting.
Kim Bo Ra is also a familiar face. According to DramaWiki I’ve only seen her in Who Are You – School 2015 and that she had a cameo in The Master’s Sun, but I know her from somewhere else as well. I remember she was also a guest appearance on an episode of Busted, but I really thought I knew her from more. Anyways, I liked her as Hyo Jin. She was a typical impulsive twentysomething who just did whatever she wanted, and although she may have seemed a little spiteful in the beginning, I didn’t really come to hate her or anything. In a way, she had the same intentions as the FL, she just wanted to watch over her idol, and that was what she was most passionate about. Even after her mom tried to stop her, she couldn’t go against what made her heart throb and that in itself is also a pretty brave thing to do, especially if you’re from a wealthy family and other things are expected of you. All in all, I liked how she wasn’t a stereotypical antagonist or anything like that, she made a turn for the better as well.
Jung Jae Won. At last a drama has presented itself with this guy that did not make me dislike him. Honestly, so far I’ve only seen him in parts where I thought he was a complete brat, both in Room No. 9 and in Arthdal Chronicles where he played the young version of Tagon. I see he hasn’t actually done that many dramas yet, AC being the last one from 2019. Anyways, he was the perfect cast for a K-Pop idol, he has the smile and the looks and everything. I have to admit I was scared that they were actually going to bring him into the love triangle, or at least get him involved even closer in the FL’s personal life, but I’m glad he stayed a bit more on the side, as we also see the FL calm down in her nervousness around him. He still remained a person of her admiration, but from afar, and she was okay not to get any closer than that. I thought it was nice that Shi An just felt like he had to bring his mother and supposed older brother (which he figured out by himself, by the way) together through those paintings. I was kind of worried that he would be kind of a jerk behind the smile as well, but luckily he seemed to remain a nice enough person.
So yeah, I actually didn’t dislike his character here, haha!
Lee Il Hwa is also such a familiar face, I think she also played the mom character in the dramas I’ve seen of her so far. I’ve seen her in Heartstrings, You Who Came From The Stars, Doctor Stranger and She Was Pretty. She has a kind of sophisticated elegance about her, and I thought she was a really good cast for both Ryan and Shi An’s mother.
I know Heo Seo Young from The Liar and His Lover and more recently I’ve seen her in My Absolute Boyfriend, where she was a psychopath, so it was nice to see her in a more sympathetic role this time. I actually thought Da In was pretty cool, she didn’t come across as a very hostile love rival or anything like that, she really played it cool and kept calm and all that. I liked how down to earth she was. She didn’t even get to do that much, but I still liked that they wrote her character the way they did and gave her a personal kind of closure in which she got out of her slump. I would’ve also found it interesting if she and Eun Gi became a thing, but I also like that they just remained friends.
I recently saw Im Ji Gyu in Fates and Furies where he was one of the few characters I actually liked, haha. He has a really friendly face. It was nice to see him as a father figure and in combination with Park Jin Joo, he made a really sweet husband. Apart from this, I’ve seen him (apparently) in God’s Gift – 14 Days, Fantastic, Go Back Couple and Radio Romance, and he’s also in a couple of other dramas that are still on my to watch list. I would like to see more of his acting, I’m starting to like him.
Before I conclude, I just want to make one final criticizing comment to a couple of comments I read on one of the first few episodes of this series that just baffled me. So, as I mentioned in my review somewhere, in the beginning Ryan believes that Deok Mi and Sun Joo are in a secret relationship together. This misunderstanding starts with him booking the suite that the two fangirls plan to stay at for their fan pilgrimmage and Sun Joo tries to convince him to give them the suite. In her explanation she mentions that she likes someone and it’s not easy for her to actually see that person and that’s why she wants to stay in this suite because that person has stayed there before. Of course, we know she’s talking about Shi An. However, after rejecting her, Ryan sees her later that evening at the bar with another woman (this is Deok Mi, but he only sees her from behind so he doesn’t recognize her). The two women are just watching a performance video of Shi An, but from the back it looks like they are hugging each other, so when he suddenly interprets Sun Joo’s earlier words to apply to this woman, he suddenly feels like a complete jerk and he actually gives them the suite. Later on, there are a couple of more situations in which he sees them being all touchy-feely with each other and draws his conclusions. I have to say that it was kind of funny how, when Sun Joo offered to take pictures of him and Deok Mi being all lovey-dovey to strenghten their fake dating rumor, he was all like ‘how can she be okay with her own girlfriend doing this’ and Deok Mi even fed his imagination by saying things like ‘oh yeah, she gets crazy about seeing me be intimate with other people’. Like, okay, the misunderstanding was kind of funny. Anyways, I just wanted to make the point of Ryan being completely okay about these two women being together, and that he was more than happy to help them get together. Somewhere in the first few episodes, Deok Mi and Ryan visit a writer who they wanted to participate in the exhibition as well, but who was hesitant about sharing the pictures his dear friend had left behind. In the end it was suggested, not even explicitly mentioned but heavily suggested, that these two men were more than friends.
Now I personally always really appreciate seeing the theme of homosexuality being normalized in K-Drama, because I feel like it’s still not accepted as a normal thing overall in South Korean society. There could always still be more, of course, but it’s a good start to at least start mentioning the theme. However, to get to my point, I read a couple of disgusting and ridiculous comments on one of these episodes and it just made me wonder. Basically, some people were commenting on how they didn’t like these homosexual connotations to be apparent because what they liked about K-Drama was that it’s different from American shows. It’s not explicit, it’s not about sex, it’s about pure man-woman romance. And they just went on saying stuff like, ‘why are they suddenly bringing all these homosexual themes into this drama, why does it suddenly have to become all sexually driven, this is not what I’m here for’ etc. And my mind was just blown. Like, what the heck are these people even talking about?! Just because there’s a HINT of a homosexual couple in it makes it ‘sexually driven’?! Bro, the word ‘gay’ wasn’t even mentioned, it was purely SUGGESTED. And if you are so against ‘sexually driven’ dramas, wouldn’t you have a bigger issue with the chemistry of the main leads? Because that relationship was definitely the most passionate of the whole series. So if you are okay with that but call a single HINT of a homosexual relationship ‘vulgar and sexually-driven’, then the issue lies with you. It saddens me that there are people out there with this kind of mindset. I watch K-Drama purely because it gives me joy and I could care less if the main leads are male or female as long as the romance makes my heart throb. My apologies for the sudden criticism, but I just wanted to get it off my chest. I hope we can all remain civil and kind about this sort of thing.
Okay, so! We’re finally at the end of this review. It took me a while to structure the whole thing, but I think I managed to get it down the way I wanted. This has actually been a really nice throwback to the kind of genre of K-Drama I originally fell in love with. The romance was great, the characters were funny, the story itself was solid, the drama didn’t get too DRAMA-ish, and it showed some very healthy human relationships. I was looking forward to watching this, and I was not disappointed. I really loved Park Min Young and Kim Jae Wook’s chemistry, I’ll keep repeating that, haha. It wasn’t a combination that I’d expected per se, but they really did a good job. So yeah, if anyone would ask about a good romance drama, I would definitely consider recommending this one. Also because it wasn’t so heavy and the few heavy themes are all smoothened out in the end quite quickly.
I also liked that it highlighted K-Pop fans and that it didn’t necessarily put them in a bad light. On the contrary, I could relate to the FL’s feelings towards her idol. Maybe it’s because I know a little bit about the scene, but I know that, while fandoms overall might have a bit of a negative association, not all fans are like that. There are also fans that are purely encouraging towards their idols, that support them through everything and that also aren’t obsessed with actually meeting them and wanting them for themselves. As the word ‘sasaeng’ was in the title, I was scared that a sasaeng would also appear, but in the end, no one was so intrusive as to actually form a danger towards any of the idols depicted, so that was good. I hope we can all learn from dramas what we can and not just choose to be biased about these fangirls. We all have to do something that makes our heart throb to get through our daily lives, don’t we? Why should this be any different? I really liked the message that even though you might have a hobby like this, that could be seen as embarrassing, especially when you have a professional career, it’s always good to stay true to yourself, because people will see you in your element and admire how much you radiate when you do what you love to do the most. I think that’s probably one of the messages I got from this, to never be ashamed of your personal passions because people will come to accept you for who you are once you are brave enough to stand up for it.
So I’ll now be moving onto a series from this year that piqued my interest and while it’s not my usual kind of genre, I’m very curious as to what it’ll be like. I’ll be back with another review next month. Until then, bye-bee! ^^
