Sassy Girls

Anyways, that's why no updates this week... I was borrowing Alice's laptop for e-mail and stuff, but actually a lot of stuff automatically comes up Chinese and I couldn't figure out how to change it (and also figured it would be more polite not to). And also I didn't want to always be on her computer, so my lessons this week were really boring (but I only had to teach twice!)

So after being so pissed off last weekend, I just wanted to sleep in. But Monday was my introduction to... dun dun dun... the kindergarten! Yes, I will most likely be starting at a kindergarten soon. I promise you, only about 5 of those students will hear a single word I say (I counted) but they're cute? I was also informed sorta last minuted that I'd have to teach a short lesson, which annoyed me because I had sort of expressed an interest in not having classes sprung on me last-minute anymore. Sort of explicitly, actually. But I see that this time it really couldn't have been helped because they needed to see how I'd behave in front of so many kindergarteners. They had a book they were using though, so I just did some reviewing out of it. The teacher there said I did well, but I dunno if she saw what I saw... a lot of ADD in that room. There was just one loud little boy who shouted the answers to my questions in repeat mode until I gave the answer so it *seemed* like more kids were paying attention. But anyway. That was really early Monday morning.

Then Tuesday morning they cancelled my class at the high school because the students in my class were taking part in some other activity. Russ's class was still on, but I got the afternoon off which was totally awesome.

So what have I been doing with my free time?

If you've been spending [too] much time on facebook the past few days, it's possible you'd have noticed that I've developed a serious affinity for Korean melodrama. My mom spent half of last year trying to get me to watch some Korean show that she and my aunt were really into, but I was mostly uninterested in even approaching that. First of all, do I even speak Korean? No. Korean is perhaps the EA language that mystifies me the most. The words look like really hard math and even after watching My Sassy Girl (widely beloved Korean romantic comedy) to the degree that I have, I'm still unable to even repeat the names of the main characters.

But the Korean TV, it's really popular here. Why is that? Because they know drama. They know comedy. Also it's generally accepted that Korean people are very nice to look at. No joke. A question we posed in classes early on was, "If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?" Some folks said things like Germany for the economy, Switzerland for the watches, and so on, but there were also some women who were all about Korea for the good food and beautiful people. And it's not like I disagree. So there's one very important point about Korean TV-- the casting directors know what they're doing.

One day at dinner, Connie told us that she'd been losing sleep recently (this was a while ago when I was still teaching at the hospital). When I asked why, she admitted that she'd been staying up late watching Korean drama on TV. So yeah. And now I totally understand that.

Alice is a huge fan of Korean drama. When we were in Hohhot together, she bought a few series on DVD, one being Palace, of which I'd seen the first episode at home. I tried watching it with my mom because I was in the market for some fruity cutesy Asian love show, and I really think it would have fit the bill if I could have understood any of it. We tried it in every combination of Korean language, Chinese dubbing, Chinese subtitle, and English subtitle, and I just barely figured out what was going on. So I started it with Alice again, but left after a while to fall asleep and she ended up finishing the rest of it that week. I can't wait to get home though, I'll probably give it another try, even though she said it went very slowly.

She then started another show... and when she described the premise to me I was like... "what the?" So there's this girl at beauty school who lives with her grandmother and aunt. Turns out her mother married her father against the grandmother's wishes, and when he died, the mother had to leave. But the grandmother had been more or less caring. The girl had been flirting with this guy when "whoa" it turns out she's pregnant with his kid! I only got this far, but Alice told me the rest. He dies almost immediately after they get married, and she gives birth to what appears to be a 4 yr. old. And then the rest of the show... I dunno, she has to get along with the family in law, donate some organs to her birth mother, and fall in love all over again. Wasn't a fan, but Alice likes it.

So by the time this weekend came around, I was only paying a marginal amount of attention to the shows Alice was watching. There was one she was watching on TV that was almost over, and though I'd try to figure out what was going on from time to time, I was like "eh."

Then she went to Hohhot again and came back with many more shows, including the one she'd been watching on TV. And I walked in one day about the time the main character, enraged, throws a cake into the face of the guy who'd eventually become her boss and love interest. I was intrigued, and signed on for the majority of it, though ended up not being able to catch the end (fortunately, it's more or less predictable). The show's called My Lovely Samsoon, and I'm totally bringing it home with me in June. It's about a slightly overweight girl with an embarassing name who studied baking in Paris and shows amazing prowess as a pastry chef. She's fairly untalented in most other aspects of life except that she's pretty good-natured and very honest/opinionated. She needs to borrow some money from her young attractive boss for some reason, and as part of the deal has to pretend to be his girlfriend so his mother will stop trying to arrange marriages for him. Meanwhile, he's been pining for 3 years after his ex-girlfriend, who whisked off to America for reasons unknown and left no forwarding address. The ex is a very pretty girl, who, it turns out, had advanced gastric cancer and went to the US for treatment and school. She didn't want to tell the guy... dunno why. In America, she met a really hot Korean American doctor named Henry who also happened to be a very sensitive, mellow type of guy. He fell in love with her, but she was still all about going home hale and healthy to start again with her guy (for whatever reason, she didn't consider him an ex). So Samsoon and the boss are finally having some breakthroughs when the ex re-enters the country. Compounding this, Henry gets a 6 month sabbatical and decides to use it to visit Korea, though he respects that the girl he likes likes someone else. You can imagine what ensues.

This particular set of DVDs was dubbed completely in Chinese except the parts where characters sing or speak English. This is how I know that the guy who plays Henry and the Korean actress who does the ex are pretty good actors in English. Also it's how I know that Chinese dubs will arbitrarily change out voice actors in the middle of a season, and also how much of a shock it is to find out Samsoon's real voice is a few registers lower than the Chinese girl's who dubbed her. This show has an oddly familiar soundtrack. There was one episode in particular that had some good songs in it, but the only moment I really remember from it was when "My Strongest Suit" from Aida, the Broadway musical, signalled the sassy start of the day. At the restaurant. Thereby having nothing to do with clothes, but it fit anyway.

My Lovely Samsoon is very funny and makes you very hungry. Best moments: when the bus driver hits the brakes and Samsoon has to run to the front to avoid falling over and a random techno dance-off sequence between a member of the waitstaff and a sous-chef.

Ok, but that was the preliminaries. The ULTIMATE in Korean drama that I've experience thus far: Sassy Girl, Chun-hyang. I walked in Tuesday night after my training center class and Alice had already started the series. Being too tired to attempt anything else, I sat down on the couch next to her and stared at the screen until I just had to know what was going on. When I saw the main characters' faces, I recognized them from the show they were playing on TV in Alice's dorm. How? The guy struck me as having very big eyes. So yeah, same show.

This show came in the original Korean with simplified Chinese subtitles. So what did I do? I watched it. Whoever said you can't learn a language you don't know through subtitles in another language you can barely read might still be right-- but I still feel pretty empowered for having been able to catch as much as I did. Just wait, by the end of my term here, I'll be a simplified-reading powerhouse who can sound off a number of random words in Korean like "agreed," "cell phone," "thank you," "older sis," and "ice cream." Admission: cell phone and ice cream are borrowings from English, but yo, I picked that out, so I feel cool.

Anyways, I have never in my entire young life expended so much energy in watching any show. The first night, I was in tears for like an hour feeling sorry for this girl. By the end of the next day, I had nothing but sympathy for the guy. It's kind of an emotional spin cycle. Also, it was like sending my brain through the wringer trying to read all the subtitles in time, and I ended up having to ask Alice a lot of time just to make sure I got the gist of statements that were clearly important, or which made her laugh and didn't make me laugh, or which were simply spoken too quickly. Therefore, we also had a lot of dialogue going on, which escalated into yelled commands and remonstrations directed at the characters, predictions, loud declarations of grief or frustration, and so on. It was a highly interactive experience.

Also, our DVD player is on its last legs over here. After about an hour or two of playback it has a seizure. I started the evening watching Pretty Woman, but am writing now because it started skipping and freaking out as Richard Gere takes Julia Roberts to the opera. So I still don't know how the movie ends. So some episodes took an eternity to finish since ever 2-3 seconds of action would be punctuated by about 5 more seconds of torture and cursing.

Bedtime this week was about 2 am.

The plot... uh. Cute flaky boy (Lee Mong-ryong) meets pretty intellectual girl (Chun-hyang) their senior year of high school, and after some bizarre mishap that I missed that resulted in his naked body being discovered in her bedroom one morning, they've been forced into an engagement and are more or less married. She moves in with him and his parents to finish high school. His dad is an awesome sword-swinging police chief and his mom is a kind of annoying lady who lunches. The kids get along really well though, usually, and she helps him raise his grades and then stands up for him when he's accused of cheating. Meanwhile... well, I guess he really doesn't do much for her at this point. Before they marry though, he has a chance to hang out with the girl he actually likes, some older girl he went to high school with before he moved. She told him though that she'd always just think of him as a younger brother, and that's why he consents to the wedding (he and Chun-hyang spent the first few episodes trying to thwart the whole thing but finally give up). The second he marries CH, the girl decides she wants him after all, and then tries to sabotage the relationship, hence, drama. The dumb git then is sort of dating the both of them, and at this stage CH actually falls for him for real but lets him hang out with the other girl because of it. MR has no idea that he's being an insensitive jerk.

While he's off doing whatever, CH meets an entertainment mogul, we'll call him the exec, who is god knows how much older than she is. As a cute, compassionate high schooler, she unwittingly catches his fancy, and he sets about to woo her.

So the show is 17 hours of gut-wrenching melodramatics as wires consistently get crossed and continuously more tangled until, by episode 17, at least 7-8 years later, it's a totally different show. There are a lot of real serious laugh-out loud parts, a few moments where it's truly appropriate to shout "shake her like a baby!" in loving memory of Steph Glass, some excellent achievements in the slow-motion dramatic wrist-grip-to-hug transition tradition, and flattering light treatment. And much more! More? For example, that old trick where the guy enters an up elevator just as the gal exits the down elevator and they actually miss each other? Damn that.

Also they make Lee Mong-Ryung run here and there a whole lot, and he has a really admirable running posture. Also... he's cute like whoa. Meh.

Anyways, we managed to finish the show last night AT LONG LAST (I know, it's been about 3 days), and all of my dreams last night were fixated entirely on it. I think I dreamed up a whole new 17 episodes and dwelled a really long time near the end, obsessed that there had to be a happy ending. I was so disoriented when I woke up I didn't know what to do. Then after a nap later today, I woke up cycling through the soundtrack.

It has to stop.

But what is the thing about the titular "sassy girl?" There are other shows with that term in the title, and of course, the aforementioned movie. Sassiness must be a quality that they value? Anyways, it's clear that we should all aspire to at least some sassiness, because what does sassiness get you?

We should all search for our own rewards.