5 reasons you'll fall in love with "When Life Gives You Tangerines"

What if a love story defied time, survived heartbreak, and felt as fresh as the tangerine season? "When life gives you tangerines" is an emotional K-drama about love, time and memory with a story rich in such emotions, experiences and life lessons that people of different ages, cultures and world views could fall in love with. Let’s explore 5 reasons you’ll fall head over heels for "When life gives you tangerines"!

1.  You’ll witness a life journey, both earthbound and enchanted

 "When Life Gives You Tangerines" follows the tumultuous and complex relationship between Ae-sun and Gwan-sik, two childhood friends who grow up on Jeju Island and slowly fall in love with each other. The story begins in the 1960s and carries to the present day, so that we can see all the stages of their relationship – childlike love, young love and mature love. Ae-sun’s and Gwan-sik’s story is wrapped in a fairy-tale vibe due to the enchanting landscapes evoked by the natural beauties of Jeju island, but the rawness of their hardships, fallen aspirations, unlived dreams and turbulent emotions is so earthbound that fuses with our own reality as if we witness the life journey of our own parents and grandparents. Ae-sun and Gwan-sik teach us that fate and choice can co-exist as two equally logical variables in human life, two variables that complement each other as two fitting pieces of the same puzzle. Each major event has a dose of reality and a dose of fantasy, while the seemingly insignificant events carry their own weight and complete the storyline beautifully.

2.  You’ll empathies with beautifully flawed characters soothed by flickers of hope

Ae-sun and Gwan-sik aren’t the embodiment of the classic perfect characters we generally see in the majority of K-dramas. They reflect the flaws of the ordinary human beings we see around us every day, but instead of breathing the same air as them, we experience them on screen. What’s more, they invite us to understand the ones around us better – their flaws, struggles, and pain. Ae-sun and Gwan-sik teach us how to look around and really see others and the burdens they carry, either in silence or screams. They show us how loss of unspoken things feels like – the unfulfilled dreams we carry in silence, the unspoken words we never had courage to share, the alienation we feel when we are faced with misunderstanding, or the sadness and nostalgia we feel for a life we never managed to live on our own terms. However, the K-drama doesn’t resort to sacrifice and grief only – it also teaches us how to see flickers of hope even in the darkest places, even without a torch in our hand or a guide to show us the way.

3.  You’ll understand better the heavy tapestry of emotions that trauma leaves behind

 "When Life Gives You Tangerines" gracefully balances emotional tenderness and intensity, revealing how healing always carries traces of trauma and how trauma always points to what needs healing. The K-drama can have a profound psychological impact on us as viewers because it addresses things we often hide in our unconscious to protect our minds or souls. Ae-sun and Gwan-sik give names to the most misunderstood human emotions without always naming them directly. Trauma isn’t always addressed directly in our mundane lives, and emotional talk is a difficult conversation to have when life must go on, no matter what our deepest pain is. Even when living a perfectly ordinary life, trauma can follow us like a ghost, and we know that humans aren’t able to see ghosts, aren’t they? Despite this, the ghosts of our past emotions and experiences always follow us in silence and permanently shape who we are, either in the best or the worst possible way, or maybe in both at the same time. The characters we see in "When Life Gives You Tangerines" make us grateful that nowadays we have access to mental health services meant to ease our personal traumas and navigate through our emotions more safely without causing ourselves more damage.

4.  You’ll experience how authentically Korean language, culture and history are brought to life

Set against the windswept beauty of Jeju Island, the actors prepared carefully for their roles by steeping themselves in the distinct dialect and rich historical details relevant to the timeline, carrying the story’s heartbeat from the 1960s to the present day. The K-drama accurately addresses historical details, reflecting South Korea’s modernization from the post-war period until the contemporary times, which builds a feeling of authenticity. One such cultural and historical detail is the portrayal of haenyo (which translates as „sea women”), the female free divers of Jeju Island. These women have harvested seafood for centuries by diving up to 10 metres deep without the aid of a breathing apparatus. The culture of Jeju haenyo dates back to the 17th century when women had to step into the role of the main provider of the family following the absence of men bound to their military duty or fishing expeditions. The matriarchal legacy of Jeju Haenyo has been inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2016. In  "When Life Gives You Tangerines", Ae-sun is the daughter of a haenyo who wished a different life for her daughter because of the dangers of the sea and the physical toll a haenyo’s work has on women’s bodies. The haenyo culture is fascinatingly represented in the K-drama, although it doesn’t represent the main focus of the story.

5.  You’ll immerse yourself in stunning visuals and surreal-like cinematography

The K-drama is a cinematographic poem that stuns the eyes and enchants the heart. The cinematic scenes capture the breathtaking beauty of Jeju Island with its enchanting nature, stormy coastlines, misty mountains, and dreamlike tangerine orchards. The cinematography is a visual poem because each scene feels like a tide of emotions washing the coastline. The script perfectly completes the visual elements, each line being enveloped by deep meaning so that it feels like verses of a poem. The K-drama’s cinematography doesn’t just act like a lifeless stage – it has a life of its own, completing perfectly Ae-sun and Gwan-sik’s story of love, loss, resilience and recovery.

If I told you that  "When Life Gives You Tangerines" will leave you both breathless and blissful, tender-hearted and teary-eyed, would you watch it?