It’s slightly ironic, because usually I have no qualms staying up until obscene hours of the morning reading, having ridiculous conversations, throwing myself down the black hole of the interwebs, or even studying, but I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my precious sleep for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that was the winter solstice lunar eclipse.
Then I stayed up past 3am anyway. But not to see the eclipse, or to do anything that I, or even a more normal person, would ordinarily do at that hour. Nope. I stayed up to hear my mom give me a several-hour-long summary of a TV show.
It all started when her friend lent her a copy of Winter Sonata. My mom doesn’t ordinarily watch TV much at all, but when she does, it’s impossible to tear her away. I would even venture to say that her obsession with Winter Sonata far surpasses my obsession with Glee (or with The OC in my middle- and high-school days).
If you don’t believe me, I’m listening to the TV in the background as I type this because my mom is watching the series from beginning to end for the third (or fourth, because she can’t even remember) time. She listens to the soundtrack when she’s not watching the actual show, so the music has basically become the sonata of my winter break. She looks up info on all the actors and knows the main dude’s life story, precisely how much a coat that appeared on the show sold for at a charity concert, and the exact scenes during which certain actors fell asleep filming. She even watches unsubtitled interview clips in Korean (which she does not understand) just to watch the actors open and close their mouths to the sound of a foreign language.
Crazy.
Some of the craziness has infiltrated my brain as well. Sometimes I find myself humming a song I don’t recognize at first, but then I realize it’s from Winter Sonata. Of course, I had to watch a few episodes to see what the appeal was, and…I didn’t see it. The plot and actors make me laugh, but somehow I don’t think that’s their intent. I mean, it’s supposed to be a romantic drama, not a comedy, but it had me cracking up (or gaping at the TV in disbelief) through all the parts I saw.
The series starts out with the main girl (Yu-jin in Korean, or Wei Zhen in Chinese) sprinting to catch a bus to go to school, getting shoved onto said bus, falling asleep, and missing her stop. She happens to be sitting next to the main guy (Jun Sang), who also misses the stop to get off to go to the same school. It’s Jun Sang’s first day at that school, though, and he is completely awake throughout the whole bus ride and doesn’t react even after Wei Zhen wakes up and tells him that they’ve both missed their stop. Did he just not know which stop to get off at and plan on riding the bus to who-knows-where for the hell of it?
“WHY would he/she do that? Do real people do that?” was my reaction to so many of the scenes, especially after my mom told me about all the ridiculousness as I was getting ready to go to sleep. Possible spoiler: Someone in the series gets run over by a car and loses his memory, but gets another person’s life and memory transplanted into his brain. He later gets run over again. And that’s not all. The lines spoken between Wei Zhen and Yu-jin are SO cheesy that they take all the cheese out of “If I’m a bird, you’re a bird.” In fact, Winter Sonata makes The Notebook look like real life.
Oh, also, the leading man looks like a woman. There’s nothing wrong with that. I just find it amusing.
Ah, I love my mom, and all the weird things she’s a fan of provide me endless entertainment. That night, it was like I was six again and being told the most bizarre bedtime story of all time. I mean, imagine replacing Goodnight Moon with a story about (highlight for actual spoilers this time) a guy who goes to a town in Korea to look for his father, but ends up falling in love with a girl, and then thinks that the girl’s father is his father and that he’s in an incestuous relationship, and then gets hit by a car and loses his memory and gets a memory transplant and falls in love with the girl all over again after a decade, and then gets hit by a car again, and then moves to the U.S. somewhere in there (a lot of Korean dramas seem to have this theme…) but returns to Korea, and then goes blind but lives with the girl happily ever after despite the girl’s best guy friend who stood in his way (holy run-on sentence).
Anyway, I got distracted so many times writing this post (I am currently browsing Oh No They Didn’t! for the first time in a year, maybe — woohoo for wasting time over winter break), and it’s Christmas Eve now! Merry Christmas Eve to all of you! I hope you and your loved ones are happy and healthy this holiday season.