[drama 2008] Happiness / Bliss / I Am Happy 행복합니다

[Guest kacanghijau]

Is there any download link other than Clubbox?

[ay_link]

Ratings are pretty high for the first 2 episodes, even though KBS2 "Angry Mom" got higher ratings for its first two episodes (25.3% for ep 1 and 30% for ep 2)

"Happiness" RATINGS

TNS Media

E01 - 20.9%

E02 - 21.3%

Does anyone know how many episodes this drama will have?

Is it confirmed that it's 50+ eps?

Sigh~ how I wish it's less than 20eps hehe...

.........

Kim Hyo Jin plays as Park Seo Yoon, the middle child... the stubborn daughter

She's still hiding the fact from her boyfriend, Lee Joon Soo (played by Lee Hoon), that she's the President's daughter.

Oh, and in HK, her mom's trying to match her up with the son of another chaebol family. lol. Very typical~

Lee Jong Won plays as Seo Yoon's oldest brother, Park Sang Wook.

He's married, and seems to live in HK or just taking care of their family business in there.

In Episode 2, the Park family went on a family vacation (maybe to celebrate the Chinese New Year?) and they all were in Hong Kong.

(spectacular view and fireworks, indeed, gerryg ^^ I was mesmerized~)

That's when he met again w/ Ji Sook, his 'hidden first love' hehe.. I think they'll have one hot affair~ lol.

Lee Eun Sung plays as Park Ae Da, Seo Yoon's youngest sister.

She's indeed the youngest daughter of the chaebol Park family. Sweet and innocent.

She ran into trouble in HK, and Kang Seok (Ha Suk Jin) came and rescued her

Ha Suk Jin's character appeared in episode 2 towards the end... very mysterious, cold but kind-hearted and gentleman ^^

[Guest freezspirit]

Oh I really do hope this gets picked up by a subbing group (even as a side project). I just watched the first episode and I'm hooked.

[baduy]

Hi everyone!

I just sampled ep 1 of this (CB's been awkward about sending me ep2 so far), mainly because I've always found anything penned by Kim Jung Soo worth a try, but also because of ay link's writeup. I get the sense that the Soompi clan are a bit uncertain about whether to take this particular ride, so I thought I'd try my hand at a mixture of summary and commentary giving my personal take on the first 20 mins or so of ep.1.

I know this is very wordy, but I'm trying to convey at least a hint of the production and editing style, how things are shown -- or not shown -- as well as what is seen and said, because that's where a lot of the qualities of better KDramas are found anyway, and people need to know that kind of thing as well as the plot and character outlines when they're deciding whether to give a series a try.

Though I cover only around a third of the episode, I hope I've given enough explanation for people with no Korean to be able to keep following the main lines of the plot in the rest of the episode, and maybe even in those to follow, and make their own judgements about whether they want to stick with this one. I personally will certainly watch a couple or so more, but whether I stay with it after that will depend on how those follow-ups turn out. And also maybe also a bit on on whether there are people around who feel like exchanging views and insights on this one.

I ought to say that I'm no Korean language expert, and I may well have got some things wrong, language wise. That's one reason why I tend to quote the Korean as well as translating or paraphrasing it, so people who are better at the language than I am won't be led astray by any mistakes in my understanding or spot translations.

Plainly, this contains spoilers in the very nature of things. It would look silly to black or yellow the whole thing out, so I hope it's within the spirit of the No Spoilers Without Fair Warning principle simply to say up front: if you don't want spoilers, stop reading here.

So here goes.

Closeup of a punchbag with the sound of someone badly out of breath. That someone comes into shot, only to be hidden again as he takes a brief rest behind the punchbag. (We can tell it's a man but he's dressed wholly in black with hat down to his eyebrows and his lower face masked, like James Bond kitted out to infiltrate the DMZ under cover of night). We're out of doors somewhere, and it's dark and cold (we can see the man's breath puffing out from behind the punchbag). He moves on, and we cut to ground level and closeups of other body-building kit (dumbells etc) which he's stepping over in the darkness. Then the camera tracks his feet as he runs across frost-strewn decking and up some steps. Close-up of his hand going to a toolbelt (also black) and taking out a screwdriver. Then closeup of a doorlatch with man about to use the screwdriver as a lockpick, but then realising the door isn't locked. He stealthily opens the door and goes inside.

So far, the tone is uncertain. No music yet (Korean dramas often begin in silence, and it's only the first outbreak of OST, when it cuts in, that pins down the mood). We appear to be watching a professional burglar at work. Is he going to be surprised by the householders, with possibly violent consequences? We can't see much of the room he's entered (in fact, unless you're adept at adjusting your monitor controls, you may not see anything at all of this scene), except to get the impression that it's cluttered and untidy. Clothes spread out on a drying rack, a music stand, empty soju bottles, an unwashed cooking pot and half-eaten helpings of side-dishes left on the table.

The burglar's flashlight and the camera linger a while on a large gilt-framed photograph occupying pride of place on one wall. A typical Korean family portrait, but minus the expected females. Five men: a seated middle-aged man at the centre, in a smart suit but somewhat iffy purplish shirt, four adult males behind him, presumably siblings, but quite diverse in dress and bearing. Father and sons, we guess. One of them is smartly dressed like the father but sports a distinctly geekish-looking pair of spectacles. He has an affectionate arm round the shoulders of the youngest-looking, who seems more casual and relaxed in dress and stance than the others. Presumably these are the residents of this house that seems to lack a woman's touch.

Before we can speculate any further, there's a development establishing that we are not in for a bloodbath or anything remotely like it. The intruder is alarmed first by a dry creaky noise (we might wonder for an instant whether one of those female Asian ghosts with ankle-length straight hair, a serious posture problem and a big score to settle is about to join the party) but that's then followed by a formidable burst of very loud pig-like snoring. And we know immediately: in a drama where someone snores like that, nothing really bad is going to happen.

The burglar follows the deafening snorts into an adjacent room, where we can see a bit more, because this is KDrama land where people always sleep with at least one bedside light on, normally so we can watch them weeping into their pillows all night, but here so we can have a better chance of taking in the surroundings.

More clutter. Two men sleeping higgeldy-piggeldy on the ondol. There's a large old-fashioned wardrobe with a carved front, rather too big and grand for this room, most likely a bridal gift from long ago; a head-and shoulders photo of a woman in a hanbok, we guess a memorial portrait of the wife/mother; and close by a little cluster of military awards, all bearing the insignia of the South Korean Marines, one is dated 25 January 1976: A Vietnam veteran, perhaps?

The intruder creeps over to the stentorian snorer, recognisable as the seated figure from the photo, and manages to remove and pocket a gold neckband from him without waking him up. Then cut to another room, equally messy, a guitar on the floor, a PC and a music stand, with two more sleepers, one still wearing headphones that have slipped over his eyes, and, in the background, the intruder entering. He heads straight for a set of clothes on hangers and starts to go through the pockets. He soon finds in one jacket a presentation box containing a ring. As experienced KDrama watchers, we know what that means. Someone is either on the point of proposing to someone, or else the previous day they were about to produce the ring, but the girl of their dreams shocked them by flashing a brand new item of jewellery already placed on her dainty digit an hour or so before by the would-be proposer's best buddy. Etc Etc:

But back to the scene of the crime: our intruder suddenly catches sight of a wallet protruding from the pocket of a pair of jeans slung over a chairback and goes over to take it. That's his undoing. While he's examining the wallet, one of the sleepers half stirs and snarfs the quilt. His companion jerks it back and in so doing tugs the corner of a blanket from under the burglar's feet. The burglar ends up flat on his back between the two sleepers.

For a moment it looks as he still has a chance of staying undiscovered if he lies still and keeps his nerve, but then one sleeper turns, half opens his eyes, grunts, turns over again and is about to fall back fully asleep when he does a double-take and realizes that he's lying next to a strange man clothed head to foot in black with only his eyes visible. So we get our first line of dialog: 누구야?! [Who the **** are you?! Admittedly there's no expletive, deleted or otherwise, in the Korean, but in that language you can express extreme indignation just by your choice of pronoun and verb ending, as our outraged housedweller does here. English speakers, and spot translators, have to take a cruder approach]

After which all hell breaks loose and we're into a long semi-slapstick chase scene towards downtown Seoul, with the OST chiming in with a dooby-dooby-doo upbeat little number that finally settles that basic tone is comic, while a garbage truck becomes part of the attempted escape scenario. If you boosted the gain on your display to see the opening scenes better, turn it back to normal now or you'll miss the nuances of some rather fine views of a winter dawn over Seoul, with a wide-angle silhouette shot of the burglar being pursued across a river bridge as the sun rises and the titles come up.

Only one of the sons has managed to keep pace, running barefoot across the frozen ground, and we get a clue as to why he is so determined when we hear him struggling to find enough spare breath to demand "내 반지 내놔" [hand over my ring]! That gives the burglar his deliverance. Realizing how important the ring is to his pursuer, he lobs it into the snow-strewn reeds by the riverbank and makes his getaway while the frantic ring-owner is desperately (and eventually successfully) trying to spot and retrieve it. But when his father and brothers catch up (the fourth and apparently oldest brother, who wasn't at home during the night, turns up driving a grocery delivery truck on what we guess is the family business) he noticeably neither shows nor mentions the ring, even when his father berates him for letting the villain escape despite having stayed on his heels for so long. Apparently Dad isn't to be told about the ring or what it was doing in his second eldest son's pocket. (No names have been spoken so far, but the ring owner has been repeatedly called 작은 형 by one of the younger siblings, ie "younger older brother": but we may as well cheat now and give him his name before the soundtrack does, it's Lee Joon Soo -- from here on JS (played by Lee Hoon)

The family repair to an eatery, despite their serious state of unseasonal under-dress (JS rather awkwardly holds a newspaper as a sort of improvised modesty panel in front of his boxers, though he can do nothing about the gaping hole torn earlier in his tee shirt by a vicious swipe from the burglar's screwdriver) and here for the first time, while JS is inelegantly de-stoning the soles of his bare feet, one of the other sons spots something that horrifies them all: 근데, 아버지! 목걸이 어떡했어 [but hey father! What's happened to your neckband?] The discovery that this item has gone with the burglar plunges Dad into massive dismay, causing him to crave vast amounts of soju instantly, in fact more than his gullet can cope with, and a lot of the booze trickles down his chin as he tips it into his mouth.

Cut to a close-up of the ring, back in its presentation box. We turn out to be back home, with JS getting smartly dressed for work while chatting to two of his brothers, both still dressed as they were when they leaped out of bed for the chase. The brothers are now in on the secret of what is was JS was so keen to get back from the burglar, but he isn't going to let them know just yet who the ring is intended for.

We're about to find out though. Cut to the swish entrance of an obviously prosperous large company. The camera is zooming from deep within towards the entrance doors, advancing on the still distant figure of a smartly-dressed vivacious and confident-looking young woman who has just come in off the street. She suddenly catches sight of someone further inside the building she's plainly keen to see, so she starts running towards the camera, which halts in its tracks and pans round to follow her in pursuit of the distant rear view of a dark-suited young man who seems to be rather nervously adjusting his jacket and tie as he somewhat stiffly and self-consciously walks in.

She catches up with him at the foot of the escalator to the main lobby and cheekily grabs a quick handful of butt in greeting. Cut to close-up face-on view of the pair as they ride the escalator. The guy is none other than our JS, now fully suited for the office, complete with geeky specs as in that photo, and plainly none too happy about being so publicly goosed. "Hey, what if someone sees!!!" he half whispers. The girl, by contrast, is grinning from ear to ear at the success of her surprise rear attack. Again, let's cheat a teeny bit and reveal that we've met our other lead, Park Seo Yoon, from here on SY (played by Kim Hyo Jin)

Their brief conversation shows an interesting mismatch between what they are saying and what they are doing. She's says she's just being friendly because she's been missing him, leaning her head on his shoulder as if they were romantically riding a late-night bus. When he shrugs her away with another anxious glance around, she reaches inside his jacket to give his name-tag a somewhat suggestive little tweak, and he's none too pleased about that either. But though his manner is prim and standoffish, his words are of quite a different kind. He's the one that's asking her please can't she spare him a few moments to talk in private because he has something important to say, while she's giving him the verbal brush off with "Nope. Too busy!". "Busy with what?" "Interview!", she says, sticking to her telegrammic manner.

By now they're at the top of the escalator and by the time he's asked "who with?" she's rushing ahead into the main lobby, calling out "Mr President!" as she runs, because the company President is just about to pass through the security entrance and board the elevator. Strangely, the security guards and the President's entourage make only brief token attempts to ward her off and no-one seriously tries to stop her loudly haranguing the President as he waits for the elevator doors to close, introducing herself as from the Publications Division and saying she wants to ask him a few questions about a matter of company policy that seems to be being hushed up.

The President ignores her. Except, that is, for the very last microsecond before the elevator door closes, when we catch him pulling a highly un-Presidential face at his questioner. Then we see her in close-up looking very pleased with herself, before saying something doubtless very unrespectful under her breath, then walking back to where JS is hiding round the corner at a safe distance, looking as though he may need another change of underwear already and frantically making a "you're dead meat now, you total idiot!!" gesture at her. Her response is a mildly mocking "scaredy cat" look, and she walks to join him, apparently without a care in the world.

Before we have a chance to ponder the oddities in what we've just witnessed, we've cut to a closeup of numerous pieces of up-market luggage being stowed in the trunk of a limo, followed by an establishing shot of the outside of an equally up-market suburban mansion (but not before, for a reason that will soon appear, the camera has lingered for a moment on the plate number of the limo -- 22나 2846) then to the interior where the lady of the house is in her bedroom, trying to reach a final decision about what to wear on the journey. Plainly what items Her Ladyship takes along, and when and how she's going to wear them on the pending Big Occasion at her journey's end, is a very Big Deal calling for much forethought. Not that she's at those lowly social levels where folk pack their own bags. She has a rather refined ajumma for that, who is obviously also a kind of Mistress of the Wardrobe who has a bit of a struggle answering her employer's questions with the appropriate mixture of truthfulness and tact. (나 요즘 살 쪘지? -- 아이, 관장님! 전혀 아니세요! -- 고짓말! 쪘어! [i've been putting on weight recently, haven't I? -- Good Heavens no, Ma'am, perish the thought!! -- Don't tell fibs now, I have so put on weight] ...etc. The refined subservience of this senior member of domestic staff is thrown into sharp contrast by a much younger junior maid, who arrives to announce as if shouting the odds at a racetrack that the luggage is all safely stashed in the trunk. Madame reminds her that she has to adjust her tone if she's to be kept on in the household, but this little attempt at in-service staff training seems to fall on stony ground, because the girl replies "그리구 관장님! 살...찌셨어요 요즘! [but all the same, ma'am, you really have put on weight lately!"] . At which Madame mouths to her housekeeper "Liar!" and departs looking none too pleased, leaving the teller of unwelcome truths to get a hefty whack from her senior. Looks we're in for lots of "below stairs" fun in this household.

We're back at the company HQ and we're about to move into the main dramatic-emotional payload of the episode. JS has waylaid SY at a coffee machine in the corridor. He's still in a state of high anxiety, asking if she's come to her senses yet. How could she be so impudent to the President, making a scene like that in such a public place? She pretends not to know what he means by scene: 뭐? 고무신? [You mean like in rubber-soled shoes?] Makes nonsense in English of course -- shoes being another one of the dozen or so different meanings of 신, but KDramas are full of translation-defying puns like this one. We might try something to do with sneaking or being a creep, but life's too short... [REPENTANT RETROSPECTIVE EDIT #1 (of a long series no doubt). After hjkomos recap I now see that it should have been obvious to me before that what he said was that the President was like God to his employees. So that's the sense of the multi-meaninged word 신 as JH used it, whereupon SY pretends to think he's talking about footwear. Well, I was at least right about one side of the pun...]

He keeps on and on at her about her rashness as they walk along till she finally stops, hoists herself on to a table and says "됐어! 할 말 있다며? 그거나 해! 뭐야? [OK that's enough. I thought you'd something to say to me? So get on with it! What is it?"] Poor guy. How do you shift gear into ring-producing mode from a point like that? He tries delaying tactics: does she have time to meet for lunch that day? Suddenly her mood changes and she begins to look a bit alarmed. Does it really have to be today, she asks? How about dinner, then? Nope, not on either. She looks at her watch and says in fact she's got to go home real soon. There's something she'd forgotten about. They can talk some other time. She's really got to go now.

JS's disappointment is plainly slipping into panic. There's an extended weekend holiday coming up, so how about meeting up then? Ah sorry but, she's going to be away in the countryside for all that holiday. JS finally accepts that it's now or never, so he grabs her by the wrist and pulls her, mildly squealing with surprise, into the nearest place off the corridor out of general view, which turns out to be a large deserted lecture room with the shades all drawn.

And here, in the half light, after taking off his jacket, loosening his tie and pacing up and down a bit to gather his nerve while SY sits in the gloom looking rather exasperated at what she obviously assumes is some sort of silly trick in the offing, he finally embarks on a lead-up that isn't exactly the stuff to set a maiden's heart a fluttering, especially when the truth he thinks he has detected behind her apparent inability ever to find time to spend with him outside the company is in fact massively different from what he supposes: "They work you really hard here, don't they? The company even keeps you at it every weekend, you never get time to yourself..." "No Oppa, it's not really like that", she tries to put in, but he won't let her. "No, hear me out. It's not your fault. There's no need to hide it from me. This trip to the country thing's just a pretext, I know. And to think you're supposed to be only a part timer." And now he kneels at her feet, takes her left hand in both of his, and carries on "I ... what I want more than anything else is for you not to have to put up with such hardship." The romantic soundtrack piano kicks in, he releases her hand, and she finds to her amazement that there's a ring on her finger. She stares at her hand in disbelief (the camera viewpoint moves to over her shoulder, looking with her eyes). But although she's plainly experiencing a range of emotions, including (for reasons that will become all too clear before very long) considerable dismay and unease, she shows no signs of wanting to take the ring off, let alone give it back. She takes a deep inward breath then stares at him wide-eyed and open-mouthed, with an expression that says "my poor dear, you've don't really know what you've just done", but all that comes out is an almost tearful, drawn out "Oooooppaaa...". Neither of them seems to have taken in the fact that he still hasn't actually managed to propose in so many words, but then he rushes to add that as a kind of afterthought, afraid to even look her in the eye (you may want to eliminate all other sound sources in your environment at this point, because he speaks so low and fast that if your pet hamster rustles its straw you'll miss the actual proposal altogether): "나랑 결혼하자" [You and me: let's get married].

[EDIT after appearance of WITHS2 subs] Well, it looks as though the subber had a noisy hamster, because in the subs, the actual "let's get married" isn't there at the moment concerned (sub #144) . But the 결혼하자 really is there on the sound track, though as I said, you have to listen really hard to catch it.

[END EDIT]

And now comes the first deliberately quirky edit. The romantic piano tinkles undauntedly on as SY first gives a half laugh, then a sigh, and finally covers her eyes with her left hand (so exposing the ring the the camera's full view again) and starts to weep, plainly not for joy. As she holds that pose, the music is suddenly overlain by a descending electronic wail like an incoming missile and we hear JH's voice yelling quite fiercely "But whyever not? What's the problem?!!" Only then does the picture cut to the corresponding sound, and we see that in the meantime they've found the light switch and taken up positions in a different part of the room, indicating that we've leaped forward a minute or two, and that in the interim she's been trying to find a reason for not giving him an answer just yet, while at the same time not rejecting an offer we sense she dearly wants to accept. It appears there's some obstacle that's nothing to do with him as such, and that that she can't for the life of her think of a way of explaining it to him without blowing everything away.

A sudden thought strikes him. Could it be that she's got debts, a big loan to pay off, he asks. What?? she yells, half incredulous, half indignant, and the romantic music stops abruptly as if the invisible musicians (the piano's been joined in the meantime by a pizzicato string section) had fallen off their seats. He takes that as a "yes" and pauses for an instant, swallowing hard (we can see how to his mind that massive overtime that's apparently taken up every one of her waking hours has begun to make horrible sense); but he bites the bullet and assures her she's no need to worry, no matter how much she owes, even if the creditors are really pressing for fast repayment he'll sort things out. Then the next abrupt cut, taking us outside as the pair wait in their overcoats for SJ's bus to arrive. As it draws up, JH is still telling her not to worry, and she's still plainly not dared to say yes but has certainly not said "no". SY takes another, visibly still delighted, look at the ring on her finger, exclaims again how beautiful it is, and then with a quick "Bye now!" hops on the bus. JA watches the bus merge into the traffic, then walks away.

But on board the bus, SY is already charming the driver into stopping right away to let her out again. She runs from the bus to a limo that has drawn up behind it, obviously waiting for her. And the plate number is 22나 2846. "Did you have trouble finding me?" she asks the driver apologetically as she settles into the back seat. In reply, he just gives her an indulgent grin and says "So what's today's fib, then"? Obviously this is a familiar routine to help the boss's daughter pass for a bus-riding girl of no particular social standing, the girl that JS, who is so much in awe of the President and self-conscious about his own relatively humble background and status, wants to marry in order to rescue her from a life of hardship. Oh dear oh dear. Trouble ahead!!

Cut to the VIP waiting lounge at Incheon airport, where we recognize behind his Financial Times the President of the Company, with alongside him his very pretty younger daughter, who seems dressed up for an Oscar ceremony rather than for in-flight comfort. His wife has her back to us, but we've seen that rear view not long ago, when she was asking whether it was showing signs of weight gain, and so we know right away who that mansion (and that limo) belonged to. One more slight diversion before the last, by now pretty obvious, piece of the puzzle falls into place. Mom reaches across the table to snatch away a high-calorie snack that her daughter was about to tuck into (though without removing her white dress gloves first). But her father gives it back to her, agreeing that just one won't do her any harm. Father and daughter exchange a look before he returns to his financial reading. Message: Mom may be a would-be domestic tyrant, but youngest daughter (at least) is very much Daddy's girl, so Mom's powers in that area are limited. Then up comes the family's Social Secretary (a rather po-faced young woman who is going to be a sub-plot strand bearer, unless I'm much mistaken) and announces that "the young lady has just arrived".

Half a second later, the "young lady" herself, the President's elder daughter, comes into shot, out of breath and, in her mother's estimation, highly unsuitably disguised as a woman of modest means and social status, so much so that she's dispatched at once to the airport ladies room to slip into a lacey little black piece of haute couture, even though the flight's about to board. The family group is ready to depart.

No need, I'm sure, to say who the last minute arrival is. The main spring of the drama is now tightly wound up. Time to let things start ticking away.

I think the rest of the action, and the motives, in this ep. are pretty plain from uncommented viewing alone. Just one more point where non-speakers of Korean might need a bit of help, and which should also indicate the flavor of the remaining 40 or so minutes. While the Park family is still in the air en route to Hong Kong, JS is back home, where (maternal) granny has arrived (for her daughter's anniversary rites as it will emerge) and is giving emergency resuscitation treatment to the houseplants and pot herbs the menfolk have been neglecting. Just then a phonecall arrives for JS, telling him he has to follow the President to Hong Kong immediately to hand over some papers he needs to see urgently. So, though it means missing his mother's anniversary rites, JS catches a plane to Hong Kong too, and heads to meet the President and his eldest son who is running the Hong Kong side of the business, and who is, of course, unbeknown to JS, SY's "biological" Oppa, currently playing host to his parents and sisters in the very same hotel where JS is being put up. Most of what follows is sufficiently understandable by visual clues alone, so I'll stop there...

Hope I haven't bored or deterred anybody from taking a look for themselves. But I think anyone who wasn't totally put off by this posting would find the drama worth at least an initial try.

[lin]

Ah... so this is the drama that started right after Golden Bride ended... Ok I'll ck it out but is it on someone's clubbox??? where can I see this LIVE???

[Guest Redrac]

Thanks for the summary and info everyone.

I need to watch this tonight to see if I like it.

[Guest huangsy]

Ah... so this is the drama that started right after Golden Bride ended... Ok I'll ck it out but is it on someone's clubbox??? where can I see this LIVE???

To watch live on weekends at 8:45 pm Seoul time, go to http://www.sbs.co.kr and click On AIR, however, log in ID is required.

[baduy]

Well, I got and watched ep 2 at last, and I thought I would just say something about two scenes where I imagine people with no Korean might value a bit of help. (Again I have to warn that my own Korean ain't exactly great, but I generally manage to get by...)

Around 11 mins into ep 2: JS has finally got through to SY on her cellphone. He thinks, of course, that she's in Korea, whereas she's actually in another room in the same Hong Kong hotel, nursing the nosebleed inflicted on her earlier by her enraged Mom, while her sister is asleep in the next bed. Though JS is plainly over the moon to be able to talk to her at last (and has no problem combining his chat with some energetic physical training, no doubt to help metabolize that large burger he devoured a little earlier) all the snippets of news about his day that he shares are just a series of new blows to her that make her feel worse and worse, though she daren't let him know it.

First off, he actually got to meet the company President face to face and -- WOW -- even shook him by the hand. "Really? good for you!" she says, trying hard to sound impressed while inwardly squirming at this new reminder of the Truth Gap, as well as the social divide, between them. But the thing he's sure will really interest her is "나 오늘 진짜 너 닮은 여자 봤다! " [Today I saw a woman who looked exactly like you] And even more fascinating, it seems the woman he saw was either the President's daughter-in-law, or maybe even his daughter. Just fancy that!!

This is the news that makes poor SY abandon her flat-on-her-back anti-nose-bleed position and abruptly sit up in bed, obviously wondering just how much worse things can possibly get. Even when JS has passed on to apparently safer matters by telling her about the really tasty burger he had a while back, it risks reminding her of what she was eating, or not, and under what circumstances, at the same time that evening, while helplessly watching his unanswered calls to her piling up on her cellphone under the table, when she was supposed to be paying attention to the smalltalk of the highly eligible young gentleman and conglomerate heir her sister-in-law had positioned as her table partner.

Eventually, JS notices that SY is not her usual bubbly self and halts his yacking to ask if there's anything wrong: her voice sounds strange, has she caught a cold or something? No, she says, she's just really tired. She's hanging up now. Sleep well. Then, after a long pause, gently and on the verge of years, "I love you" On his end of the call, JH is taken aback, partly because she's signing off so soon and in such unusual low spirits, but also because she doesn't normally do lovey-dovey stuff. Neither does he. After all, this is the guy who, the previous day, was so caught up in the logistical complications of proposing that he almost forgot that actually asking the girl to marry him was normally part of the deal, and added that bit as a hurried afterthought.

And so now, his "나도 ...사랑해" sounds almost absent-minded and automatic, a reflex reaction to her words rather than heartfelt response. The problem, of course, is that what he thinks of as a simple cheerful phonecall was for her one more ordeal in a day of tribulations and angst. And one that has left her even less clear about what to do than she was before they spoke. Things are about to get worse, too.

Just before she told him she was hanging up, she asked him what time he was leaving next day. Straight after breakfast, he said. So, she thinks, at least she needn't worry about running into him again in Hong Kong. But she's wrong, because it turns out that next day, there's a need for an extra dogsbody from the company payroll to staff a river excursion, and JS is fingered for the job on his way out of the hotel. So he wasn't on that early flight back to Korea after all, even though SY secretly watched him go down to the lobby to check out and so thought the coast was clear.

And so they come face to face on the boat (about 30 mins 50 secs in). And all seems to be lost.

But it isn't, because this girl's got real guts -- and imagination. Her first impulse on board the boat when she thought the game was up was to jump overboard and put an end to it all: she had one leg almost over the railing, but then thought better of it. [There's a comic visual echo of this later in the ep (00:49:43) when the mysterious ultra-silent type who has rescued little sis from the enraged traders does a straddle-vault over the barrier at the water's edge and Ae Da only just manages to check herself from following suit: well brought-up Korean girls don't richard simmons their legs over railings in public when they're wearing a skirt, and the consequence of her modesty is that he has to bundle up his chivalrously-offered coat and pass it to her across the barrier so she can put it around her shoulders herself and watch the fireworks in comfort.]

(EDIT: I realized after submitting the first version of this post that there's another bit of the ep where people without Korean might miss something rather important, so I'm putting it into the original post at this point)

After JS and SY have recognised each other on the boat and arranged to meet up so SY can try to explain things, we see SY on her way to the meeting spot, but she sees JS sitting completely despondent on a bench waiting for her (OO:36:48], and so she stays for a few moments watching him from a distance while she plucks up courage to face him. As she does so, we get a series of flashbacks from their past (all either in the office building itself or on what look like lunch break forays into the city streets around: it seems they've never even met, let alone dated, outside their work environment).

I can't really translate the whole lot (and it doesn't look like too many folk are interested right now anyway) but I think the first of those flashback scenes should be enough to give an idea of what they're saying, and how it ties in both with the general storyline of the drama and the particular tricky situation that SY is about to face up to after she emerges from her hiding place and goes to sit next to JS. A warning, though. The real meaning of these flashback conversations is in SY's changing facial expressions and gestures as she reacts to JS's views and their implications for her life and prospects. You need to watch those to understand what it really being "said" (to us as viewers of the drama) in the scene.

(They are on the roof of the company building, looking out over the city, and obviously in the middle of quite a heated discussion)

SY: So why not? Why shouldn't it work, if people love each other? Why should different social backgrounds get in the way of love, now, in this day and age? Do we have a Hindu caste system here in Korea?

JS: Yup.

SY: Eh?

JS: Caste system's right! That's just what we have. What social background people come from decides everything.

SY: You're not serious?

JS: It's the way things are. You're not saying we don't have a polarized society? A VIP who's simply caught a cold gets needlessly hospitalized, but people with life-threatening diseases die because they can't go to hospital. That's what this country is like! Those are the facts of life, that's the world we live in, I'm telling you! And as for marriage! [He means of course marriage across the social divide: and he makes a long pause here during which SY, held in closeup by the camera, is plainly hanging on his every word...] No way!! [어림없어]

[END OF EDIT]

So back to SY and JS... Between that moment of near despair on the boat and her "owning up" rendezvous with JS back on dry land (starts 39 mins 45 secs in, and continues intercut with Ae Da's adventure) SY has come up with a plan, obviously inspired by JS's remarks on the phone the evening before that he'd seen a woman who looked just like her in the President's entourage. She's here on a confidential part time job, she explains. And she's helping out a friend at the same time.

Job??? Friend??? Help??? JS makes it very plain that this is going to have to be good if it's to convince him. And it is rather good. The friend, she explains, is Kim Ji Suk (she of the poker face and somber garb who plainly once had something going with podgy-faced lecher Big Brother Sang Wook, and indeed has it going again by the end of this episode: the multiple phallic significance of all those fireworks on tower blocks seems to get everyone in the mood, though as we notice at the very end, our somewhat uptight Lee Joonsoo needs a little more prompting and instruction from his partner than the other males do).

Like all the most effective lies, there's apparently some truth in the story SY has prepared, in that SY and Ji Suk plainly are indeed good and old friends, because it's struck us already in the earlier scenes of this ep that despite their difference in social status (not to mention apparently poles-apart personalities) they use two-way banmal to each other, at least when no-one else is in earshot. And Ji Suk is of course the President's Social Secretary. So SY's tale is that the President's elder daughter had to be elsewhere at the time of this important visit to HK, but Ji Suk solved this problem by hiring her old buddy, who happened to work in a lowly capacity in the company and was the spitting image of the daughter concerned, to stand in for her. Though naturally it was part of the deal that she must tell absolutely no-one, not even her as yet unofficial fiancé. Until he found out by mischance.

This really is quite brilliant, because it allows JS to make sense of what he's seeing with his own bewildered eyes, chimes in with his oh-so-mistaken conviction that SY is in such desperate need of cash that she'll turn her hand to anything, explains her shiftiness about her holiday plans, and obliges him to secrecy and keeps him successfully in the dark about the thing SY is most anxious for him not to know. And we can well imagine, given the closeness of SY to Ji Suk, that Ji Suk would be prepared to help her friend out by supporting her story if the need should arise. But the cleverest thing of all (from the point of view of anchoring these fun and games at a deeper psychological and plot-development level) is that SY can solemnly swear to JS that her tale is true, and be confident in her heart of hearts that she is not really deceiving him.

Because the whole drift of what she's been trying to tell her mother when she wasn't dodging her blows around the furniture of the Presidential Suite, is that the expensively dressed member of the "Royal Family" (or "Loyal Family" as it rather unfortunately comes out of Korean mouths) who has been shipped to Hong Kong to be displayed on the high-net-worth Asian marriage market, is just a shell that she has no inclination or intention of ever filling with life. The President's daughter really is somebody else, not the person her family members think she is. The cosmopolitan jet-setting Princess isn't really there. Her part is being acted out on the High Society stage by a real woman whose true heart and soul are in Old Korea with her beloved Joon Soo. And she's staking everything on the hope that when the time comes for her to be able to tell him the whole truth (or even if he finds it out before she thinks the time is right) he will understand that that truth was there all along, not so much hidden by the lies she's telling right now, as actually already present in the higher truth which her improvised fibs are thinly draping.

Well, I for one have certainly seen enough so far to keep me with this drama for another episode or two at least. The one thing I'm not quite sold on yet is the JS's family side of things. Plainly, the production team is trying to lay out a range of personalities and attitudes there, all bound together by shared mourning and affection for the lost mother/wife/daughter, but I can't say that, for me at any rate, the dynamics of that area of the plot have come to life yet. Maybe related to that, I find the range of tones and moods in the Lee household scenes a bit predictable and dull. Whereas the world of the Parks has those riproaring interactions, mood contrasts, personality clashes and rapid changes of tone and pace that give life to the better Kdramas. But as more of the "ordinary people" side of the tableau develops, that may well change.

[canyayasis]

I've watched episodes one and two -

and Lee Eun Sung is in it - watching her in that pink dressed made me laugh!

180 degrees from Evasive Intelligence Agency.

I had seen that this show was coming over in the upcoming shows FORUM.

But at that time it didn't have a thread!

So this is great!

BADUY - so glad you're here.

[Guest kacanghijau]

can anyone upload this drama on veoh, MU? Thanks....

[Guest hjkomo]

baduy, found you!

AW, DANG!!! You're dangling a mighty big carrot in front of me. I'm in desperate need of some decent sleep, but this is tempting....

What else has Kim Jung Soo written?

[baduy]

You're dangling a mighty big carrot in front of me.

That's because carrots, so they say, are very good for improving night vision. Hence a few platefuls are advised before trying to watch the first few scenes of this drama.

What else has Kim Jung Soo written?

The one that comes first to my mind is 누나 http://imbc.com/broad/tv/drama/myoldersister/ MBC's weekend long-runner (50+ parts ISTR, finished about a year ago). Particularly significant for me, because the English subs dried up after a while and I had no choice but to knuckle down to improving my Korean so I could do without them. Maybe that's one reason why I find her style of dialog relatively easy to cope with, since I learned to understand (at least some) of it the hard, dictionary-thumbing, finger-on-the-replay button way. (Also, by now I know some of her favorite puns, and puns are of course a big obstacle to foreigners trying to make sense of Korean dialog: with other writers I have to start over in the multiple word-meanings department.) But I do also like the way she writes dialog with a rhythm and wit that Korean actresses, in particular, seem to gel with and make their own (I think the language/characterization of some of her male characters is a bit flatter and more mundane, but then my wife tells me that's what men, me included, are like, and she wonders why she ever married one.)

Oops, time to try to catch a live SBS stream for today's ep. I'm not hopeful though, because SBS streaming, from the UK at least, is very iffy at the best of times, and generally impossible at weekends, when all the world's kiddies are at home and hogging the ISP bandwidth with their on-line gaming and questionable web-cam productions. The youth of today! Why don't they just stick to illegal downloading of copyright material like their respectable elders?

[canyayasis]

it's like a high school reunion!

hjkomo and baduy and tag-a-long me makes three!

YAH!

I goofed today - i'm used to those 9:55PM starts - so i will have to download to watch.

but i'll try to wake up at 4:45AM tomorrow to watch live - it''s 10am in the morning now - in that case - i guess it's time to go to bed so I can wake up that early.

I'm really enjoying what i've seen of this so far.

see you two on the flip side!

[baduy]

and tag-a-long me makes three

not to forget hjkomo's wonderfully informative and indispensible 어머님, to whom our deepest and most grateful cyber-bows are due for her generous assistance with Insoon.

I goofed today - i'm used to those 9:55PM starts - so i will have to download to watch.

Similar story here. I'd logged in to SBS with what should have been time to spare. I got over the reminder in my browser status bar that thanks to the lunar new year I'm now two years older in Korea than I am in England (I don't know if anyone's noticed, but when you log into SBS it looks up your DOB in its database and includes a "userage=NN" value in every subsequent link you select, using Chinese-style age calculations.) I just hope that someone in the Great Beyond, unaware of East Asian age counting, doesn't call me in early in the belief that my allotted span is up.

I suppose SBS sends the user's age (and gender) with every request so that innocent 15-year-old girls don't get to see scenes featuring depraved Western-influenced practices like holding hands. Instead, they are meant to put the Wonder Girls on their Ipods, stand in front of their bedroom mirrors and practice their pole-dancing moves while they lip synch to "t-t-t-t-t-tell me". Talk about media double standards!

Anyway, after watching the slew of Internet-only ads that SBS insists all on-line viewers have to sit through before they can access the actual stream, Windows Media Player informed me that I had to accept a component upgrade. Which I did, whereupon Windows crashed in a big way. Took me over an hour to get the thing running again, so all I got to see were the last three minutes or so of the episode. But what a cliffhanger!!!

I said in my last posting that the girl had guts, but gutsy isn't the word for what she's trying to pull off here. Anyone remember the scene in Lovers in Prague where the incognito daughter of the President (of the ROK, no less, in that drama) had to "borrow" a friend's pad on the spur of the moment when her unsuspecting low status boyfriend insisted on accompanying her home, since she could hardly let him walk her to the Blue House? She knew the security code for the doorlock, but once inside she didn't know where the lightswitch was or where the tea was stored... Well, that's clearly been the inspiration for this ruse, but here our plucky and desperate SY is hoping to get that tactful family ajumma (at least I think that's who the astonished middle-aged woman who answers the door to the apartment is, but on live streaming resolution it's hard to be sure) to play the part of her Mom and JS's future mother-in-law, unforewarned and unrehearsed. With only a large wink from behind JS's back to tell the poor woman what's going on. If the preceding 61 minutes or so are even half as good, I'm really going to enjoy watching this, when I get my hands on it. Not to mention tomorrow's episode, when we find out if, and how, she gets away with it...

[Guest stumpy013]

im loving this!!!!!

i'll be uploading this to my veoh page

[Guest hjkomo]

Dang, Dang, Dang!!!

If you two are watching this, then I guess I'll have to check it out, too.

*scribbles on shopping list: lots and lots of carrots!*

I'm still waiting for my dl of Ep.1 to finish. It's stuck at a sluggish 7 KB/S - 4 1/2 hrs! I thought that the new cable modem I just installed this morning was supposed to help with that. I guess the gremlins really have taken up residency in my neighborhood.

We were supposed to start painting our windows today, but the husband's got studying to do (yeah, interspersed with watching NCAA basketball ), and I'm supposed to be doing our taxes right now :blush: - SHHH!!!!!

So, I guess I've got time to do some kdrama watching.

I'm automatically waking up at dawn, despite it not being a Wed/Thurs (all because of HGD!), but I don't think I'll be able to watch this one live. I'm exhausted enough as it is. And it doesn't help that I finally crashed last night, er...this morning, at 1:30am. Thank goodness for coffee!

And I casually suggested to my mom that she ought to watch this one, too.

She's already watching Angry Mom and Park Jung Geum, in addition to the gazillion others that air during the week. She lacks the typing skills and internet saavy to join a forum, but I'm sure she'll be on hand for the endless requests for dialogue and idiom translations. At least, that way, she'll get more frequent phone calls from me, and it beats the "Why haven't you called in so long? Have you dropped off the face of the earth and forgotten about your mother?" periods of phone call-less weeks. Good thing long distance calls are free on my cell phone! But, I will have to put up with more of the "Why do you have so much time to watch shows? You should be taking better care of your husband....yada, yada, yada"....@%#$,

so, you guys owe me one - big time!

For the SBS registration, do I really have to send a copy of my ID? Is it better to email it?

[ay_link]

so happy to see more familiar nicknames in this thread~

baduy, lemme just say it upfront first before I forget... I admire those who can post such a lengthy and detailed writeup about a series.

Especially when it comes to a weekend drama like this one. So, thank you

I finally made some time to read your posts (yes, word by word lol), even though I usually have such a hard time reading... lol.

More to a visual person I am, I tend to get distracted while reading anything without pictures or doodles.

Well, I for one have certainly seen enough so far to keep me with this drama for another episode or two at least. The one thing I'm not quite sold on yet is the JS's family side of things. Plainly, the production team is trying to lay out a range of personalities and attitudes there, all bound together by shared mourning and affection for the lost mother/wife/daughter, but I can't say that, for me at any rate, the dynamics of that area of the plot have come to life yet. Maybe related to that, I find the range of tones and moods in the Lee household scenes a bit predictable and dull. Whereas the world of the Parks has those riproaring interactions, mood contrasts, personality clashes and rapid changes of tone and pace that give life to the better Kdramas. But as more of the "ordinary people" side of the tableau develops, that may well change.

Completely agreed w/ you on this case.

I, too, was having a hard time digesting' the JS's family side of things, especially when they seemed to be quite 'insignificant' during the first two episodes. BUT, in episode 3, things begin to surface a bit more in this humble family. The interaction between brothers, the matchmaking the grandma sets up for the single dad whose sons have begun to grow up, and she's worried that her son-in-law will keep on waiting by his deceased wife, with no wife to take care of him. And especially when they welcome Kang Seok and halmuhni quickly prepares his bowl of rice and soup, complete w/ the spoon and chopsticks, and tells KS to eat. I'm excited to see more stories of this family and their connection to Kang Seok. The plot has been thicken and it only gets better, hopefully.

On the other side of the fence, the Park family's queen, SY's mom. I remember the actress and her past evil character. So it's quite hard to shake off that image right off her, but luckily President Park, SY's dad seems to be the wise type. His fatherly affections towards his daughters, especially the youngest one, Ae Da, it's really heart-warming~ So hopefully when all hell break loose, when SY's parents finally find out that their oldest daughter is dating the company's employee, President Park can be the bigger man here and calm his wife down, because she can get quite scary when she doesn't get her way, lol. (remembering the scene in HK, at the hotel when SY's mom saw the ring... how she screams at her to take it off.. how it doesn't match w/ the dress, etc. hehe!)

Hm... there's something about this drama that really drawn me to it like a moth to a flame. *lol*

But one thing I notice also, props to the director for such a .... neat? creative? (can't seem to find the right word for it...) angle of this last scene..

the elevator scene... just moment before SY and JS meet SY's fake-mom, the ahjumma... (oh, which btw, the ahjumma did say out loud, "Oh, Seo Yoon ahgassi, why are you here?" and JS can't hear that? the word "ahgassi" should stir up more question marks in his head rather, unless he's...uhmmm.... tone deaf or muted )

And.... after JS properly and formally introduced himself to her (the ahjumma), Episode 3 ended with this cap:

SY rocks!

She seems to be so cool, very determined and independent. Not to mention, nobody at work seems to know that she's the president's daughter, well except her older brother and her dad.. who seems to have agreed to keep this a secret so that she can work there freely without having people stereotyping her as the Princess of this SJ Empire.

Ahh~~ can't wait for episode 4 tomorrow~~

Will Ae Da finally meet her mysterious man which jacket seems to be the only memoir left of him? the wait is killin' me softly.

I knew it they'd drop a hint of trace w/ that piece of paper Ae Da's young maid found inside the jacket's pocket.

Hopefully they'll get to meet again soon~~

.......

Edited:

Almost forgot about this one scene... @ Ji Sook's apartment after SW left.

*gasp* could it be....?

And from the preview caps for tomorrow...

Hmmmm something is definitely... fishy.

Here's the link to today's ending preview which includes highlights of episode 3:

http://sharebee.com/092247c7

[canyayasis]

hjkomo - don't be sending copies of your ID to anyone-

I'll PM you some alternate links -

[icesiren]

this is actually really quite fun to watch! i tend not to like long weekend dramas, particularly angsty ones (hello, Winter Bird, anyone?) but this seems like a good mix of drama/comedy. enough to keep me interested anyway.

cheers to the long summaries offered by the kind viewers in this thread. they got me started on this...

[Guest hjkomo]

Okay, now my CB dl is at 22 hours...wtf???

Anyone have this uploaded on MU?

Damn, now I really have no excuse not to do my taxes.