Episodes 1-5
A couple of years ago, I started seeing clips online for a K-drama entitled Work Later, Drink Now, starring Eunji from Apink, and I was frustrated because it never showed up on any legal streaming platforms. I really liked the idea of a show that centered on a group of women, in a more casual setting than the workplaces of, say, Search: WWW. And somehow this led me to Hello, My Twenties!, but I think it was probably just that clip of Ryu Hwa-young planting one on Han Seung-yeon, and I’ve got both shows mixed up in my head. But when it came time to choose which one to watch first, the occasion of my 30th birthday made the decision easy: I will start watching the show called Hello, My Twenties!
And I let out an audible gasp when I found out Seung-yeon was in it. I’ve come to really like Kara over the last couple of years, thanks to their 15th-anniversary reunion. All of their members seem super cool and super close. I like that Youngji has an older sister who kind of hangs around the group, being a public figure also. Their YouTube videos are super funny, by the way. When Youngji tries to eat fried chicken while her sister is sleeping – that is comedy gold! But anyway, I doubt I’ve seen a more star-studded cast in a K-drama. There’s my girl Seung-yeon, there’s Park Eun-bin A.K.A. the Extraordinary Attorney Woo, the controversial Ryu Hwa-young (whose bullying scandal saw a reduced role for season two), and to top it off, Han Ye-ri, the lead actress in Minari. Holy shit.
So, I don’t know if posts like “K-Drama Reports” or the one about Oldboy are gonna be of use to anyone, because they’re so personal, but at the very least I can log some developing thoughts – perhaps thoughts on developing events which may not be required later. Call this scratch paper. And the most prominent thing I’m trying to work out is the alleged queerbaiting within the first five episodes. I’m the alleger, by the way. Not gonna troll through old Reddit threads looking for corroboration for fear of spoilers, and also because I never find it anyway. Surprisingly, I don’t have much in common with the key demographic for hallyu – you know, teenage girls. But everyone knows about K-drama queerbaiting. It happened in both Search: WWW and Twenty-Five Twenty-One, and it happens in Hello, My Twenties!, I swear. Boy, that’s the feeling, isn’t it, like a very mild gaslighting.
Unfortunately, the episodes kind of run together in my mind because of how I’ve been watching this show, so I don’t remember exactly when it happens, but at some point – possibly episode three – new girl Eun-jae is out clubbing, way outside her element, and she’s about to leave when she sees fellow housemate Ji-won dancing like a madwoman. Eun-jae pushes through the crowd that’s formed around her and is elated by the sight. She’s then stricken by a flashback montage, where Ji-won – the only one who was ever nice to her – is showing her the ropes all over campus, and standing up for the shy country girl. Each time she does, Eun-jae imagines Ji-won literally growing in stature and shining like a goddess. “She’s so cool.” And here she is on the dance floor, completely untethered – totally free.
Not long after, Eun-jae’s secret admirer Jong-yeol begins to think she’s daydreaming about him, when in fact it’s a boy with a hairstyle suspiciously like Ji-won’s (and perhaps Eun-bin’s) signature bowl cut. In fact, Ji-won even shakes her own hair to demonstrate what the mystery boy’s might be, when she and Ye-eun are holding Eun-jae down and demanding answers (and you know, tickling). Now, that strikes me as an odd note, if we’re to believe that what the show is doing is suggesting that Eun-jae harbors a secret crush on Ji-won that’s manifesting as a hallucination. Why draw so much attention to it unless it’s supposed to be obvious? Because it is obvious. The boy barely speaks, and he’s always shot in slow-motion, and when Jong-yeol looks to see where Eun-jae is pointing, he isn’t there. He isn’t real.
Until episode five, of course, when it turns out that he is real. And now I don’t know what to think. What happened is that, of course, Eun-jae is meant at some point to get together with Jong-yeol. I mean, I read it on Wikipedia while verifying the character names: “Shin Hyun-soo as Yoon Jong-yeol – Eun-jae’s boyfriend.” He can’t very well be her boyfriend if she’s already dating the Extraordinary Attorney. And you might laugh at me – ha, ha! – but this heady alternate storyline I concocted in my sleep-addled brain wouldn’t be out of place here.
I expected this show to be a funny slice-of-life K-drama, with or without romance, and the first episode pretty much tracks with that expectation. It was mostly a conflict between this new housemate/audience proxy Eun-jae and a house full of young women in their 20s. Thematically, they represent a range of life experiences. That’s all. They’ll live and laugh and maybe love, like the goofiness I saw in those Work Later, Drink Now clips – which I suppose will also end up surprising me down the road. What follows episode one isn’t a dramatic tonal departure, but more so a soft realignment. The slow, quiet parts become more prominent, and naturally, the more we learn about these other young women, the more complicated their lives appear.
Which isn’t to say Hello, My Twenties! isn’t funny, because it’s the funniest K-drama I’ve seen so far. But it’s also surprisingly heavy, where each of these girls being unlucky in life and love means abusive relationships, class warfare, and deeply dysfunctional family situations back home. Maybe the first example comes from the relationship between the eldest Jin-myung and Yi-na, who’d shared an encounter before living together – one of the strange joys of storytelling for me, seeing how the protagonist has stepped into a world already in progress – where the former is poor and works multiple part-time jobs and the latter is rich and works as an escort. Yi-na brings a client to an upscale restaurant and sees Jin-myung working as a waitress. Knowing about her money troubles, Yi-na encourages her client to leave Jin-myung a big tip.
The question arises: should Jin-myung “give in” and do something socially unacceptable for easier money? Should Yi-na “go straight” and take on regular jobs? We see that neither provides the ideal solution. Alex from Search: WWW calls Yi-na a whore. Jin-myung is berated in front of her coworkers for a bloody fingernail, and then the boss takes her out for an apologetic drink, which ends with a hand on her leg. This has, all of a sudden, become a story about the lives of young women in their 20s. Which is, I guess, exactly what was advertised. Well, don’t I look like a fool!
And so, the moments of levity feel like the small, everyday victories we all have to snatch from the drudgery and pain of life. It’s really quite beautiful, but if I knew this is what the show would be like, I probably would’ve put off watching it. I kind of need to be tricked by a K-drama, which is often why my blog posts about them are so full of sputtering shock. “How could I have known, storytelling could be like this?!” Because I thought this was gonna be a comedy!
Anyway, this is how a closeted lesbian storyline wouldn’t feel like such a far cry. Alas, it wasn’t to be. So I have to ask, what’s the deal? Like, in general. Why does on-purpose queerbaiting happen – if this one is truly accidental – and why do we, as K-pop fans, ship? Because I know that a lot of those teenage girls in the key demographic actually are gay, but what about someone like me, for whom the term “girl crush” is redundant? I mean, sure, there’s the obvious loser-guy attraction to the very idea of lesbians, but I promise that my appreciation of Seulrene and MoonSun* is more than that. I think it’s almost a deficiency in how I – maybe we – have been conditioned to understand relationships.
One of the things I love about K-pop is that it’s these groups of people who have different dynamics. Pair off any two members of Girl’s Generation and you’ll get something fun (I mean, almost, but the pairs that work are dynamite). You watch Yuri and Hyeoyeon goof around with each other for long enough and maybe you start to think: “They should be together.” But they already are.
In American society, and therefore in modern South Korean society (burn), there are friendships and then there are relationships. That’s why we have “the friend zone.” But romantic relationships can literally climax. Friendships? All they can hope to do is become romantic. On TV, I mean. And so, on TV, it’s as if friendships just aren’t enough.
I want them to be, so I’ll see if Hello, My Twenties! makes the non-romantic relationships between these characters just as compelling. I can’t wait to find out, and I can’t fully express how excited I am to have finally found another K-drama that’s hooked me, a year and a half after Twenty-Five Twenty-One.
*Okay, but Solar and Moonbyul are actually a couple, right? Like, no fooling, straight-up, they’re together? We’re all in agreement?
Also on rotation:
Not Others
Following Sooyoung on Instagram, I kept seeing her in photos with Jeon Hye-jin and was quite enchanted by that pairing. The show, in which Jeon plays Sooyoung’s immature mother, also stars Park Sung-hoon, doing a hard 180 from his character in The Glory, and an unfortunately crabby Kim Sang-ho. Please don’t waste Kim Sang-ho. He’s so good!
With Eyes East 