When Life Gives You Tangerines: The Legend of Cycle-Breakers
by Sydney Reyes
When Life Gives You Tangerines (2025) is a Korean drama series on the life built by Oh Ae-sun (IU), and her husband Yang Gwan-sik (Park Bo-gum) as they navigate Jeju island life from the 1960s onwards. It’s a story that spans from Ae-sun and Gwan-sik’s childhood to marriage to raising kids and growing old together. Oh Ae-sun is a regular girl with hopes and dreams, but her story is emotional and profound. Through her, the series empathizes with women’s stories and puts them to the forefront, spotlighting earnest messages on our struggles, relationships, and joys. When Life Gives You Tangerines is a legend on cycle-breakers, showing us the bravery of people who choose to change and the lifelong implications of this.
At its core, this is a story about generational trauma. We begin with a young Ae-sun trying to gain the attention of her ever-busy diver mother, Gwang-rye (Yeom Hye-ran). As they were a poor family, Gwang-rye took on the risky job of a haenyo just to feed her children. She is consistently tough on Ae-sun, but despite her angry tone, we clearly see how much she loves her daughter. We learn that this anger comes from protectiveness and an attempt to give Ae-sun a life better than her own. To put it simply, Ae-sun experiences hardships around loss, being neglected, and marrying young in spite of Gwang-rye’s best efforts. But once Ae-sun becomes a mother she does her best to give her own daughter, Geum-myeong, a life with more opportunities.
What makes this series stand out is the 60 years’ worth of stories and generational trauma it tackles and successfully sheds light on without feeling too brushed over. From Gwang-rye to Geum-myeong and with a central focus on Ae-sun, When Life Gives You Tangerines proves that one can go through so much, yet choose to break that cycle of pain and turn out gentle.
It is also worth noting Gwan-sik’s unapologetic love for Ae-sun, his bravery to break his own cycle, and his hard-working perseverance to keep his family afloat. One of the most weighted and catalytic scenes involved Gwan-sik walking away from his mother and grandmother with Ae-sun and little Geum-myeong in tow after they arranged a ceremony for Geum-myeong to become a haenyo behind Ae-sun’s back. She would not let her own daughter work a life-risking job that her own mother suffered for and Gwan-sik would not let his family treat his wife and daughter poorly any longer.
For almost 30 years, he rose early in the morning just to set sail and catch fish to make a living. This physically laboring career manifests in knee aches, tanned skin, and wrinkled hands years down the line. The series showcases both a young and bustling Gwan-sik and a soft yet older, more exhausted version, bittersweetly portrayed by Park Hae-joon. Watching the trajectory of Gwan-sik’s life is a candid and gentle reminder that we must not forget the sacrifices that dads make to be a provider for their family. Gwan-sik’s character is a true testament to what it means to be the pillar of the home.
Lee Ji-eun, better known by her stage name, IU, is an already amazing singer, and an even more stellar actress. She took on the challenging task of depicting two different women across drastically different stages of each character’s life. IU plays Ae-sun from a naive yet highly ambitious high-schooler to a young mother of three, navigating the trials of the patriarchy in the 1970s. As Ae-sun grows older, she’s played by the sensitive and tender Moon So-ri, while IU then plays her daughter, a college-aged Geum-myeong in an entirely different way. In true eldest daughter fashion, she can be grumpy and boss her family around but it always comes from a place of love. Jump forward a few years and we see IU as an older Geum-myeong, trying to support her family, establish her career, and live her own life. Each era of Ae-sun and Geum-myeong demanded distinct emotions and mannerisms that IU certainly delivered. It is truly one of her best, most nuanced performances yet.
The decision to have one actress play both a mother and her daughter contributes to the true-to-reality nature that the series makes about parents and their kids: Children do inherit parents’ faces, but they can also inherit their hopes and dreams. Geum-myeong gained more opportunities, such as living in the city and studying abroad—all things Ae-sun initially wanted for herself before becoming a mother, and the kind of life Gwang-rye would have wanted for her as well. Even if she did not achieve these dreams, Ae-sun still proudly exclaims to her kids that “when you guys soar, I swear it feels like I’m soaring too.”
Everything about Ae-sun and Gwan-sik’s everlasting love with each other set the foundation for breaking the cycles their parents and grandparents weren’t able to. While their parenting isn’t perfect, Ae-sun and Gwan-sik’s efforts in giving Geum-myeong and their son, Eun-myeong, a better life never go unnoticed. They did not let them suffer through being treated like dirt by older people and laboring away with physically demanding jobs. Ae-sun prevents Geum-myeong from falling into her same fate when she notices her daughter’s would-be in-laws treat her poorly. Gwan-sik secretly helps Eun-myeong make money to feed his family. Throughout the show, Ae-sun and Gwan-sik strive to be the parents they wanted to become. And despite whatever life threw at the siblings, their parents inspired them to become resilient and share this very love with their own relationships. What they then pass on to their own children is something kinder and more gentle.
From the wins to the losses and every single thing in between, When Life Gives You Tangerines walks us through all of it. It’s moving to witness how the lives of this one family can touch many and teach us a thing or two about humanness. Ae-sun and her family’s lives represent all of us. Each character offers something to learn in the half-century we follow them. Seeing Ae-sun and Gwan-sik’s entire history reminds us that the tales we hear from our parents are events that they actually lived through, and we should respect their sacrifices. This series offers a rich story full of life anecdotes that everyone inevitably goes through, from grief to success to sickness. Yet whatever may happen, the series tells us we will be okay. That with love, we will have lived a life worth living. When Life Gives You Tangerines is a standout slice-of-life series about generational trauma that delivers an extensive, emotionally poignant and wise take on life. It’s a reminder that we don’t have to pass trauma from generation to generation—we can instead give our descendants aspirations, dreams, and the opportunity to just live.