My Lovely Sam-soon 내 이름은 김삼순 [MBC]

My Lovely Sam-soon is an MBC drama which first aired in 2005 in South Korea.  Imagine, I watched it sans subtitles with only a faint idea of what the story was about back then.  I recently discovered that there are passionate k-drama fans who very helpfully write episode-by-episode recaps of k-dramas in English (woo!) with screen grabs and some explanations of Korean culture from the k-dramas that can be so foreign to people who are well, foreign to Korean culture (double woo!).  So now I can compare my second-guessing back then with the recaps and discover if my deduction skills are up to par (triple woo!).

Helmed by Kim Sun-ah, who gained weight to play the role of a soon-to-be thirty-year old patissier, My Lovely Sam-soon is a Cinderella romantic-comedy with a female lead much more accomplished and older than the male lead, who played the role of a rich, handsome, irritatingly young man who fell for the un-lightliest of an unsophisticated female.  Eh?  Isn’t this the same as Secret Garden?  No wonder I kept feeling the sense of déjà vu while watching Secret Garden.

So, in the early days when Hyun Bin was still a relative unknown, and looking like a Japanese-idol-wannabe without fringe covering his forehead, before he became smitten with Empress Ki in her stunt-woman training days, he had already fallen for a brash and loud woman, whom his fabulously rich mother (again!) disapproved (double again!).  In this case, unlike in Secret Garden, Hyun Bin’s character’s mother grudgingly consented to their wedding, as Hyun Bin kept harping on about “the unborn child”.  Hilarious!

Despite no subtitles, I ploughed on with My Lovely Sam-soon because:

·         Kim Sun-ah piled on the weight to play the female lead.  There was quite some hype about it and I had to see how much weight she put on.

·         The relatively unknown male lead shot to stardom, thanks to this show.  I don’t think it took much to channel Hyun Jin-heon when Hyun Bin was good-looking, even in his pre-hideous-sparkly-blue-tracksuit-days-in-Secret-Garden.

·         The female lead is a patissier, so I was expecting gorgeous creations of pastries, which the production team did not disappoint in the first few episodes, but subsequently, Kim Sun-ah’s character got side-tracked by her love issues with Hyun Bin’s character, so pastries stopped appearing much.

·         The dishy Daniel Henney played the role of a cancer surgeon from the States who took time off from his work (and life) to accompany his patient back to Korean to reunite with her boyfriend, whom she had to leave for her advanced gastric cancer surgery despite him being involved in a terrible accident which killed three people, left him very badly injured and a niece who was orphaned from that accident.  Really, the things people can do for unrequited love.  Thankfully for the love-sick Henney, his love interest got dumped by Hyun Bin and so the spare-tyre got promoted to boyfriend status.

My Lovely Samsoon was a huge success in Korea, and critics attributed its success to the anti-heroine  Samsoon, who was able to succeed in love and life despite not being born into wealth or with beauty and brains, and her character resonated with ordinary Koreans.

For me, the best part of the drama were the lovely pastries.  Some of the concepts in the drama might be familiar to Koreans, or people familiar with Korean culture, but were plain bizarre to me.   A love contract?  Social statuses of mothers?  And why is Hyun Bin so déjà vu in the characters he played.  Again his character seemed rehashed in Secret Garden.  Son from a rich family suffered a horrible accident which affected him emotionally and psychologically, such that he couldn’t bring himself to admit that he liked Samsoon/pre-Empress Ki and expressed his love through weird actions.  I wonder if the script writer for My Lovely Samsoon and Secret Garden is the same person.