One of my stories about what life on Earth used to be like for some people gets published

It seems hard to believe now that I once wrote a short story that was a psychological profile of a husband cheating on his wife. Today, I wrote an email to someone that ended, more or less, with, "I really hope you aren't one of the people who dies." At some point, I more than half believe, normal life will continue, which means people will resume making the same hopeful, misguided, and doomed choices they hope will lead them to happiness they've always made. I look at this story as a reminder of the kinds of mistakes we'll hopefully one day be lucky enough to be making again.

This story is published in the Northern Virginia Review, making this the third local journal to publish my work: The Baltimore Review, The Potomac Review, and now this. I wonder if being local actually helped me get published in these journals. Do they look at my bio and weigh my home address in the balance when deciding what to publish?

In any event, NoVa Review does a really attractive hard copy that they put a lot of effort into. But they're not going to be able to do this one in hard copy, at least any time soon, since the journal is tied to a college and has university students who put it together. So all they've got now is the Adobe document for what would have been the spring 2020 edition. As online literary journals go, it's not the best, because you essentially have to just click all the way through it. I'm all the way on page 87. It looks like it would have been a really attractive magazine. The link is here:

https://indd.adobe.com/view/45d7be02-7abc-4c6a-b7f0-237aac053a78

A survey question I don't know how to answer

I participate in surveys put together by the Pew Charitable Trusts. They keep asking me to answer their questions, although every time I do, I feel like the worst survey respondent ever. About half their questions make me stop and think, sometimes to such an extent I actually can't finish a survey because a question on it has stumped me so badly. The latest one I took had a good example.

It was largely a COVID-19 survey. There were some easy questions, like overall, how do I think the president is doing and overall, how do I think my state is doing, and overall, how do I think most states are doing. But then the survey wanted to go a level deeper. It asked me if I thought, in the context of the public reaction to the COVID-19 epidemic, that "most people can be trusted to do the right thing."

This brought to mind a Tweet I saw re-posted this week:

Here's why the question flummoxed me: on the one hand, I think "most" people, i.e. more than 50% of people, are probably trying to do the right thing. But there are two reasons I don't think this is really the critical question, nor what the people who wrote the question really wanted to know. Because it takes far less than a majority of people doing the wrong thing to screw things up for everyone. So the question isn't whether more than 50% of people strive to do the right thing, it's whether we're over the limit in our country of the number of people needed to screw it up for all of us.

And even that number of people trying to do the right thing--how hard do they have to be trying? Should we be doing everything in our power to minimize our potential to infect others by minimizing our caloric intake in order to stretch out the food in our houses and avoid extra trips to the store? If we go to the store and buy items we don't need to survive, didn't we just spread our germs to places in the store we didn't have to spread them? What level of doing the right thing do people need to achieve in order to be placed in the "trusted to do the right thing" camp? If you're just going to say it's whatever is reasonable, then you'd probably just be looking at what an average person does, in which case, well, just about exactly half of the people would be doing at least what an average person does or better. So it's a meaningless question.

And then there's the question of duration. How long will people continue to do the right thing? Most people likely don't go buying up toilet paper at a rate far greater than what they need at first, but once a few panic buyers start snatching it all up, others, who wouldn't have done the wrong thing on their own, are likely to follow suit, and before long, you have the quorum of bad actors needed to wreck things for everyone.

A question more to the point than what the survey asked me would be something like this: "Do you think that our society has the ability to act corporately in such a way as to minimize the negative effects of the COVID-19 outbreak?" Because my answer to that question is a lot different from my answer to whether I think the majority of people will try to do the right thing.

New old worries

On the surface, it seems like life in coronavirus times presents me with new ethical quandaries:

• Yesterday, I went to the grocery store. Every cashier seemed to be above 60, including mine. My demand for food was putting these people at risk by making them be there. Should I not go to the grocery store?
• If not the grocery store, what if I order food online from Amazon or a similar source? Am I not just changing the source of the threat for the worker supplying me from customers in a store to co-workers in a warehouse? 
• Should I order take-out from local restaurants that aren't allowed to have sit-down customers any more, so they can at least continue to make some money, or am I just putting them at risk of infecting each other in the kitchen?
• Is there, in fact, any way for me to continue to consume during this crisis that doesn't put these workers in jeopardy? I can, of course, try to reduce my consumption. I'm not going to buy the grass seed I need to fix my awful lawn this spring until the threat is over. But I also would like to try to keep about two weeks of food on hand at the house in case one of us gets the coronavirus and we all need to self-isolate. Which means I need to stock up every few days. Is there any ethical way to do that other than hunting my food, which I don't know how to do? 

These might be questions I'm framing in a new way or with a new urgency, but when I think about it, they're not that different from questions that mildly bother me every day. Should I patronize a fast food restaurant when the workers in it are underpaid? Does refusing to go there help them in any way, or does it just cost them the patronage that keeps them in a job they need, even if the job doesn't pay well? Does Amazon exploit its workers, and is it bad for the American economy overall? Should I not buy things from them, even when it's obviously the most economical and convenient way to get something? Is there any way for me to consume in a way that doesn't contribute to the unhappiness of others, especially when I think of the complete supply chain stretching all over the world?

I don't know another way to survive than buying what I need. I don't think I'm capable of becoming a subsistence organic farmer. (And even if I could, to do that would still require me first making enough money to buy a farm and everything I need to run it, which would involve decades of earning and consuming.) There doesn't seem to be a way out of the trap of my existence contributing to the unhappiness of others. 

Generally, I can only stand to consider these questions for so long. It ends with me just sort of blankly resolving to keep going and to try to be okay with not being okay, to live in the absurdity. But every act of consumption on my part feels like I'm numbing myself to how not okay the way we all live is. 

Most people who don't worry about low-paid workers figure that it's a free labor market, and if those workers want a job that pays better, it's up to them to do something to get one. We shouldn't feel bad for them if they don't. I guess I have a hard time buying that because of how long I was once stuck in retail work, how impossible it once seemed to me I'd ever escape, and how lucky I am to have been rescued from it. Things happen in life, and a lot of people end up in places they didn't mean to be. The free market is not a perfect mechanism, and it doesn't lead to a perfect meritocracy. The American Dream can get sidetracked by bad luck as much as by bad choices. 

In any event, for now, living through the crisis for me is shaping up to just be a time when it's harder for me to push aside thoughts I never quite fully succeed at pushing away even in happier times. I feel utterly parasitic, with no way to lessen the burden or share the risk of better people. 

Diversity that isn't forced: the K-drama "Itaewon Class"

We're so used to shows in the U.S. having the requisite diversity in them, we hardly notice it anymore. If we do notice it, it's likely a sinking feeling of how perfunctory that diversity is, how the mix of demographic characteristics in a given show feels like a team of HR experts created the show in a lab, rather than a team of creatives coming up with it in a bar, basement, or garage. There's usually little organic about the diversity in many of the shows we watch now, and whatever might have once felt inspiring or revolutionary about having a mix of characters that represented a wide mix of people is now gone.

(Enjoy the soundtrack while you read this. It's one of the strengths of the show.)

That's why watching Itaewon Class, now available up to the final episode on Netflix, felt so fresh and joyous. South Korea isn't in an era right now of perfunctory diversity; watch any movie or drama, and you're likely to only see Koreans. That's not necessarily ignoring demographic realities for Korea the way it would be here; South Korea really is mostly made up of South Koreans. But there are other people in South Korea besides traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine ethnically Korean men and women falling in love with each other. Itaewon Class finally has a few of these people in the story.

The story's still built around two traditional characters. In fact, what makes the male lead, Pak Saeroyi, so compelling is that he's got a decades out-of-date ethos that he's trying to make work in the modern world. He refuses to sacrifice his principles, which is originally what gets him into trouble and sets the whole plot in motion. He ends up in a bit of a love triangle with two women, one a bit more traditional and the other an example of a grab-life-by-the-balls take-no-prisoner modern career gal.

But in addition to these leads, we get two characters I've never seen in a Korean drama before. One is a Guinean-Korean young man, Tony, who speaks fluent Korean he learned from his father and has returned to Korea to try to find his family and gain his Korean citizenship. He faces a lot of prejudice and just faulty assumptions from people. Everyone assumes he is a foreigner who doesn't speak Korean, and he has to keep assuring them that he is Korean, even when they hear him speaking the language right in front of them. There are quite a few "blasian" black-Korean people in the world, many of whom are the result of U.S. service person-Korean woman unions, but Korea hasn't traditionally paid much attention to this population. (Other than when Heinz Ward won the Super Bowl MVP.)

There's also Ma Hyeon-yi, a transgender female. She's vulnerable but tough, and when she is outed, it's a moment for the country to reflect on its thoughts about transgendered people.

There are two reasons these characters' existence in the drama doesn't feel forced. First is that there are no official forces in Korea demanding greater diversity. The show did this because it's the story they wanted to write. (It's based on a web comic.) The second reason is right in the name of the show. It's set in Itaewon, one of the most Bohemian and international parts of Seoul, already a fairly international city. So oddballs and misfits belong there. They're organic to a story about Itaewon.

There are, of course, criticisms one could make about Tony and Hyeon-yi. Neither gets quite the level of fleshing out and agency the other characters who work in the restaurant that makes up much of the main setting of the show do. There were a number of times I expected a flashback for both of these characters that never came. Hyeon-yi says something at one point about fathers and how their love can be inscrutable, and it was the perfect moment to give us her backstory, but the moment just passed.

Also, Hyeon-yi is played by a cis-female actress. That might have just been an unavoidable bit of casting. I don't know how many trans-female actresses there are in Korea. But it was a little bit of a cheat, because it didn't really challenge the prejudices of viewers very much to have a classically female looking actress. When the super-masculine waiter at the restaurant seems to finally take a romantic interest in her, it's not hard for viewers to accept without challenging them, because the only thing really signifying Hyeon-yi's otherness is the fact we've been told she's different.

These are the characters I'm talking about. The one on the right is Hyeon-yi, the one on the left is the one who ?maybe? ends up interested in her romantically. This photo of her is from before her surgery in the show, when the show is still trying to make her look somewhat like a man. 

Still, I couldn't help enjoying the story for its frank treatment of parts of Korean society that really exist but don't get much attention. I'm not going to tell you that this or any Korean drama is great art. I watch these shows because I want to get better at Korean, and I don't see any harm in enjoying watching dramas while I'm trying to improve. I get to watch something I'd feel far too guilty to enjoy if I were watching it in English, because it would feel like a waste of time. So put all my reviews of Korean dramas in brackets. But given the limits of the genre, I felt like this one in particular did about as much as it could do with the show.

Neither hot nor cold: how America's reaction to coronavirus highlights its identity problem

Sometimes, advocates for particular points of view will strain to show that the idea they are arguing for makes sense not for ideological reasons, but pragmatic ones. Take diversity as an example. Most people argue for diversity on ideological grounds, such as justice or fairness or equality. But a study by Boston Consulting Group hinted at a practical, self-interest-based reason why companies should strive for diversity: companies that are diverse make more money.

I know some mathematicians who take issue with the methodology of that study, but let's assume there's some validity to it. Even beyond that study, there are plenty of other examples in the world of diversity as a pragmatic value, from the survivability of diverse gene pools in nature to the principle of having diverse investments. At the heart of it, though, there is a principle involved in making a pragmatic claim like "diversity is good for us" that is hard to get at through reasoning. There is a chain of reasoning we have to undergo here that runs something like this: 1) It is good for companies to make a profit; 2) Diversity helps companies make that profit; therefore 3) Diversity is a useful goal for society, not merely an ideological one, because it helps us accomplish something we all agree is good, which is companies making money.

As any beginning philosophy class will annoyingly point out, though, there is sort of an intellectual dodge going on here. How did we decide that companies making money is a good goal? What do we base that on? Is that just an a priori assumption we have, one we don't feel the need to prove? If we don't like the idea of saying it's an a priori assumption, we might then launch into another pragmatic line of reasoning: it's good for companies to make money because they can then pay good salaries, which means people will be able to buy the things they want, and this will make them happy. But that, of course, is based on priori assumptions that we ought to want people to be happy, and that we know what happiness is, and that one's happiness increases along with one's ability to consume. At some point, there is always going to be an a priori assumption somewhere underpinning a pragmatic argument. 

Lately, I've been seeing people on social media who favor socialized medicine and a living wage using the coronavirus outbreak to make a pragmatic argument, rather than an ideological one, for why we all need these policy changes. The argument is that stressed low-income workers, either because they lack affordable health care or because they can't afford not to work, will go to work sick, spreading the disease. Since even wealthy people opposed to paying for socialized medicine and a living wage would be affected by poor people spreading the disease like this, those people should change their minds out of self-interest, if they won't do it for ideological reasons. It's the same argument Dr. Greg House pointed out over a decade ago when he didn't eat at the hospital cafeteria because of the workers there, one of whom he suspected of being sick: "When you make ten dollars an hour, you kind of need your ten dollars an hour." 

An example of what I've been seeing

This is better than the "diversity makes us money" argument, perhaps, in that it's easier to see the link between a policy and an outcome we consider desirable, but it still runs into the same a priori roadblock. And even to stick to pragmatic reasoning, presumably there are long-term ways to mitigate the threat the poor pose to the rich in this scenario. In some sectors, for example, we could replace the poor with machines that don't get sick. Or the rich could avoid going to stores where they might get sick. They could even hire the poor to go shopping for them. If we don't favor these changes, it's likely for ideological reasons, not pragmatic ones. 

In other words, this argument in favor of expanding social safety net payments to the poor only holds water for us if we see paying for a social safety net for poorer workers as more desirable than other solutions we could create, and we will only see it that way if we have a priori assumptions that lead us to feel that way. The best philosophies, of course, combine the ideological and the practical. Just as any practical argument has to have an a priori assumption under it somewhere, every ideological belief is useless if there is no way to implement it. But our society tends to ignore the ideological side much more than the practical one.  

I can't count the number of arguments I've seen on social media the last few weeks about whether the government's proposed solutions to deal with this threat show the hypocrisy of our opposition to socialist solutions. "Everyone's a socialist in a crisis," the progressives say, while the conservatives staunchly insist that no, intervening in a crisis doesn't change the fundamental nature of who we are. Progressives point out the hypocrisy of suddenly caring about people out of work because of coronavirus and not intervening for the more quotidian crises that happen to people all the time. Conservatives stick to their guns, certain that it doesn't contaminate the competitiveness of our people to be rescued in an emergency, but it would if we did it all the time. 

The reason these two sides are seeing different things in the coronavirus response is because they have different a priori assumptions. At heart, liberals believe in erring on the side of giving aid to the vulnerable, while conservatives at heart believe that a culture built on competition will actually improve life overall.

What we're seeing now is just the same identity crisis America suffers from all the time, but made more obvious through a crisis. We are equally descended from Puritans and Quakers. We feel with roughly equal conviction the responsibility of the individual to fend for himself and the responsibility of all of us to care for our neighbor. 

While every culture is a pastiche of different ideas, our current pastiche isn't intentional in any way. It's just the random averaging out of all the underlying beliefs, all the a priori assumptions canceling one another out like colliding waves, sapping our overall energy we could be using to respond to crises. 

If our culture actually believed anything with fervor, we'd be better equipped to deal with trouble when it came. If we were fully an individualist, fend-for-yourself nation, we wouldn't be quarantining at all. We'd say we're going to meet this thing head-on, and the free market will realize that we're about to need a lot more health care, and it would meet that problem by suddenly making a lot of medical equipment. If we are more pragmatic capitalists who understand that the market, while usually efficient, isn't always fast enough to respond to a crisis, we could use the Defense Production Act to get the free market turned around faster. But we'd still be responding to this crisis with a keep calm and carry on approach.

On the other hand, if we were fully a nation that prioritized the vulnerable, we'd be locked down much more than we are. But because we're neither fully either thing, neither hot nor cold, we end up spewing a response out of our mouths that is sort of the worst of both worlds. It's a lot like our health care system. Either a fully socialized system or a fully capitalist system without insurance--with price wars and transparent prices and all the other things we're used to--would be better than what we have now. But because we don't know what we are and tend to just let opposing forces average out, we have the worst of both worlds.

Deciding what our a priori beliefs are is hard. It's much harder now than it was for our great-grandparents, because we can no longer just look to religious dogmas to tell us what our a priori beliefs ought to be. There's nothing we can do about that. The push from some conservatives to try to get America to return to old religious dogmas is doomed. Much of the country couldn't believe those dogmas anymore if we tried. That means we have work to do figuring out what we really believe in now. Ethics in the world today is a little bit aesthetics and a little bit ontology. It's a question of what world we want to live in and who we want to be, which are open-ended questions we can answer any way we choose. The number of choices open to us is dizzying.

But we need to choose something. More than likely, this isn't going to be a threat we can get past in two weeks or four or eight. We can flatten the curve for a time, but the disease isn't going to go away. Until we get a vaccine, we're going to remain vulnerable to this. The rugged individualists in our society might be shamed into compliance for now, but will they continue to comply unwillingly if this is still going on in eighteen months? Congress might pass a relief bill with checks to the needy today, but what if the economy is still half shuttered in six months?  Twelve? How many trillion dollar relief packages does Congress have in its back pocket? How long can people keep going with disruptions to common consumer goods? 

Barring some kind of miraculous cure, the hard decisions are yet to come, when we've exhausted our ability to combat the threat in a low-cost way to the average person. And even when we do finally get past this, as I more than half expect we will, the shape of our economy at that point is going to force us to ask questions about who we are and what we want that we've been pushing off for decades. Some people have commented that it's good that we are facing a threat that only kills 1-3% of the people who get it, because we're getting a live drill that will hopefully prepare us for the deadlier disease we all know will eventually get here. It's also possible that this crisis is a good chance for us to face the questions we have needed to face for as long as we've been a country. Who are we and what do we want? Without answering those questions, there are limits to how long we can last, even without an unprecedented threat to weaken us. 

"This is not our customary rejection letter"

Writers trying to get journals to publish their work are always trying to read tea leaves. Does the fact they've held onto my work so long mean they're seriously considering it? Will I have a better chance getting published if I change my cover letter to something more personal? One of the things writers who get rejected a lot (which is everyone) often find themselves wondering is this: "Is that rejection letter I just got a standard rejection, or an "encouraging" or personal rejection, one that means I was close and should try again?"

There's a whole wiki dedicated to the rejection letters of literary journals, trying to determine which are the form rejections and which mean they actually liked your work but just couldn't use it. It's kind of a big deal to get one of these personal rejection, especially from a higher-prestige journal. They don't give them out like candy. (I know, because I've gotten a lot of the form rejections before I started getting the personal ones.)

Some form letters are easy to identify. The formula goes something like, "Thank you for submitting, but it's not right for us at this time." If that's all it says, you got a form rejection. But there are some letters that leave you guessing. The contain phrases like "but we encourage you to submit again," or "we enjoyed your work." Those could be form rejections or they could be meant as the encouraging kind of rejection. (And of course, even a second-tier rejection that encourages you to submit again is often still going to be written using a template, so that might be why some of these phrases are still impersonal.)

One magazine, however, makes it completely clear if you got the other kind of rejection letter, as I've just discovered. Agni just sent a rejection that said this: "Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read X. The manuscript isn't right for us just now, but please consider sending other work in the future. The is not our customary rejection letter. We hope you'll keep us in mind."

What an excellent response! Rather than leave the writer guessing if her work resonated at all, they make it very clear. I wish every journal did that, or something similar to it.

I've had over a year now of getting these personalized kinds of rejection letters, after many years of mostly only getting the standard rejections from everybody. It's nice to know I've gotten better, but I think I've already made the big improvements that allowed me to make easy improvements. From here, it's all going to be greater grinding to make increasingly smaller gains in order to make it over the hump to get into the better journals. It's so insanely competitive. And for the last few months, I've really been leaning toward feeling like it's not worth the effort. So I'm simultaneously encouraged and discouraged. But it's not even a bad form of discouragement. It's more like I've been far enough down the road to know what the landscape is really like, and I'm kind of thinking it's not for me. That's different from the kind of giving up that leaves you with regrets. It's the kind that's informed. It's more like a 26-year-old semi-pro tennis player with bad knees giving up his dream of joining the pro circuit than it is like a high schooler giving up after not qualifying for state one year.

Fading hopes for reunification: the Korean drama "Crash Landing on You"

Last week, someone put one of those challenges up on Twitter where you're supposed to name four books that "changed" you. I wasn't sure if I could really measure which books had a real change on me and which I merely admired, but I did the best I could with the list. One book I included was Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. It's about two political prisoners who are cell mates in a Latin American underground jail. They are occasionally tortured for information. Completely powerless while in prison and totally at the mercy of their captors, they cast about for ways to regain some kind of tiny agency over their lives. One of the prisoners, Molina, who is jailed for being gay, finds one small thing he can do: he tells stories to his hard-core communist cell mate Valentin, who was jailed for openly fighting the government.

Molina likes to re-tell the stories of movies he has seen, providing a kind of screen-to-audiobook adaptation for Valentin's amusement. One of the movies he re-tells is a Nazi propaganda film, the kind Leni Riefenstahl might have made. Molina seems to have genuinely liked the movie, which Valentin finds impossible to believe, given that it was propaganda meant to serve the worst purposes. Molina believes, though, that the film makers, constrained in their ability to make a different movie, chose to make the most beautiful movie they could make within the constraints given. Molina finds the romance in the movie beautiful, and doesn't feel the beauty in it is less because it is there to serve an evil purpose.

That has stuck with me. None of us has any real power to affect the world the way we'd like to. This fact might not be as dramatically shoved in our faces as it is for political prisoners in a hellhole of a torture chamber, but our power over our circumstances is usually incredibly circumscribed. Society is what it is. I wanted to be a poet. Instead, I'm doing the job that society made available for me to do. Within those constraints, I'm doing the best I can to live with some kind of free will, to bring something beautiful into being.

The tragedy of North and South

North and South Korea are both full of people who share a common history, a common language, and a common culture. Every Korean person sees their separation since the end of World War II as a tragedy, but nobody seems to think it will be resolved in my lifetime. There was some hope once. After the Soviet Union fell apart, North Korea's original ruler, Kim Il Sung, died, and some thought that North Korea would fall like many former Soviet satellite states did. It didn't, but South Korea later implemented the Sunshine Policy, leading to unprecedented breakthroughs. Families from North and South met for reunions. South Korean companies opened an industrial park in the North that employed North Korean workers. There were cultural exchanges. People thought there might be a real shot for something--if not total reunion, at least an openness between them that might be nearly as good.

But that all disappeared in the late 00s and early 10s. The Cheonan sank in early 2010, which South Korea blamed on North Korea. The industrial park all but disappeared, lines of communication and travel were closed, and the two countries went back to cold war.

In the last few years, there have been a few glimmers of hope: Trump's meeting with Kim Jong Un, South Korean President Moon's historic step into North Korea, a slight thawing in North-South relations, the 2018 Winter Olympics. But hopes never quite rose quite as high for quite as long as they had before. Right now, we don't seem any closer to a meaningful reunion than we've ever been.

Proof of the low hopes: Crash Landing on You

The best evidence of the humbler hopes of Korean people for an eventual reunion I can think of is in the wonderful 16-part drama Crash Landing on You (사랑의 불시착). Like Molina from Puig's novel, the writers of Crash Landing have looked to romance as a socially acceptable way to find power in a powerless situation. In this case, the writers wanted to tell a story about North-South relations at a time when any such story was likely to be fraught with tension on both sides of the border.

The drama succeeds by focusing not on politics, but on love. When Yun Se-ri crash lands in North Korea after a sudden tornado pushes her hang glider there, she is found by Ri Jong Hyok, the hyper-masculine son of the chief of the General Political Bureau, a man who might be considered as the second most powerful man in North Korea.

Ri Jong Hyok (Hyon Bin) beats up so many people in this series, you can forget it's a romantic comedy

Ri doesn't turn Yun into the authorities. He quickly falls in love. Because he's in love, the audience can sidestep the issue of whether this is a betrayal of his country. There's a subtext to this. There are a lot of reports out of North Korea that the citizens up north watch a lot of South Korean dramas, at great risk to their own lives. Early in the series, we find a lovably naive North Korean watching the now 16-year-old drama Stairway to Heaven, one of the first big hits of the Korean Wave of the 2000s. The writers of Crash Landing were clearly hoping that at least some North Koreans might somehow get their hands on their drama, and they wrote the content about North Korea with that audience in mind.

That left them a dilemma. They wanted to write respectfully of North Korea, but they couldn't praise North Korea too much, both because it might run afoul of South Korea's National Security Act, and also because it's a little too much to praise the North in the name of cultural diplomacy.

The writers found their way out of this dilemma in two ways. First, they focused on basic human relationships that are more fundamental than national citizenship. There is, of course, the romantic relationship between Ri and Yun. But there is also friendship, mainly the friendships between Yun and the North Koreans she gets to know. There are also family bonds, the bonds which allow the director of the General Political Bureau to stand by his son in spite of terrible risk.

Secondly, when they needed to make North Korea look bad, they found a scapegoat in the Ministry of State Security, North Korea's feared secret police. They essentially made it possible for a North Korean watching the show to feel that neither the people nor the state--including the Dear Leader--were being attacked. Instead, it was those vexatious Gestapos in the MSS. It was a brilliant move on the part of the writers, because honestly, who ANYWHERE likes the secret police? Even Kim Jong Un probably hates them, as much as he needs them.

There is a lot of humor and optimism in the show, but I wasn't sure we were going to get a happy ending. When the show kept referring to the earlier drama Stairway to Heaven, I took that in two ways. On the one hand, the writers made frequent references to Stairway's most famous line: Love always comes back. I thought the writers were linking the fate of Jong Hyok and Se-ri to the fates of the two countries. There are all kinds of hokey contrivances in the series to keep putting the two together, but this use of the cliches of the Korean drama are totally justified if we are thinking of Se-ri and Jong Hyok as microcosms of their two countries. North and South Korea SHOULD come back together, however long it takes.

But then again, Stairway ended with the death of the female lead, so....I wasn't sure where Crash Landing was going.

It concluded with maybe a perfect ending, but also one that reveals the fading hopes of the present generation for reunification on any kind of grand scale. (SPOILERS COMING!!) The two are separated at the end, but they manage to meet once a year every year in, of all places, Switzerland, that country famous for its neutrality. The lovers can't hope for ultimate union. They can't get married and have children. They can only meet once in a fleeting while in a dream-like neutral state.

I thought often while watching this drama of the 2003 Korean movie 남남북여, translated into English as Love Impossible. The title of that movie in the original is a reference to an old Korean saying, one stressing that the best looking women are in the north and the best looking men in the south. (I always assume a South Korean man made that one up, although it's a pun in Korean, so maybe lots of people thought of it.) In Love Impossible, the love really doesn't end up being impossible. The South Korean man finds a way to be with his North Korean love--by directly convincing Kim Jong Il of the power of love, no less!

Clearly, switching from a southern man and northern woman to the reverse wasn't the only thing that's changed in the 17 years since the movie was made. The hopes for what's possible have dimmed considerably as well, if we judge from Love Impossible and Crash Landing.

This was one of the most enjoyable K-dramas I've watched in a long time. It also had more to say than most do, although it mostly managed to hide its message in a compelling romance. It used love to tell a story that was hard to find space to tell. And while the humble happiness the lovers find doesn't fully satisfy, maybe that half-fulfilled happiness will keep alive some hope in whatever people on both sides of the border happen to watch the series by making them also yearn for greater satisfaction.