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.