Hey everyone!

Like what we did for the past couple of years, we’re having guest posts from the lovely folks on Patreon, to help us take stock of our drama years, yay! 🥳

We’ll be seeing about 2 guest posts per week, and this will unfold into January 2023, and that’s perfectly ok.

My annual year-in-review, which usually comes out in December, will also come out in January (or thereabouts 😅), after all the guest posts have been published.

If you missed our earlier posts, you can check them out as follows: Ele, Natalia, JJ, Sean, j3ffc, Uyen, MC, Elaine, lotusgirl, ABV, learjet, dreamingdrama.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Diasporic Chick is sharing her drama year.

Diasporic Chick’s been a part of our little Patreon community for a while, but this is the first time she’s sharing her drama year with us. What a great way to get to know her, yes?

Thanks Diasporic Chick, for taking the time to write this post! 😘

I hope you guys enjoy!

~ KFG ❤️

About Me

A tycoon heiress parachuting into the North Korean side of the DMZ, a 999-year old fox who wants to become a human by turning his marble blue, and Olympic fencing champion who falls in love with a journalist – what do these plots all have in common? 

In 16 episodes you become convinced that these are viable storylines in the epic world of Korean television dramas.

My Korean tv drama viewing started and intensified during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when my family of four was in social and physical quarantine and during the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US.

I needed to tune this out by tuning into beautifully shot cityscape panoramas, slice of life dramas, well developed scripts and nuanced character development with original soundtracks, all of this I found in k-dramas.

While the pandemic spurred my interest in this genre which I’ll admit borders on addictive sedentary couch behavior, it brought up familiar and nostalgic aspects of growing up in a majority Vietnamese and Mexican community and binge watching Chinese dubbed martial arts VHS tapes with my mom on a rain filled winter evenings in Northern California. 

Following the Actors and their recent works

My approach for finding new titles of shows to add to the streaming queue has been heavily driven by online commentary and internet research about actors and actresses whose performances I’ve enjoyed.

One day a global streaming service promoted Start Up (2020), and my husband and I decided to check it out.

While the actors Kim Seon-Ho, Nam Joo-Hyuk, Bae Suzy, and Kang Hanna impressed us with their performances in that series, I really did want the poor boy turned rich head of investment Han Jipyong to win the love of Seo Dal-mi, whom he had written letters to as a kid to comfort her in her loneliness.

When I noticed Kim Seon-Ho was the male lead in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha (2021) I had to watch, duly noting that he was a classically trained theater stage actor.

Nam Joo-Hyuk, who was the second male lead in Start Up, and Kim Tae-Ri both depicted coming of age romance in the backdrop of the devastation wreaked by Asian Financial Crisis in Twenty Five-Twenty One (2022).

The show continues to be in my top favorite list for its subtle but powerful contextualizing of economic and social context, and they even include an episode devoted to the South Korean journalistic coverage of the United States 9/11 tragedy.  

Bae Suzy in While You Were Sleeping (2017) was a novel plot about a woman who sees visions of future tragic events and tries to work with an investigator to prevent them.

Though I didn’t seek out her work, Kang Hanna adds a lot of humor to her supporting cast role in the sci-fi fantasy My Roommate is a Gumiho (2022) where she herself as the supporting cast there mainly for comic relief is a fox turned human.

This is an example of one of many nodes in my snowball approach to finding new K-drama content in a sea of narrative plenitude in South Korean dramas.

After viewing Start Up (2020), I, like many others, got hooked into the gateway film Crash Landing On You (2019), and of course, like millions of others, became obsessed with Hyun Bin, and sought out his previous work, including Secret Garden (2010), Memories of the Alhambra (2018), and recently on Korean Airlines flight, I watched Confidential Assignment II (2022).

Hyun Bin was someone whose character off screen seemed like a philanthropic individual.

Ever the consummate researcher going down many late night internet rabbit holes, typically after I complete viewing of a show that I enjoyed, I would feel the need to triangulate and know every tidbit about the main actors, read online reviews, and to gut check my instincts with Kfangirl’s opinion and Google’s average numerical ratings to see how much of others’ opinions jived with mine, and meticulously updating my k-drama spreadsheet to track my 1 to 5 ratings. 

Top Picks in 2023

Much to my disappointment, the number of heart string-tugging shows that debuted in 2023 were fewer than those released in 2022; it was actually difficult to keep my top shows in Asian cinema and television dramas within the calendar year: 

1. Hidden Love (2023)

A Chinese drama starring my new favorite China-based actress Zhao Lusi and Chen Zheyuan, beautifully shot rom-com with a solid script and a lot of good on-screen chemistry between the two main leads, supporting cast, and character development spanning many years leading up to the big confessionals and intense love between the OTP.

Apart from having rewatched this series I kid you not five times, I have listened to the OST on repeat, and it appears two of the songs on the playlist are performed by the multi-disciplinary creative actress-singer-visual artist herself, Zhao Lusi.

Sources on the internet say that she lent her wardrobe, original drawings, used her personal network in casting hard-to-reach actors like Victor Ma, and was a huge driving force in pushing to make the film actually happen after a few setbacks in production.

The series was filmed in Chengdu, Lusi’s hometown.

In a bit, I’ll return to the compilation of dramas featuring Zhao Lusi ,which helped me better understand her evolution as a young actress rising to meteoric fame.

2. Past Lives (2023) and Love to Hate You (2023)

Both starred Korean German diasporic returnee actor Teo Yoo (head nod to my friend TT who clued me into his talent on screen).

Both the award-winning film Past Lives (2023) and Love to Hate You (2023) show Teo Yoo’s acting range and his ability to convey his emotions non-verbally through his eyes, posture, and gestures. 

Past Lives features the story of two friends separated by immigration.

When Nora, the character portrayed by Greta Lee, moves to Canada with her family, twelve years later, she rekindles an intense online friendship with Hae Sung the character portrayed by Teo Yoo who remained in Seoul but whose intensity of love for his friend never dissipated in spite of the separation.

His visit to New York City another twelve years later, when Nora has now been happily married to her partner, and the restaurant scene where the tenderness of his nostalgia for Nora is melt-your-heart intense.

I rewatched the film on my couch late one night immediately after my first viewing because it tugged at me the first time and I needed to rewatch his acting with his infinity-pool-of-loneliness eyes.

Love to Hate You after the first episode was a much better view than similar plot So I Married the Anti-Fan (2022) – which both coincidentally show the dark underside of online bullying of women who date Korean super stars.

LTHY is about a female lead, who happens to be an attorney hired into a male dominated firm and knows how to fight and kick ass, was refreshing as the physically strong one in the relationship, but who discovers she is unable to bear the burden of seeing her love’s career go down the drain as their relationship becomes more serious.

A series of events leads to her past being dug up and misunderstood.

I saw Love to Hate You before I saw Past Lives and really developed an appreciation for Teo Yoo, who is closer in age to me than many of the young gorgeous strapping young lads with blemish free skin and wispy hair.

Teo Yoo, through his on screen character portrayals, exudes maturity and sensitivity in a way that I don’t see as often.

This, and the fact that I learned he is married to a Korean photographer 11 years his senior made me really intrigued as this is not the norm for Korean celebrities. 

3. Soundtrack #2 (2023)

..which had connection to Soundtrack #1, was for me a quick watch of 6 episodes.

The ex-lovers coincidentally re-entering each other’s lives and getting back together, with some bumps along the road, was unique and refreshing for the way it portrays a more mature kind of love.

The male lead is ghosted by his lover, then motivated to pursue his dream of being a successful media tycoon, and gets his satisfaction of learning that his ex-love was struggling financially and on the cusp of leaving a musical career playing piano, while she was supplementing income with app-based gig work.

Korean television series have a knack for portraying artists, writers, actors, and other creatives as their protagonists, and both Soundtrack series demonstrate this.

I was moved when Ji Suho let go of his desire for revenge against his ex, whom he was made to feel inferior and less than, when he was in their first relationship, though it was obvious throughout that he hadn’t really moved on, and in fact had been pining after her and their shared memories together all these years. 

Other shows that I watched and rewatched this year that were released in years prior included She Would Never Know (2021), Nevertheless (2021), Because This is My First Life (2017), and Monthly Magazine Home (2022).

Actress Jung So-Min in the latter two films chooses really good scripts with strong, independent female protagonists. 

My Love Affair this year with Chinese Dramas

After having watched about 30 Korean dramas by end of 2022, I spent much of the second half of 2023 enjoying Chinese dramas after hopping onto the Hidden Love (2023) bandwagon.

I have been following three favorite darlings on screen including Zhao Lusi, Yang Yang, and Riley Wang – a diasporic Canadian Taiwanese actor. 

For martial arts and epic battle scenes with romance and intrigue as per usual, Who Rules the World (2022) which stars Zhao Lusi and Yang Yang;

For online role playing games with effects and a college romance, see Love o2o (2016) starring Yang Yang and Zheng Shuang.

After the first few episodes, the show grew on me, and the last episode has a beautifully shot love scene with a red silk dress. Yang Yang even performs one of the songs in the OST. 

You Are My Glory (2021), starring Yang Yang and Dilraba Dilmurat (who identifies as part Uygur), which I highly recommend, had a slow burn then electric romance.

Yang Yang plays an astro-physicist, and viewers will always remember that he is “the rabbit who has seen the most stars”;

The Romance of Tiger and Rose (2020), starring Zhao Lusi and Ding Yuxi, contained a unique plot, where Lu Si’s character becomes a protagonist in her own script, in a city where women hold more power and her would-be antagonist/enemy falls in love with her through her ability to anticipate his next move; 

I Hear You (2019), starring Zhao Lusi and Riley Wang, is about an onscreen couple that eventually falls in love off screen, and for the first time that I’ve seen, a Tesla Model X has its day in Chinese cinema product placement – in nearly every episode;  

First Romance (2020), starring Riley Wang and Wan Peng about high school into college romance, has some adorable supporting cast, including the supporting male character who winds up not being as creepy as his character would suggest.

I want to believe that Riley Wang isn’t always going to be typecast as a musical prodigy in his main lead roles. 

In conclusion

So far, I can conclude that Chinese rom-coms have a different aesthetic than Korean dramas, and love scenes in Chinese-dramas are even more subtle than Korean dramas, with a lot of things implied but not revealed to the audience.

But there is room in my middle-aged heart for both Chinese and Korean dramas, and I do enjoy this new treasure trove of shows available to me – C-dramas tend to be shorter in length per episode but often range between 24 to 44 episodes.

~Diasporic Chick