“I’m Sorry, I Love You” (미안하다 사랑한다)

By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
January 5, 2016

Moo-hyuk (played by So Ji-Sub)
Eun-chae (played by Im Soo-Jung)
Yoon (played by Jung Kyung-Ho)
Min-Joo (played by Seo Ji-Young)
Oh Deul-hee (played by Lee Hye-Young)
Gal-chi (played by Park Gun-Tae)

↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

There’s a scene early on in “I’m Sorry, I Love You” that encapsulates the best and worst elements of this dramatic series. A man returns to a strip club just as they are about to auction off a young woman, who doesn’t realize what’s happening to her. He grabs her from them and they outrun the goons sent to chase them down.

What she doesn’t know is that while she had been passed out drunk, he had sold her to the bar’s owner.

So, why the change of heart?

Part of the problem with this 16-episode drama (which aired in 2004 on the Korean network KBS) is that we’re not sure how to feel about him. Moo-Hyuk was abandoned at birth in Korea and sent to an orphanage, where he was adopted at the age of two by an Australian family. In his backstory, we learn that his adoptive parents were abusive and basically threw him away…just like his birth mom.

Angry and uneducated, Moo-hyuk is street smart and quick at picking up languages. Thanks to his Korean-Aussie girlfriend, he has learned to speak conversational Korean. He has also picked up enough Chinese and Japanese to scam Asian tourists who accept his offer to help them. Instead, he and his gang steal their valuables.

That’s how he met Eun-chae, the young woman he sold to the strip club. She’s a little mouse of a girl who walks around for most of the series with a confused look on her face.

She’s a complete doormat for Yoon, her childhood friend whose music career is on the rise. She works as his stylist and is in love with him. He is in love with Min-Joo, a popular actress who also happens to be one of Eun-Chae’s best friends. After seeing the two cozy up to each other on a videoshoot in Melbourne, Eun-chae tells them she’ll meet them at the airport. That’s when she got lost, was robbed and was “saved” by Moo-hyuk.

She could’ve saved herself some trouble by simply calling Yoon or Min-Joo. Instead of phoning them — or the rest of the team traveling with them — for help, she simply stares wistfully at photos of Yoon on her phone. That’s the kind of woman Eun-chae is. She’d rather put herself in danger than inconvenience others.

“I’m Sorry, I Love You” would’ve benefited from some taut editing. Had this series had been cut down to a 2-hour film or a 4-hour mini-series, the showrunners really could have created something special.

As much as I enjoyed looking at heartthrob So Ji-Sub, watching him suffer for 16 hours was just too much. No doubt Moo-hyuk has led an incredibly difficult life. First his birth parents abandoned him. Then his adoptive parents threw him out. And then his girlfriend dumped him for an old, Aussie mob boss. Why? She loves Moo-hyuk, she says, but the mob guy is rich.

The Aussies must run a nicer mob than Americans, because even after Moo-hyuk steals her away moments before she is to walk down the aisle, there is no retribution. When he returns her to the villa, no one so much as lays a finger on him. He does, however, end up with two bullets in the head that were meant for the mob boss. Even though his ex-girlfriend had betrayed him, Moo-hyuk tried to shield her from getting hurt.

One of the bullets would become his death sentence. The doctor’s prognosis: He has a year a live. The newly minted Mrs. Mob Boss tells him that her husband now wants him dead. She gives him “enough money to last a lifetime.” (How she managed to get that money without her husband knowing is beyond me.) She tells him to return to Korea to find his biological parents.

He flies off to Korea and is reunited with Eun-chae, who believes that he came all the way to Seoul because he is in love with her.

Unlike thousands of real-life adoptees who are unable to locate their birth families, Moo-hyuk learns that he has a twin sister, who has a young son who takes care of her. When she was 5, she chased after a car thinking that her birth mom might be in there and was hit by another automobile. Since then, her mental faculties remained at that age, which is why she named her son Gal-chi. (In English, Gal-chi translates into hairtail fish.)

The time that Moo-hyuk spends with his twin and his nephew are some of the best moments of the series. Gal-chi doesn’t have to be the adult of the house when his uncle is around. And his sister doesn’t have to worry about being assaulted by the neighborhood men, who know that she can’t and won’t fight back.

Later, Moo-Hyuk finds out that his birth mom is a famous, rich actress and that her son is none other than Yoon. He had always imagined that he was given away for adoption because his mother was too poor to raise him. Why did she throw him away? Devastated and enraged, he plots his revenge on both mother and son. He befriends Yoon and gets hired as his driver.

One of the more amusing elements was his plot against Yoon. Moo-Hyuk sets up a swanky pad in the same condo complex as Min-Joo (the actress that Yoon pines for). Instead of wearing his ubiquitous newsboy cap, he hides behind sunglasses, slicked back hair and a ridiculous little stick-on porn ‘stache. In almost every encounter they have, he ignores her, which only makes her want him more.

His plan works. Yoon discovers the two of them together and gets into what could be a fatal car accident. Yoon could survive with a new heart.

Moo-hyuk tells Eun-chae he will give Yoon his heart, if she will stay with him until he dies.

The real travesty is the time spent trying to spare everyone from getting hurt. When Eun-chae and Moo-hyuk realize they have fallen in love with each other, they spend so much time trying to protect each other from the inevitable that they waste precious time.

His Ex, who had married the mob boss, comes to Korea to find Moo-Hyuk and say she still loves him. She has left her husband and found a surgeon in Germany who was confident he could save Moo-Hyuk’s life.

Instead of devoting so many hours on the co-dependent relationships between Eun-chae and Yoon, and Eun-chae and Moo-Hyuk, I wish that the writers had spent more time on fleshing out some of the other characters. I would like to know what Yoon’s mother was like during her youth. Was there another side of her than what was presented to us? Giving up her first child for adoption could certainly be one reason why she overcompensated by coddling Yoon. (Although, allowing a 25-year-old man to crawl into her bed because he’s having a bad dream reeks of all kinds of ewwww.) But was she always so rude to people who weren’t family?

There is not one moment when she is sincerely nice to Moo-Hyuk — not even after she learns that he has offered to donate his heart to her son.

He never tells her that he’s her first-born son.

Spoiler alert:

Moo-hyuk dies. He chooses to kill himself in a motorcycle accident. There is no last-minute miracle that saves him. And the scene is quite tragic. His body is buried in Australia. Eun-chae returns to Australia to visit his gravesite and kills herself.

Moo-hyuk’s birthmom never knew that she had a son. As a budding starlet, she had an affair with a married movie director who got her pregnant. Expecting to wake up to hold her child, she was instead told that he had died. She also wasn’t told that she had given birth to twins. Her parents had worried that her career and future would be ruined by the scandal. So they instructed her chauffeur to take the babies to an orphanage. The chauffeur was Eun-chae’s father.

Before Moo-hyuk died, Yoon told him that he had been adopted.

Yoon survives after receiving Moo-hyuk’s heart. He doesn’t tell his mother that the heart beating inside of him belongs to the son she believed to be dead.

A few thoughts about the adoption plot:

While much of this series was overly dramatic, one aspect that rang true was the adoption plotline. To this day, there is a huge stigma surrounding unwed mothers in Korea, who have a very difficult time raising children as single parents. Employers can terminate them for their lack of “morals” and the government doesn’t provide the same sort of economic assistance as countries such as the U.S.

There is also the expectation that ethnically Korean people should be fluent in Korean, regardless of where they were raised. Because this was a Korean drama aimed at viewers who speak Korean, the series had explained that Moo-kyuk learned to speak nearly flawless Korean from his girlfriend. But for the majority of adoptees raised by non-Korean speaking families, this would be next to impossible.

The scene that best exemplified these expectations was when a Korean documentary crew interviewed Korean adoptees in Melbourne. When editing the piece together, the director complained about Moo-hyuk not using honorifics, as is customary in Korean speech. The fact that a young man who was an Australian national could even speak Korean was a feat in itself. (Imagine how they would’ve praised a white man who could speak a few words of the language.) It was heartbreaking that his achievement was seen as less than.

© 2016 JAE-HA KIM | All Rights Reserved