“Green Mothers’ Club” (그린마더스클럽)

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
March 3, 2023

Lee Eun-pyo (played by Lee Yo-won)
Byun Chun-hee (played by Choo Ja-hyun)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

I don’t think I’ve seen a K-drama lately where I liked it so much in the beginning, but slowly began to hate it for a variety of reasons, starting with a wishy washy leading lady and ending with a prurient adoption theme that made my stomach turn. There was so much promise in the beginning, before it let go of reality and turned into a free-for-all makjang (or overly-exaggerated series).

In a nutshell, the series revolves around a group of mothers whose lives are spent pushing their young children to excess so that they can be the best student no matter what. They spend money they don’t have on after-school hagwons for extra tutoring. And they clique together and take turns turning on whichever mom has been deemed the weakest for that week.

They teach their children that working in a supermarket is shameful and that no one in their position should work at such a “degrading” job. So when a bitchy child threatens her frenemy — saying she’ll out her mother for working part-time at a grocery store — unless she agrees to accuse a smarter boy of sexually molesting them, the child agrees. Mind you, these are kindergartners.

That’s right: this is a community that looks down on hard work, unless it’s the kind they can gloat about. I watched this series as I waited for new episodes of “Crash Course in Romance” — which also centers on mothers pushing their children to do better in academics — to release on Netflix. And all I can say is that my parents had always told us that we immigrated to the U.S. for a better education. I had always assumed they meant we’d have access to better schools here, but I think what my parents really wanted for us was to learn without being subjected to this part of South Korea’s educational system.

The epicenter of this series is Eun-pyo, an educated almost-professor who left Paris before she could earn her Ph.D in fine arts. Why? Because her boyfriend dumped her for her rich and pretty friend Jin-ha (Kim Gyu-ri), so she hightailed it back to Korea. Eun-pyo’s hot French beau Louis (Choi Gwang-rok) — a Korean adoptee who miraculously speaks Korean (quelle surprise!), even though he was raised by parents who didn’t speak Korean— dumps her on the spot and chases after Jin-ha.

“Green Mothers’ Club” and the film “Return to Seoul” — which centers on a Korean adoptee who was raised in France — were both released in 2022. Yet the depictions of adoptees are vastly different, with this K-drama using adoption as a trope to introduce a gross forbidden love subplot. (More about this in the Spoilers below.)

Flash forward 15 years or so and everyone is living in the same complex. Eun-pyo’s second cousin Yun-ju (Joo Min-kyung, who was so good as the youngest sister in “One Spring Night“) is on the poorer side and sucks up to all the alpha women, even turning against her own cousin when it suits her. Young-mi (“Parasite” actress Jang Hye-jin) is a divorcee remarried to a rising director who abuses her children. Even when they tell her this, she doesn’t want to lose the prestige of being married to an artist and makes excuses for him.

And then there’s Chun-hee, the queen bee of the group who is quick to make fun of Eun-pyo’s rambunctious son, because he isn’t a robotic A-student like her daughter.

Eun-pyo is strangely drawn to Chun-hee, even though the latter is a backstabber who accuses her of having an affair and being a murderer. She turns all the neighborhood busybodies against her. The rumors even trickle down to the neighborhood bakery owner, who cruelly turns Eun-pyo away saying she doesn’t want her business.

Call me a weirdo, but if anyone made even one such allegation against me, I would have nothing to do with them ever again. But there are story arcs to smooth things over and explain why Chun-hee does what she does. And guess what? None of the reasons worked for me. And forgiving her friend is one thing, but why in the world would she return to the bakery where the owner was so despicable to her? Trust me when I say there are tons of delicious bakeries in Seoul.

Everyone has issues in their lives they have to deal with. Not everyone is rich. In fact, most of us aren’t. That’s when you have to adapt. If that means you have to get a divorce to protect your children (or yourself), or you have to cancel your kids’ expensive extracurricular activities, that’s what you do. Of course, you may lose some of the advantages that society has to offer the elite. But there’s no guarantee that anything you do will land you at the top of the pile anyhow.

Airdates: Sixteen 70-minute episodes aired on JTBC from April 6 to May 26, 2022. I watched this on Netflix.

Spoiler Alert: Eun-pyo’s older son, Dong-seok (Jung Chi-yul), is a happy kindergartner who the other mothers make fun of, because they think he’s not very bright. In reality, he’s a genius who doesn’t like doing the classwork, because it’s too simple and basic for him. The most poignant part of this series was watching this happy child being pushed to study non stop because his doing well in school reflected positively on his mother.

OK, so here’s the backstory on the French dude. He was adopted at a young age to French parents, who already had two children. They had a biological child, Antoine, and Rhea — who they had adopted from China before they adopted him. He and Rhea fell in love. But then she mysteriously disappeared for years and he was heartbroken that the love of his life (ew!) was out of his life. When he saw Jin-ha, he was shocked that she looked just like Rhea. So he dumped Eun-pyo and married Jin-ha. When Jin-ha found out, she died by suicide. (There is a vague flashback that shows him trying to save her, but it’s implied that he didn’t try hard enough, because her death would free him up to pursue Rhea.)

Previously, none of the women involved knew that Jin-ha’s resemblance to Rhea is why he had married her. After finding out, Eun-pyo calls him out. And this is what he says:

Oh my god, Louis, you ridiculously handsome but abnormal freak! No. It’s. Not! Especially when your first love was your sister!

Everyone is shocked that Louis married a woman that looks like his sister. But no one is shocked that he and his sister have a physical relationship! And for all those who’ll say, “But they’re not biologically related…” Shut. Up. They were raised together as siblings since they were young children. You do not want to open up this can of worms as to why it’s OK for family members to have sexual relationships with each other. It’s simply not OK.

But before it was revealed that he married Jin-ha so that he could be with someone who looked like his “first love,” photos of Jin-ha semi-nude are released on the internet. When Eun-pyo tries to get Louis to use his clout to expunge those images from the web, he tells her to mind her own business. But she tells him that while Jin-ha was his wife, she was first a human being whose memory deserves to be protected and that he should keep that consideration in mind. Yes, girl! Tell that sister-fucker off!

The one who released the photos was Young-mi’s director husband. Jin-ha had never posed in the nude. He deep faked her face onto another woman’s body.

Eun-pyo is kind of a dim bulb for a good portion of this series. When the director assaults her from behind in a dark alleyway, she bites his hand and his glasses fall off. When she realizes who attacked her, she goes back to the scene of the crime and picks up the glasses, getting her DNA all over them when she could have — oh, I don’t know — called her detective husband for assistance.

Oh, but there’s more. When she finds out that Chun-hee has been secretly injecting people with illegal drugs in exchange for money — to help pay off her husband’s gambling debts and their children’s educational expenses — and is about to be arrested, Eun-pyo helps her escape. But Chun-hee is ultimately caught and serves a short year in prison.

Don’t get me wrong, Chun-hee does have a sob story background. A doctor at the hospital she worked at accidentally killed a patient. And rather than dealing with the lawsuits that would follow, the hospital used her as collateral damage instead, saying that she — a nurse — made the mistake. So what does she do? She tells the doctor she will remain quiet, but in exchange, he has to … marry her, because she thinks her life will be better off by marrying a murderous doctor who blames her for his mistakes.

Anyhow, the end.

© 2023 JAE-HA KIM | All Rights Reserved