By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
May 28, 2020
Cha Yu-Ri (played by Kim Tae-Hee)
Cho Gang-Hwa (played by Lee Kyu-Hyung)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.
A sweet, sometimes slow series revolving around a dead woman who temporarily comes back to life, “Hi Bye, Mama!” tackles a lot of topics: death, grieving, notions of what constitutes a real mother, undying love and letting go. At times, the series is a comedy with slapstick humor that incites belly laughs. And within the same scene, the characters will sob so uncontrollably that viewers will be reaching for tissues to have a good cry along with them.
This is the first project lead actress Kim Tae-Hee tackled after giving birth to her second daughter in 2019. (Her husband is the idol and actor Rain.) Beautiful, poised and soulful, Kim is 100 percent believable as a mother who — when given the chance to live for 49 days — convinces herself that her only goal is to see her daughter, Seo-Woo. She doesn’t want to distrupt the lives of her husband, Gang-Hwa, who has remarried Min-Jung (Go Bo-Gyeol).
Min-Jung is a nurse, who quit her job to raise Seo-Woo. Ostracized by the other bitchy neighborhood moms because she is younger, prettier and — most importantly — a stepmother, she distances herself from them when they make half-hearted attempts to befriend her. Seo-Woo loves her, as does Gang-Hwa, which is why Yu-Ri is reticent to do what it would take to come back to life again for an indefinite amount of time: she has to regain her position as Gang-Hwa’s wife and Seo-Woo’s mother.
Yu-Ri gets a job as a kitchen helper at the pre-school that Seo-Woo attends, simply so that she can be close to her child. But here’s the problem I had: She so visibly only cares for her daughter — to the point of looking like a stalker. Everyone she works with notices, but her pat answer is that she pays so much attention to Seo-Woo because she’s so cute. All the children are cute. And yet none of the adults think her behavior is dangerous or even strangely odd.
Though Gang-Hwa had been a successful surgeon, he has been unable to return to the operating room after Yu-Ri’s death. (How he stayed employed for five years is beyond me, but it’s all part of the storyline.) He’s a bit of a broken mess. And while I empathized with his grief, I didn’t see why Min-Jung would’ve been attracted to him. He was a sullen shell of his former self.
There were several parts of this series that reminded me of “Go Back Couple.” In that series, a bickering middle-aged married couple divorce and end up time traveling back to their college years. Kim Mi-Kyung plays the mother of the female lead in both series. In the former, she somehow figures out what’s going on and tells her daughter to go back to the future, because her baby needs her. She doesn’t know that she will die of cancer, but her daughter does and must decide whether to stay in the past with her mother or return to the future where she is the mother. In “Hi Bye, Mama,” Kim Mi-Kyung plays a mother who loves her daughter, but doesn’t want Min-Jung to be cast aside, either.
With so much undertainty, I wondered how they would resolve the ending. But the writers presented a beautiful finale that felt right for everyone involved.
Airdates: Sixteen episodes — ranging from about an hour to 90 minutes — aired from February 22 to April 19, 2020 on tvN.
Controversy: Some netizens had a fit once word got out that the child actor hired to play Yu-Ri and Gang-Hwa’s daughter is a boy. Four-year-old Seo Woo-Jin landed the role of Cho Seo-Woo, because the producers thought he bore a striking resemblance to Kim Tae-Hee during her youth. It’s not a big deal. He did a great job. According to his parents, he understood he was pretending to be a girl as part of his acting role … which requires him to pretend to be a different character each time.
Spoiler Alert: Gang-Hwa’s inability to operate on patients is rooted in his guilt that while he was saving another patient, his own wife was dying. She had been hit by a car and her final words to the ER doctor was to save her in utero baby. He didn’t know that Yu-Ri’s ghost has been with him and Seo-Woo since her death.
Yu-Ri was able to come back to life, because the powers that be listened to her mother’s daily prayers to see her for just one more day. Once she realizes that her mother got her wish, it was easier for her to decide what to do. As much as she loves Seo-Woo, Yu-Ri also knows that Min-Jung is the only mother her child has ever known. And she is astute enough to realize that Min-Jung is Seo-Woo’s absolute favorite person in the world. It’s a testament to a mother’s love that she chose not to regain her family position, even though she knew that meant she could no longer live in this world. She makes the decision to leave the living after her 49 days are up.
I really liked that the series didn’t make a villian out of Min-Jung. And that without clobbering viewers over the head, it also drove home that a mother is someone who unconditionally loves her child, regardless of whether she gave birth to the baby or not. In the finale, it’s clear Seo-Woo has always been able to see Yu-Ri and that she knew Yu-Ri was her mother. It is my hope that she grows up remembering her and knows how much love both her moms had/have for her.
The finale shows a teenage Seo-Woo walking with her parents, Gang-Hwa and Min-Jung. Living up to his promise to Yu-Ri that he would live his best life, he overcame his psychological issues and returned to his earlier status as his hospital’s best surgeon.
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