Week 4: When Life Gives You Tangerines: Family and Generational Culture
A multigenerational Jeju family drama, and how duty, marriage, and independence have shifted between generations
15 March 2027
Pokssak Sogatsuda (폭싹 속았수다) — When Life Gives You Tangerines — follows a Jeju Island family across decades, from a hard postwar childhood to the adulthood of the next generation. Its span is the point: a single household lets us watch what “family” was expected to mean change underneath people who didn’t necessarily choose the change themselves.
Questions#
- How have Korean family structures changed across the decades the drama covers?
- What roles have parents and children traditionally occupied, and where does the drama show those roles under strain?
- How does economic development — migration, new work, new money — reshape family relationships?
- How do different generations in the drama understand duty and independence differently from one another?
What to take from this week#
- family as a structure with historically specific, changing expectations
- filial responsibility, and what it has and hasn’t meant across generations
- generational difference as a source of both continuity and conflict
- marriage as a family decision as much as an individual one, in the periods the drama covers
- changing social expectations, and how quickly a “traditional” norm can turn out to be recent
Teaching team
- May Rhee — convenor