18 Again (2020) Hong Dae-young Fixes Everything *Spoilers*

Hong Dae-young formerly a whitegoods repairman and all-round handyman fixes everything in his life. Well almost everything. And what a great finale -- one of the best. Not because they lived happily-ever-after but because those who needed to, grew in terms of learning how to do better in all relationships. Every single one learnt (or rediscovered) fundamental life skills to make necessary ongoing "repairs" to maintain what's good and precious to them. It's a timely reminder that relationships are made or broken by little choices and little gestures. In the busyness of life, all that can be easily forgotten. Because we are all flawed, selfish individuals, repair is par for the course. Unless one doesn't prioritize the relationship.

Dae-young learns a very important truth in the time he occupies his 18 again body and that is... he cannot be a father and a husband to the family if he remains in his teenage body. His teenage years are well and truly gone. They're a part of his life that he built with the choices he made over the years. But they're gone and all that's left for him is the present and the future. It's not just a case that absence makes the heart grow fonder but absence makes one realise what has been taken for granted when everything seems like a part of the furniture. He was a friend to his family for a short time and was able to be part of their lives in a way that he couldn't before but those interactions were fraught with limitations especially when his heart was drawn to them in ways he had not previously appreciated. In game parlance it was a "time out" that he needed -- to reflect and re-calibrate in order to map out the kind of future he wanted for himself. In fantastical fashion Hong Dae-young learnt he may have lost a potential career in basketball but he gained a family that he loved for life. His investment reaped a different set of dividends that he might not have been able to have if he had chosen a different path. I would go further and say that the choices he made is a reflection of the man he is

Regretting is a normal part of life. But the biggest lesson one learns (as one ages) is that life is often a zero sum game. No one can have everything. It's impossible. And to quote the great philosopher Westley, "Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something, Your Highness." The path that seems the hardest may seem to be the one most fraught with suffering but the advice here perhaps is that if we look just a bit harder, it probably wasn't all bad. In fact the good might have outweighed the bad. Or what's more, on hindsight much good came out of what was seen to be "bad" at one time. Clouds, silver linings ... all that stuff.

There's much in this show that reminds me of an old Christmas favourite, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. (I'm reminded a lot about that film lately) Like it's predecessor, this drama might seem sentimental and schmaltzy to some but for me it's a timely reminder in the current climate to take time out and appreciate the little things that we do have instead of dwelling on what we don't because it naturally follows that we're bound to miss what's right in front of us.

In Capra's classic, an angel visits a depressed George Bailey on the cusp of taking his own life and grants him his wish for a world in which he had never been born in. His regrets are similar, wishing he had led a different life and bemoaning missed opportunities. He too led a self-sacrificial life, putting others ahead of himself. But a world without George as he comes to see is not a happy one. It's doom and gloom. Without him, crime and amorality runs rife in his hometown. As the angel progressively demonstrates to him, no man who has made so many contributions in the lives of the people around him can ever be described as being "poor".

Before he regains his 37-year-old body, Dae-young meets Da-jung on the bridge in the same way that they did as frightened 18-year-olds wondering about their uncertain future with babies in tow. They made the difficult choice and stuck to their guns. They wept from time to time about what they had lost but also focused on what they had gained. The crucial thing that I observed from this is that these two were responsible individuals. All their lives they took responsibility for themselves and did a little bit extra. There's a scene where Si-a's admirer and childhood friend Ji-ho watches a video of featuring Dae-young during a school sports meet to reminisce. He has no father to join him in the father-son race so a much younger Dae-young steps in. It is at this moment Ji-ho realises that Woo-young could be his favourite ahjussi Dae-young. For us on the other hand this sequence reinforces the type of man Dae-young is -- how the people saw him and how he made a difference to his world even when he didn't know and harboured regrets about what he'd lost.

We are also told that Dae-young was the one who saved baseballer Ye Ji-hoon's niece in a multiple car accident. It isn't just about fated connections that we are given this piece of information. But what's clear from these two incidents is that Dae-young is a decent human being. He doesn't have a lot but he gives a lot of himself reflexively. One take home from this is that his choice to prioritize his children right from the start had positive flow-on effects for others. He tells Ji-hoon later that he saved Seo-yeon because she reminded him of his own daughter, Si-a.

Perhaps another important lesson that we're meant to get from all of this is that relationships matter more than ambitions or dreams. It's not that ambitions and dreams don't matter at all. However, in the scheme of things, I don't think the vast majority of people wishes they'd spent more time in the office or in the basketball court when they're lying in their deathbed. Life is so incredibly short. The time we have left with the people around us is limited. Those are the sorts of things we shouldn't regret. As I get older and as my kids get older, I have fewer regrets about being out of work for their sake. 

Da-jung's situation is relatable for all working mothers. Her persistence is commendable even if she's never certain of attaining the Holy Grail of being a tv broadcaster. But she never lets up even while raising kids and caring for her father-in-law who's estranged from his son. In the end her perseverance pays off but not without jumping through all the hoops as well as overcoming all kinds of discrimination. The fulfilment of dreams come late for some but in some cases they do get there. While she had the skills and personality, she could not have done it alone. That's shown all throughout. Without the support of others from her family to admirers to colleagues, she couldn't have gone as far as she did. Especially when things became unbearably hard.

What follows the wedding at the end is an entertaining does of realism that eschews the Disney fairy tale story. Life goes on after the fanfare in raw mundane fashion. Conflicts are par for the course. But it is in the mundane that we find God in the details. Who we are, why we're here and what life is really about.

The wedding isn't the end of the story for Dae-young and Da-jung but it is the end of his search. They both can move on confidently in an unknown future because they now know what they'd prefer spending the rest of their lives investing their time and energy on.

This is what Hong Dae-yang had to fix. Not the past. But his thinking about the past and to forge a future with no regrets.

18 Again (2020) Early Impressions

Despite watching around three times more dramas in 2020 than in any year prior, I still managed to miss out on one of the year's gems. An online, fellow Kdrama watcher sang its praises recently and it's been at the back of my mind to get to it at some point. A couple of days ago a city-wide lockdown was announced for this weekend which provided an opportunity to for a marathon watch.

18 Again is one of those sorts of storytelling excursions that Kdramaland excels in. A white goods repairman (Yoon Sang-hyun) suffering midlife crisis and marriage woes looks back on his life bogged down by regrets, lamenting on missed opportunities. He and his wife (Kim Ha-neul) put aside career aspirations as 18-year-olds when she falls pregnant with twins, no less. They both made the tough choice at that age of keeping the babies and raising them. Hong Dae-young, the male lead seems to have hit rock bottom when his wife demands a divorce and a long-awaited promotion bypasses him. On top of that he barely has a relationship with his children. 

On one occasion he meets an enigmatic elderly man during a repair job. The latter notes that Dae-young has a knack for fixing things but Dae-young remarks that he can't seem to fix his own life. The elderly man offers help but Dae-young notes that since the problems are his, he should try fixing them. One night while he's shooting hoops at a local school, a weather event occurs and Dae-young fantastically reverts back to his younger 18-year-old body. 

Body-swapping stories over the years have provided a comical platform for telling stories about framing regrets and shifting perspectives on one's life. At the end of it, the character(s) involved will have become more reflective and come to the "right" conclusions about where their priorities should be. However, as someone who brings a certain parental lens to this, the show delves into a larger range of topics that I personally find relatable. The drama evoked many emotions. It reminded me of much... not least that many things my own parents did and said only really made sense to me after I started raising my own children. Dae-young's journey to reconnect with his own children is one of the show's highlights as it points to the trans-generational issues that seem to beset every era. It's also a highly insightful exploration (so far) of why misunderstandings and estrangements occur. Much ink has been spilt over the generation gap since I was old enough to read and understand newspapers. But there are good objective reasons why in certain cultures (including the one I was raised in) age is reverenced over youth. The show to my mind makes a reasonable case for acquired wisdom through life experiences.

With the benefit of hindsight and experience, Dae-young in his younger body (Lee Do-hyun) sets to "fix" things. From his newly acquired perspective, he discovers that his son, Si-woo although a talented basketballer like his father, is reluctant to play the game and is being relentlessly bullied. He stumbles on the fact that his daughter is working at a convenience store because she has other ideas about her future that don't include higher education. School, he soon notes, is a complex space of continual negotiation of hierarchical structures and external influences with its own set of problems. It also emerges as an ongoing subplot that a bribery scheme has been at play among the basketball players for some time.

But it isn't just the case that parents don't always know what their kids get up to outside of the home. Children can't always make sense of the adults in their lives as they don't have a full picture of what goes on behind the scenes when matters are deliberately concealed from them. In trans-generational conflict the importance of being able to stand in someone else's shoes or at the very least view things from a different perspective is absolutely key to some form of resolution. 

Dae-young's wife, Da-jung on the other hand, has never lost her interest in television broadcasting, practising for the craft in spare moments and applying for jobs when possible. She edges closer to fulfilling a lifelong dream now that the children are reaching their completion of high school. When she's finally selected for her dream job, she faces all kinds of discrimination -- ageism, and for the fact that she's a working mother. who is divorced. Which apparently is a workplace taboo of sorts in her cultural context. To her credit, she perseveres and proves repeatedly that she has the confidence, natural talent and skills to be at the top of the game. The irony which is not lost on the viewer is that Da-jung perceived weaknesses turn out to be assets. For instance, when she is put on the spot to do a quick interview with a baseball player, she carries it off like a pro and gets instant praise for being quick to react as well as her surprising knowledge of baseball. As an older woman and mother, she's had to learn to adapt to situations in life and her baseball knowledge has come from years of spending time with a baseball fanatic at home in the form of her former spouse.

Da-jung too has things she doesn't know about the husband that she gradually grew weary of. His inner turmoil and the hardships that he encountered as a far-too-young father and husband. As life got harder, they both (I think) forgot what it was that they liked about each other and kept them going for the longest time. They both had to re-educate themselves to find their way back to each other.

The show handles Da-jung's relationships with different men with fascinating sensitivity. It isn't that she'd stopped loving Dae-young but she thought he'd change for the worst. So when new admirers come on to the scene, she maintains a respectful distance because in part it's too soon and in part she's got a ton of things to worry about. Her relationship with Lee Do-hyun's Dae-young is what you'd expect in such a situation. Because of his youthful looks, she's instinctively maternal to some degree (once she gets past his remarkable resemblance to her former husband) but she's also confused by reminders of Dae-young in his gestures and speech. She must also be conscious to some degree that his attentions to her are far beyond that of a unusually mature teenage boy.  

With all of these ingredients in the mix, the drama is a guaranteed feel-good watch as the show charts the highs and lows of Dae-young's old and new life. The firm and steady directing elicits credible performances from the entire cast from the very youngest to the most senior. Special mention should be made of Lee Do-hyun who shoulders enormous responsibility as the younger versions of Dae-young: firstly as a young dad fresh out of high school and then also the middle-aged man inside the body of a youngster. He is particularly memorable and humorous when he forgets that he's not supposed to be the 37-year-old Hong Dae-young.