Why do I watch bad dramas? It has to do with how they tell some universal truths. And the best way I can explain what that means for me is to use word-pictures involving my favorite thing . . . food, of course. Home-made versus store-bought. Made by hand with love as the motive versus made by machine with money as the motive.
When I watched https://www.viki.com/tv/28081c-kimchi-family back in 2011 and absolutely fell in love with every character, every building, and every single cabbage leaf in all the warm, comforting episodes, I rushed right out and bought a large, very expensive jar of kimchi from the grocery store chain in my area which happens to be the number one chain in the United States. It has a killer Asian food aisle with really good imported products or products made for them according to authentic recipes.
I checked the ingredients of my jar of kimchi against what I noted from the TV series, and then I literally ate the entire jar standing in the middle of my kitchen. My body told me, âHey, maybe not the smartest thing to do,â but I did not care because the taste (one my father taught me to love) was SO freaking good!
I then watched a whole series of Japanese and Taiwanese dramas and loved the quirky humor and the obsession of every character with finding THE perfect bowl of home-made noodles and/or the most delicate bites of seafood, and I rushed back to the store for packages of udon and soba and mouth-watering sushi made by staff trained in Japan.
When I got sucked into Healer (https://www.viki.com/tv/23730c-healer?q=HEALER) so far that I binge-watched the whole thing WHILE working full-time and sleeping only three hours a night, I took my first step into culinary paradise and went out to a Korean restaurant with the foodiest Americans ever born and STUFFED myself with . . . gimbap. And then I went to the store AGAIN and bought a tub of imported gochujang paste and used it in beef stew. Divine!
When my friends also introduced me to Sichuan cuisine Cantonese dim sum and Indian cuisine and Malaysian cuisine and Vietnamese cuisine and Thai cuisine, I had a happy cultural meltdown.
My friends were both graduates of a prestigious engineering school in the city where I live and learned from their friends where to go late at night for good food.
My kitchen cabinets and refrigerator ended up being filled to overflowing with little red peppercorns, more noodles, twenty-five million kinds of fragrant tea (it seemed), six kinds of rice instead of one, preserved ginger, garlic in all sorts of forms . . . and it was all soooooooooooooooooooooo wonderful.
I did not understand all the subtleties of the cultures or languages or foods that came across the Internet, but it all made my heart happy. It was all so comforting, simple, and pure as I expereinced the essence of a good life: being with people you love and rejoicing in the gifts that life brings.
2020, the strange year, saw the debut and disappearance of the two-episode Crazy Noodle Recipe. Nice try. I did not get through episode one.
Of course it was hard to cook or buy anything well during parts of 2020, but when I was able to zip in to the Asian food section of the number one grocery store chain in America to get some snacks to sustain me during Viki binges that sometimes lasted twenty-four hours, I came upon a square package that intrigued me.
It was wrapped up like a bag of potato chips but fit in my hand. The label was in Korean; I recognized the picture of sheets of seaweed used to make gimbap. I thought, âHmm. Two bucks. Okay, my kind of price. Is this a package of some kind of crunchy, yummy, crackers? I love crunchy!â
When I got home and opened the package, there were no yummy crunchy crackers, only very thin, very precisely cut sheets of what seemed to me a sort of vegetable version of toilet paper. Each very green and very insubstantial tiny square melted away on my tongue almost immediately. I paid two dollars and got about ten centsâ worth of taste, texture, and experience.
I thought, âOkay, that was interesting. Not what I expected, not worth two dollars, not something I am going to buy again. But it comes from a wonderful part of the world; somebody worked hard to come up with the idea; other people worked hard to bring it to market so they could make money and take care of their loved ones.â
The point of my word pictures is that like people, whether the Asian dramas that attract my attention are fancy or plain, overwhelming, or disappointing, they all reveal something special about the hopes and dreams that are common to all human beings.
People want comfort. They want to be with people who care about what they care about. They want a way to bridge challenges in communication, share burdens, learn new things, keep their loved ones healthy and safe . . . and have fun along the way.
With a few obvious, very selfish, very manipulative exceptions, I have always found bits and pieces of those hopes and dreams in every Asian drama Iâve seen on Viki, even those that can only be described as cringe-worthy.
I think it has to do with the way I was raised.
I was very fortunate to be raised by parents whose motto was, âPeople are people, period.â They truly believed that it was evil for human beings to say, âI donât care about anything but material success;â or âYou cannot possibly be good if you donât look like me.â
They simply loved people, loved beauty, and loved sharing their lives with others. And if others thought their beliefs were stupid, or that they were naive, my parents simply shook their heads in pity and tried harder to love those people and break through their anger with love.
Thatâs why I think, with some obvious exceptions, both good and bad dramas on Viki can be worthwhile, can teach me something.
Does anyone else think this way, or am I totally off base here?
and give each countryâs drama their unique signature.
