My Unfamiliar Family: Episode 5

by quirkycase

Our typically stoic sister’s world comes crashing down as she’s forced to face the fact that her marriage isn’t what she thought it was. To her surprise, her sister proves her biggest supporter and refuses to let her suffer alone. They may not always understand or even like each other, but they are family.

 
EPISODE 5

We return to Eun-hee and Eun-joo’s conversation in the restaurant. Eun-joo tries playing off the pill situation by saying their dad has insomnia, but Eun-hee isn’t buying that excuse. She knows that people in Sang-shik’s profession often suffer from depression.

Eun-joo takes offense at Eun-hee’s comment that things like depression and insomnia don’t fit with their dad, and things start getting heated. On the phone with Chan-hyuk, Ji-woo prophetically cautions him that things can go south quickly with his sisters, even if it seems they’re getting along.

Geon-joo’s call to Eun-hee goes unanswered. At the table, Chan-hyuk sits uncomfortably while Eun-hee brings up the time their mom left with Eun-joo. When they returned, Eun-joo would barely talk to her. Eun-joo clarifies she barely talked to anyone.

Eun-hee remembers crying every day, but Eun-joo came home smiling and holding flowers. Eun-joo remembers being cold and hungry while Eun-hee wore new clothes and ate home-cooked meals. She missed going to school like other kids.

Eun-hee catches Chan-hyuk’s eye and tries to lighten the mood, but Eun-joo continues that their mom never lets Eun-hee or Ji-woo suffer. The sisters start fighting about who worked harder in college, and Chan-hyuk gets Eun-hee to calm down.

At Geon-joo’s, his girlfriend notes how he always has his phone in hand and asks if he’s having an affair. Geon-joo claims it’s not an affair since they broke up. She argues they’ve been taking time apart, but that’s not how he sees it. He’s ready to make a clean break.

Eun-hee is properly drunk now and starts confronting “Yoo ajusshi” as if he’s there, and Eun-joo herds her home. At Eun-joo’s apartment, Eun-hee hugs her and wonders why she can’t be smart like her. Then, she cries about her dad. This girl’s a mess when drunk.

At home, Jin-sook thinks about Sang-shik asking her to accompany him to Ulsan, claiming he has no secrets from her. Meanwhile, Ji-woo uses work to hide from his family. He and Chan-hyuk get drunk, and Chan-hyuk reminisces about how he decided to enlist when he heard Jong-min and Eun-hee were going out. Hmmm…

Ji-woo supposes he liked his sister, but Chan-hyuk corrects him. He liked Eun-joo. “See? You liked my sister.” Chan-hyuk: “No, I didn’t.” Pfft. In his drunken state, Ji-woo lets slip that Sang-shik isn’t Eun-joo’s biological dad.

On the train to Ulsan, Jin-sook finds a love note Sang-shik slipped in her thermos. It takes her back to when he would tell her he loved her multiple times a day. Sang-shik smiles and recalls she would slip love notes in his lunch.

Back at Eun-joo’s, the sisters see the chatroom on Tae-hyung’s laptop. We flash back to when the family prepared to officially meet Tae-hyung. Jin-sook had wanted everything to be perfect while Sang-shik found it all ridiculous.

He accused her of only caring about the fact that Tae-hyung’s family was rich. She’d agreed, yelling that she was glad Eun-joo wouldn’t live like her. After their screaming match, Sang-shik stormed out only to meet Eun-joo and Tae-hyung out front. Sang-shik wakes up on the train and convinces himself it was just a nightmare. Oh, he’s remembering.

Meanwhile, Eun-joo locked Eun-hee out of the room and continues reading the chat. She sees a text from their dad on Eun-hee’s phone. Does she remember when they met Tae-hyung? Was he there? Overwhelmed, Eun-joo cries.

She finally opens the door and returns Eun-hee’s phone, saying she read the text from their dad. When Eun-hee texts him back, Sang-shik admits he had a dream. Eun-hee speculates to Eun-joo that his memory could be returning.

Eun-joo can’t focus on that now as memories of her IVF injections and doctor visits replay in her mind. She calls Tae-hyung, screaming at him to answer. Eun-hee cries as her sister rages. She refuses to leave, even when Eun-joo accuses her of just wanting to see her taken down a notch.

Eun-hee sobs she’s sorry, and Eun-joo lets out her pent-up anger at her sister. She rails at Eun-hee for barging into her life with nothing more than an “I’m sorry” after years of cutting her out. Eun-joo shouts that she knows Eun-hee didn’t mean it and doesn’t care.

When Eun-hee hugs her, Eun-joo screams at her to get off and leave her alone, but Eun-hee won’t let go. Eun-joo throws her off and goes to the kitchen where she grabs a pair of scissors. Eun-hee wrestles the scissors away from her frantic sister and holds her.

At Chan-hyuk’s, the boys wake and recall each other’s drunken confessions. Ji-woo is relieved to have someone else know his secret, but Chan-hyuk laments his fortune of being one sibling’s personal safe and carrying another one’s baggage. Ha.

On the beach, Sang-shik and Jin-sook listen to music on his phone. It’s a song from the first movie they saw together. He confesses he watched it before their date and bawled his eyes out, causing everyone in the theater to stare. Aw, Jin-sook smiles and even chuckles when he apologizes for crying again when they saw it together.

She reminds him they should head to meet “that kid.” Sang-shik reveals that, although they made plans to meet, he can’t reach him now. Jin-sook suggests calling a friend or Young-shik’s mom, but Sang-shik gets uncomfortable. She wonders to herself what he’s trying to confirm with this trip.

At Eun-joo’s, the exhausted sisters sit at the table. Eun-joo observes it looks like they had a fistfight and abruptly starts laughing at the absurdity of it all. She tells Eun-hee to go, but Eun-hee isn’t about to leave and let her sister hurt herself.

Eun-joo assures her that’s not it. In the moment, she felt like she couldn’t breathe and wanted to cut her hair. Eun-hee presumes Tae-hyung’s family is in the dark about him, but Eun-joo takes the less optimistic view that there are things family sometimes pretends not to know.

Eun-hee worries he’ll do something drastic, but Eun-joo thinks Tae-hyung merely got tired of lying; he wouldn’t have left his laptop behind if he weren’t coming back. He just didn’t have the courage to say it to her face.

“I guess it wasn’t my fault.” It suddenly hits Eun-joo that Tae-hyung’s coldness and depression weren’t because of her. She even considered divorce. “You did well,” Eun-hee says. Eun-joo scoffs that she thought she was all that (Eun-hee: “You are.”) and could read people well.

Now, she recognizes all the signs he gave her. “I didn’t know because we’re family.” Eun-hee thinks Eun-joo is blaming herself for not knowing and defends her, calling Tae-hyung a “selfish, cowardly, irresponsible, shameless jerk.” Eun-joo can handle her own affairs and tells Eun-hee to go home.

If their roles were reversed, what advice would Eun-joo give? Eun-hee says she’d tell her not to be emotional and to get compensation for the years’ worth of deception. Ger her alimony and bounce back.

Sang-shik and Jin-sook visit Young-shik’s work, but no one has heard from him in days. His house has even been emptied out. A colleague pulls Sang-shik aside and, after chiding him for bringing Jin-sook to ask about Young-shik, confides that some of the guys lent Young-shik money recently.

The colleague is shocked when Sang-shik asks for Young-shik’s address. Can’t he remember where his hometown is? After asking around the area to no avail, Sang-shik decides to do a cargo run and sends Jin-sook home.

Before he left, Tae-hyung set up a doctor’s appointment for Sang-shik. Jin-sook and the sisters accompany their dad to what seems to be Tae-hyung’s family’s hospital. Eun-hee offers to go with Eun-joo to greet her mother-in-law, but Eun-joo says she’s not in that day.

While they wait, Eun-hee asks Eun-joo if she talked to Tae-hyung. Eun-joo frustratedly says she didn’t and tells Eun-hee to stop asking questions. Sang-shik exits with a clean bill of health, but Jin-sook stays behind to question the doctor.

Shouldn’t his memory be back by now? She’s worried because some of his memories of the remote past are inaccurate. Jin-sook thinks of his claim that she used to put love notes in his lunch. Ooh, so that never happened. The doctor notes that memories are flawed and can be tinged by desires or feelings.

In the lobby, Jin-sook pulls Eun-joo aside. If Sang-shik’s memories don’t return, they want to run some tests. She asks Eun-joo to talk to Tae-hyung about it when he gets back.

At work, Geon-joo calls Eun-hee to his office to give her materials for the meditation book she’s working on. They could go over them at his place, if she wants. Eun-hee declines. Noting her distance, he starts to explain why he didn’t contact her after he said he would.

Eun-hee cuts him off. What if she hadn’t called him before going up to his apartment? Reality hit after that, and the thrill of secretly meeting wore off. It’s tiring and makes her feel cowardly. Eun-hee clarifies that she no longer wants to go ahead with the affair. Geon-joo wants to talk about it later, but Eun-hee states she has plans.

Eun-joo gives her mom another envelope of cash. Jin-sook comments on how great it is to see her and Eun-hee getting along. She encourages Eun-joo to be lenient with her sister, even though she’s lacking and impulsive. Eun-joo defends her sister and chides her mom for how often she’s said those hurtful things in front of Eun-hee.

Eun-hee meets with Chan-hyuk who notices her off mood. She abruptly starts grilling him about his dating life. Then, she pivots and shares that she’s decided not to meet Geon-joo anymore. Chan-hyuk jokingly wonders if she’s saying she wants to date him now.

She pivots again and starts talking about how Eun-joo is driving Tae-hyung’s big car now. Poor Chan-hyuk scrambles to find the thread of this stream of consciousness style conversation. Eun-hee continues that, when she married, Eun-joo gave her expensive car to Eun-hee, claiming she was scared to drive it.

Eun-hee sold it and bought two used cars, giving one to her family. She hated that her sister was the breadwinner of the family since it made her feel indebted. She never realized how narrow minded she was.

Chan-hyuk is worried now, sensing something is wrong. Eun-hee remarks that Eun-joo resents her and believes she’s just pretending to be a good sister after ignoring her. Eun-hee recognizes she’s been accommodating to everyone but her own sister.

Chan-hyuk wonders if something happened between them, and Eun-hee comments she should’ve stopped her that day. At that official first meeting with Tae-hyung, they’d announced their marriage after a mere three months of dating. But neither looked happy.

Drunk, Eun-hee had asked what Tae-hyung liked about Eun-joo. His reply? She’s not too girly. Yikes. She’d been shocked when Eun-joo sat by silently, acting unlike herself. Eun-hee had assumed Eun-joo loved him and bit back her retort.

The discomfort she felt that day has weighed on her all this time. Chan-hyuk asks why she’s regretting this now, but Eun-hee changes the topic. He must like Eun-joo if he painstakingly developed those black and white photos and then held onto them for years.

Chan-hyuk exasperatedly points out with that logic, he must like her even more. How many of those type of photos has he done for her? Chan-hyuk won’t let her wriggle out of answering so easily and brings it back to Eun-joo. Why now?

Eun-hee recalls how Ji-woo has been constantly talking about feeling sorry towards Eun-joo and wanting to see her. Has he said anything to Chan-hyuk about it? Chan-hyuk cagily says Ji-woo will surely tell her himself if there’s something.

Eun-hee thinks Chan-hyuk knows Ji-woo better than her and asks him to let her know if he finds out what’s bothering her brother. He can barely meet her eyes as he agrees.

At home, Eun-joo ruminates on what she read in the chatroom about how wives and children serve as great cover. She sits down at Tae-hyung’s computer and looks like she’s about to enter the chat.

Eun-hee ignores a call from Geon-joo but finds him waiting in her neighborhood. He’s worried she took the following day off because of him. She assures him she’s not that immature. They head somewhere to talk.

Chan-hyuk receives a wedding invitation from his ex. Ji-woo and Seo-young gossip about whether the personal note included is a “screw you” or lingering attachment deal. Seo-young gives Ji-woo a private smile before walking away.

Eun-hee scoffs at Geon-joo’s smooth talk about how being a little deceitful can be healthy, so he’s finally straight with her and says he doesn’t want to lose her. Plus, he broke up with his girlfriend.

As they walk back, he asks why she took a day off, but she evasively says it’s a family matter. Jealous, Geon-joo wonders if she’d give that same vague answer to Chan-hyuk. Her silence confirms his suspicions.

Eun-hee knows Geon-joo’s breakup has nothing to do with her and won’t feel burdened about it. Since she shares that things are comfortable for her as they are, Geon-joo is willing to stay friends. He wants to put her at ease.

Chan-hyuk reads the note from his ex and sighs that he has no idea what she’s talking about. Meanwhile, Eun-hee thinks of her sister’s breakdown after seeing the chatroom. The following day, she pops by Eun-joo’s.

She knows Eun-joo lied about not driving well so she could gift her the car and thanks her. She won’t feel indebted. Eun-hee offers to drive her to her meeting, and Eun-joo lets her.

Eun-hee sees a new side of her sister as she watches her laugh with clients. She takes Eun-joo to lunch and wordlessly places a piece of meat in her bowl. Eun-joo looks at Eun-hee appraisingly.

Sang-shik sends pictures of pretty scenery in a family chat while Jin-sook visits her mother in a care facility. Seon-il shows up with flowers, and Jin-sook smiles. The kids respond to Sang-shik’s photos – Eun-hee’s response is particularly enthusiastic – making him giddy. Eun-hee wonders contemplatively what their dad thinks about on those long drives.

Eun-joo still can’t reach Tae-hyung who was supposed to be back by now. Eun-hee is concerned something happened, but Eun-joo thinks he’s just avoiding her.

At work, Ji-woo frets about whether it’s right to keep the secret about Eun-joo, but he can’t bring himself to tell anyone in his family. When Chan-hyuk asks if he should tell Eun-hee for him, Ji-woo helpfully hands him his phone. Ha. But Eun-hee ignores his call as she’s still with Eun-joo.

That night, Sang-shik asks Man-ho about Young-shik, but Man-ho claims the topic has always been hush hush. He thinks it’s better Sang-shik doesn’t remember since his relationship with Jin-sook has improved. If he remembers, it’s back to “marriage graduation.” Sang-shik, naturally, is confused.

Eun-joo receives a call that sends her and Eun-hee rushing to the clinic where they’re frantically sending patients elsewhere. Hyo-seok sees Eun-hee posting a notice of temporary closure and mutters, “cowardly jerk.” Eun-hee notices him staring at Eun-joo through the glass and stands in front of him. He scoffs and walks away.

Once everyone leaves, Eun-hee starts badmouthing Tae-hyung, but Eun-joo won’t hear it. It hits Eun-hee that Hyo-seok might have been referring to Tae-hyung earlier and seems to know something. She tries to tell Eun-joo, but her sister cuts her off and orders her home.

Ji-woo calls on his mom’s behalf to check on his dad who hasn’t come home yet. Sang-shik promises to be home by dinner. At work, Ji-woo thinks Chan-hyuk is making up excuses when he claims Eun-hee has been ignoring his calls and only believes him when Chan-hyuk calls her in front of him. Ha.

Eun-hee stops by the café to talk to Hyo-seok, but he took the day off due to a family emergency. Meanwhile, Eun-joo goes to see her mother-in-law who greets her warmly but appears nervous.

At home, Sang-shik comes bearing flowers and thanks Jin-sook for putting up with him all these years. He remembers everything, he says with a smile. They should do the “marriage graduation” now. Jin-sook stares at him searchingly.

 
COMMENTS

I liked the theme of the subjectivity of memories that we often see as absolute. Eun-joo and Eun-hee had very different takes on the same basic memory from their childhood. Their feelings colored their perception of events, foreground some aspects and backgrounding others. Then, you have Sang-shik seemingly creating memories of Jin-sook based, perhaps, on what he wished had happened. Memory is a fickle thing, but it’s easy to believe our version of events is the “correct” one and take it as fact. I seriously doubt Sang-shik’s memory has returned since he’s still behaving very much as the 22-year-old version of himself. Maybe he got confirmation that Young-shik is his son and feels guilty. This version of him really wants to see Jin-sook happy, so I can believe he’d agree to separate if he thought it’d be to her benefit.

This episode was a big one for our sisters who continue to be fantastically acted by Han Ye-ri and Chu Ja-hyun. Eun-hee and Eun-joo embody the “I can talk crap about you but no one else can” sibling dynamic. They seem to do nothing but criticize each other, but Eun-joo even stood up to her mom for disparaging Eun-hee. I think this situation is making both sisters see each other in a new light. Eun-hee has a tendency get caught up in her own emotions and become self-centered, but she has really stepped up for Eun-joo. She’s trying to listen and see things from her sister’s point of view. And now, it looks like Eun-joo is starting to believe Eun-hee does care about her. I was glad Eun-joo confronted her about re-entering her life like nothing happened, though. Eun-joo often holds her feelings in, but I think they both needed that out in the open.

Eun-joo’s reaction to the revelation that Tae-hyung is gay has been interesting. I expected more justified anger at being lied to and used as a cover, but she seems understanding instead. Hearing that she’s been blaming herself for their marital issues and Tae-hyung’s depression even, it makes sense that she could feel relieved to finally have an explanation. There’s so much pressure on women in a marriage to be the good wife and mother and create a happy home. Eun-joo had the added stress of not being able to get pregnant and being made to feel like a failure for it. Knowing that the result for them would be the same no matter what she did or could do must be freeing for Eun-joo.

Eun-hee’s affair didn’t last long, did it? Although, if Geon-joo and his ex were already broken up, I guess it doesn’t count as an affair. Why didn’t he tell Eun-hee that in the first place? It’s odd he let her agonize over it rather than clarifying his relationship status. He comes off as untrustworthy to me, so I’m glad Eun-hee has taken a step back. Even if he’s single now, he is still her boss which is a whole different issue. A boss actively pursuing their employee the day they arrive on the job is just kind of icky. But I can’t imagine their saga is over yet, although Chan-hyuk probably wishes it were.

Poor Chan-hyuk is now the designated confidant and fixer for two out of three siblings. They’ve basically co-opted him as an honorary family member at this point. It’s good they have someone outside their mess to provide some perspective, but I worry for Chan-hyuk’s sanity as he gets dragged into all their problems. At least he doesn’t have to keep Ji-woo’s secret from Eun-hee anymore.

One of the (many) things I love about this drama so far is that the interactions feel real thanks to a combination of good writing and acting. The things that are said or left unsaid, the frustrated interactions between family members, the ease of conversation with good friends – it all feels natural. For me, that’s the difference between this and a lot of makjang family dramas. Even if there are multiple over the top situations happening, the reactions of the characters to these situations feels realistic. The characters lend it credibility and keep things somewhat grounded while the makjang gives us that dramatic flair that spices things up. The balance is working for me, and I’m just hoping it can keep it up throughout its run.

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