“An Apt Metaphor for What the Nation Has Survived.” A Taxonomy of K-Drama Amnesia

My foray into K-drama amnesia began with Truth (2000). Ja-young is an economically disadvantaged girl living in the basement of a house that belongs to a rich brat named Shin-hee. Ja-young’s dad is Shin-hee’s family driver, while Ja-young’s mom works as their housekeeper. Ja-young and Shin-hee war for several years due to class differences, rivalry, and jealousy. Ultimately, Ja-young wins the affections of Shin-hee’s crush, Hyun-woo, a handsome and gentle young man who comes from a well-off background. Then oopsie. Shin-hee gets behind the wheel of a car after drinking with Hyun-woo and Ja-young, and she crashes into another driver, causing a severe accident.

When Shin-hee wakes up, she moves Ja-young’s unconscious body to the driver’s seat to pin the blame on her, assuming that Ja-young is dead. Shin-hee’s accident kills the other driver, puts Hyun-woo in a coma, and leaves Ja-young in the ICU, but Ja-young eventually wakes up and her memory is lucid. Shin-hee is the one who drove that night, but no one believes Ja-young, as Shin-hee digs in her heels and insists that it was Ja-young who drove. Fuck!

Weeks pass with no signs of improvement in Hyun-woo’s comatose condition, but Ja-young endures by his bedside. She believes—no, she knows!—that he will make it out of the woods. Sure enough, Hyun-woo finally awakens. Ja-young rushes over and calls out his name. The camera closes in on Hyun-woo as he turns around and says blankly, “Who are you?” OMFG. Then the episode ends with music and credits.

I was filled with despair for a whole week until the next VHS arrived, and I saw Hyun-woo recover his memory after Ja-young wraps a scarf around his neck. This action triggers his sensory memory, and everything comes flooding back to him, as he screams her name with familiarity, “Ja-young, ah!” And the knot in my stomach finally released. Oooooooh. So good.

Then Hyun-woo exposes the truth! Hence the title! Truth! He remembers it all. It was that bitch Shin-hee who drove while intoxicated that night, not Ja-young! Shin-hee framed this poor, innocent girl that Hyun-woo loves! I can only dream of K-dramas today to be as beautifully tacky, hack, and convoluted as Truth.

Amnesia is a powerful storytelling device found in Hollywood cinemas like Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). It takes on whole new camp levels in soap operas like Guiding Light (1952–2009) and Days of Our Lives (1965–present) on American television. Then K-dramas turn amnesia into Sriracha sauce—it goes on everything everywhere all the time.

Amnesia is an engaging device used to drive a romantic narrative because it raises the stakes and adds mystery. While before the amnesia the whole purpose was to get the lovers to finally become a couple, despite family disapproval or a jealous saboteur, after the amnesia a whole new purpose appears on the horizon. The one who lost their memory must recover it so their love may be whole again. Gooooood shit. I am in. Let’s go.

A nice juicy K-drama frequently has a character with amnesia, but not all amnesias are the same. There’s the classic amnesia, in which a character suffers a head trauma and loses memory, like Ja-young. In All About Eve (2000) the show’s diabolical antagonist attempts suicide by drowning but survives without any memory of who she is or where she comes from. In Winter Sonata Jun-sang gets hit by a car, forgets who he is, and returns with a new identity. The exact same thing happens again to characters in Land of Wine (2003) and Stairway to Heaven.

Then there’s amnesia among ghosts who died a traumatic death. In Oh My Ghostess (2015), the ghost Soon-ae can’t recall who killed her or how she died. Some forms of amnesia protect the ghost from their own past life’s sins, like the grim reaper in Goblin, who killed his wife and brother-in-law but doesn’t remember. In the same show Eun-tak has temporary amnesia and forgets who her boyfriend Kim Shin is after he disappears for ten years.

In Unkind Women the father loses his memory and disappears, conveniently forgetting that he’d been unfaithful to his wife. Short-term amnesia also plagues the father in My Unfamiliar Family (2020), who was emotionally abusive toward his wife for decades but forgets why. There is also dementia and Alzheimer’s among elderly characters in Navillera (2021), The Light in Your Eyes, and Dear My Friends.

In the Korean context, amnesia is an apt metaphor for what the nation has survived and what dwells in its collective memory on both a surface and a repressed level. These characters don’t lose their memory out of sheer nothing. There was a cause. As such, there are causes for why amnesia is such a hackneyed device in K-dramas that we can dig up by analyzing the nation’s forgotten histories.

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Amnesia during Japanese-occupied Korea (1910–1945) was induced in the form of erasure. The Japanese imperial government imposed its colonial rule through forced assimilation. Koreans were required to speak Japanese and convert their Korean names to Japanese. Japanese colonizers assumed that once Koreans assimilated, they would forget their identity and live as Japanese. This logic is as bonkers as K-drama characters who hit their heads and wake up with no memory of their names, who they are, or where they come from.

The Koreans most closely affiliated with the Japanese during colonial rule were the elite. This national betrayal by the upper echelons of Korean society and the shame stemming from it are complicated matters that haunt South Korea to this day. In Mr. Sunshine the character Lee Wan-ik is a Japanese sympathizer who profits by giving up Korean insurgents to the Japanese police.

Sociologist John Lie uses the term “cultural amnesia” to describe how South Korea recollects the colonial period. Cultural amnesia is when societies forget certain histories that belong to their collective past. The most triggering World War II memory for South Koreans is when Japanese soldiers stood in long lines outside of tents to take turns raping hundreds of thousands of kidnapped and enslaved Korean girls and women. This is the one cultural memory that South Koreans and the Korean diaspora express a great deal of outrage and grief over. Lie, however, contends that this grief overpowers the cultural benefits that Chosŏn gained during the colonial era that the nation forgot.

Japan’s colonial oppression was severe. They imposed strict censorship laws that prevented Korean dissenters from speaking up for their rights (not that they didn’t—especially the comedians). But it is also true that Chosŏn was enriched by cultural modernity and industrialization via Japanese influence, given its long relationship with another expert colonizer, Great Britain.

Korean society began to change radically during the colonial era. As Lie writes, “Mass schooling, the military and its destructive weaponry, the Western bureaucracy with its discourses and uniforms, capitalist factories and department stores—all these and much more entered Korea in a rapid and compressed manner in the first half of the colonial period.” New ideas in the form of art, architecture, and literature entered the Korean consciousness through Japanese translations of European ideas.

Lie notes that colonized Koreans begrudgingly or even avidly embraced “the colonial masters and their civilization” in a capitulating fashion. There were influential writers like Yi Kwang-su—arguably the first Korean novelist (albeit not my cup of tea)—who claimed that Koreans ought to give in to Japan and co-prosper in their East Asian relations. Lie also cites Korean youths during the colonial period who strived to become kamikaze pilots and fight for Japan’s imperial war cause. Lie writes, “It’s no wonder that most South Koreans today see colonial rule as an era of unremitting darkness: cultural amnesia as contemporary convenience.”

Trauma occurs during the actual affliction, but its effects can remain dormant until much later, as I know from experience. Even if Korean civilians did emulate their colonizer’s lifestyle, language, education, and modernity, were they operating with a sense of autonomy, agency, and choice? Capitulation does not mean consent with intention. It means to cease resisting the opponent. It implies a learned helplessness, which occurs when a trapped person or animal is repeatedly abused until they stop fighting their abuser. Van der Kolk writes, “Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening. I thought about my patients with abusive families who kept going back to be hurt again. Are traumatized people condemned to seek refuge in what is familiar?”

Perhaps this amnesia that causes South Koreans to forget the cultural, economic, and social benefits present during colonial occupation is not just a convenience but rather a necessity for survival. A child feels the threat of death without their caretaker’s love. I wonder if a civilian feels the same threat without national sovereignty promising to protect them.

Hope of co-prosperity between Korea and Japan was fundamentally flawed because Japan annexed Korea and dissolved its monarchy. Reading about Korean elites who buttered up and sat beside Japanese colonizers while enjoying the fat of colonization reminds me why I read subordinate women who “consent” to sex with their supervisors as nonconsensual. When such a strong power disparity is at play, it’s hard to call it consent. Coercion is not an agreement. Surviving is not living.

As sociologist R. W. Connell recognizes, “Violence is part of a system of domination, but is at the same time a measure of its imperfection.” The moment coercion through weapons, violence, and manipulation comes into play, the playing field is no longer level, and ideals of consent or co-prosperity disappear.

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In Stairway to Heaven Jung-suh is the daughter of a well-off single dad, widower, and professor named Su-ha. Jung-suh’s close friend is a slightly older boy, Song-joo, who is a chaebol. Su-ha marries a film actress named Mira, who moves in with him and Jung-suh. Mira is initially very loving toward Jung-suh, but she has two teenaged children of her own, Tae-hwa and Yuri, from her previous marriage. After Mira’s kids move into the house with Jung-suh and her dad, Mira reveals the dark side to her split personality.

Whenever Mira feels a competitive rivalry against Jung-suh through her daughter Yuri, she physically and emotionally abuses Jung-suh. Mira also separates Jung-suh and Song-joo so her daughter Yuri can date him and become a chaebol’s wife.

When the kids grow older, Yuri runs Jung-suh over with her car out of jealousy. Jung-suh’s head trauma from the accident causes amnesia, and Yuri lies to her family and Song-joo, telling them that Jung-suh died in a fire. But Jung-suh’s stepbrother Tae-hwa, who had been in love with Jung-suh since high school, takes advantage of Jung-suh’s amnesic state and starts living with her after implanting a fictionalized memory in her consciousness. Oy vey.

The kidnapper’s act of implanting a new story in Ji-soo’s consciousness reminds me of how Lie describes Japan’s cultural imperialization of Chosŏn: “The general trend of colonial rule was assimilation, at once expunging things Korean and implanting things Japanese.” Implanting a new narrative also reminds me of how the Korean War and its multitude of grievous stories went erased, denied, and locked away in the classified files until historians and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began to unearth them in the 1990s and early 2000s.

When it comes to the Korean War, the whole world suffers from amnesia. The Korean War is nicknamed “The Forgotten War.” But historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki writes, “The term ‘Forgotten War’ . . . refers largely to an American amnesia.” While the US chose to forget that the Korean War was ever part of its history, American soldiers returned home with the brutality they endured, witnessed, and participated in during service.

“Secondary trauma” is when a person witnesses another person being traumatized through attack while participating in the attack itself or being there to offer aid. America dropped more bombs on the Korean peninsula during the Korean War than it did in the entirety of World War II. When the American government treats the Korean War as though it never happened, it is not only an offense to the millions of Koreans who died but also to the US service personnel stationed in Korea, both past and present.

Culturally speaking, mainstream America did not have a grasp of where and what Korea was for a long time. When I first moved to the States, I did not have the words to offer the US cultural imaginary an explanation of what I was. Telling Americans that I was Korean was no different from telling them that I was an alien, as most people had no clue where Korea was on a map, even though their taxes have been funding the US military occupation in South Korea since the 1940s.

After World War II, US forces occupied enemy countries like Germany and Japan. The American military presence in South Korea, however, is a confused matter, as South Korea was never a US enemy. The US began to station hundreds of military bases around the globe in this manner after the Korean War. The beginning of America’s experimentation with “containment” policy—meaning containing or limiting the spread of communism—began with the Korean War and was fanned by the flames of US McCarthyism.

This precedent of attempting containment and failing in Korea is the reason why the US tried to do it again during the Vietnam War until Vietnam kicked the US military out. Historian Bruce Cumings cites that the Korean War gave the US government a reason to enhance its military budget to four times what it had been during World War II, and it hasn’t gone down since. Ever since the Korean War became America’s excuse to increase its defense budget toward containment by fighting against communism, the same logic has applied to America’s fight against terrorism through wars in the Middle East.

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From K-Drama School: A Pop Culture Inquiry Into Why We Love Korean Television by Grace Jung. Copyright © 2024. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.