Dae Jang Geum/Jewel in the Palace

Dae Jang Geum

Was down with gastric flu lately and spent quite a bit of time in bed. Got sick of being sick and decided to stop resisting the Korean TV serial Da Chang Jin that my mother lent me more than a year ago. I started watching it on Sunday afternoon and only finished it yesterday at midnight - after a few sleepless nights and almost nothing else done.

Now it's over and I can at last get on with my life, but of course I have to day dream about the handsome hero in the series and his pretty heroine and rewrite scenarios in my head. Sigh, such steadfast and sans condition love, support and confidence he had for his beloved, do such men really exist? I know I sound like a lecher, but I thought that they could have created a few hot scenes (e.g. some cheek to cheek rubbing in the least) between the 2 of them. All that chaste hand-holding and hugs were particularly frustrating.

Otherwise, it was interesting watching them cook though I regret to say that for some reason I didn't find the food (except the BBQs and Steamboats) particularly appetising. Though I like the idea of quickly stirfrying groups of ingredients individually and putting them together in the end. I am going to explore this cooking method.

I also love the soundtracks in the serial, namely this and this. The latter is actually sung by an Italian (Alessandro Safina).

I am also a great fan of anything period and royal. One of my favourite TV serials remains Ho Gong (Japanese Inner Court or Harem) shown like decades ago and featuring the Japanese Royal Palace during the Tokugawa Shogunate era. All the ladies in elaborate Kimonos and those sword brandishing samurais...and loads of History, one of my favourite subjects.

Speaking of history of course I started to research Korean history after watching Da Jang Geum as I was quite perplexed as to why pretty often the Chinese dubbing would talk of Chaoxian when normally Korea is Hanguo. And I believe that actually both are correct except that in South Korea they would refer to their country as Hanguo and the Northern Koreans would refer to Korea as Chaoxian. Didn't know that the Joseon Dynasty lasted 500 years and that they already had a special system to record their History even then. If I am not the boring housewife that I am today I wouldn't mind getting my hands on the Joseon Dynasty Annals to verify a few facts myself.

Meanwhile, I normally have loads of respect for Confucius but I must say that finally I realise that he's quite an MCP (Male Chauvinist Pig) with all that discrimination against women etc. And fancy our hero making shoes for a living at the end of the serial and then I find out that this trade was considerd really low class in Korea, ironic when you actually pay hundreds of dollars for a pair of M.B today.

I am also quite pleased with myself, with the fact that I watched the entire 70 episodes in Mandarin and read the Chinese subtitles (without difficulty) at the same time. To think that I used to struggle with (and hate) Chinese when I was at school and now I'm wishing that I had paid more attention to the language then. And it depresses me to know that my kids will definitely not be able to speak Chinese not to mention read or write it. Fancy all the wonderful movies, TV shows, music and morals they will be missing out on. Speaking of the Chinese, my Hunan version probably had quite a bit censored (knowing the Chinese) so one of these days I should get my hands on the original Korean version and watch it again. I also wouldn't mind watching it in Cantonese.

And then I started to wonder about the use of the Chinese language in Korea and it's really interesting to learn that Chinese characters were/are used in the Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, the other Chinese dialects/languages etc without any need to employ the same pronunciation. If I were at school again I would certainly study linguistics. How many Chinese characters do you know? One needs about 3-4000 in order to be literate and there are about 47000 characters in the Chinese language. I hope I live a long time because I have so many things to re-learn when the kids are all grown up.

I've just gotten my hands on the piano score for Onara (the theme song) so I'm going to go play it.

PS : The piano score is too easy and therefore uninteresting. If anyone has a more difficult and complete score please let me know. Thanks.