Tao of K-drama: Wait a Bit

In order to write The Tao of K-drama, I thought I should pay close attention to the Tao Te Ching. I got really hung up in the process. The five English translations I read emphasized the concept "Do nothing." According to the translations, successful people do nothing and things turn out well. I found this incomprehensible both because there was lots of doing in the Tao, and because it's literally impossible to "do nothing," right? To explain, "do nothing," people would start to talk about "go with the flow," which is not at all the same thing. 

Furthermore, it was clear to me that nothing about modern South Korea, including what is shown in its popular television, involves people doing nothing. They are always doing something. Now, it was nobody's fault but my own that I had linked K-drama with the Tao, but I was really committed to that proposition. To salvage that, and to link the busy-ness of K-drama with the "do nothing" of the Tao, I came up with this saying:

Heart of the Tao

"Do nothing" means "Wait a bit and see what comes along, while cheerfully doing your chores and cleaning all the neglected corners of your house."

My friend, the poet Michael Lally, liked it so much he suggested I make a tee shirt, which he proudly wears. Thank you, Michael!

But about the time the tee shirts arrived, I got a whole new perspective. I came across Roger Ames and David Hall's Dao Je Jing: "Making This Life Significant" A Philosophical Translation. They make the point that the correct translation is "do nothing coercive" and the common "do nothing" is simply an  unfortunate translation. This makes total sense to me -- suddenly the text is entirely coherent and I feel that I have been offered a real direction for living a good life -- do nothing coercive. AND it totally works for the message of K-drama, which made me so very happy!!!

I did have a new problem -- if "do nothing" is out the window, what do I do with my saying? The rest of it is rather perfect, as anybody who has seen even a little K-drama can tell you. Might I rephrase it???? 

And I might add, this is an excellent prescription for people with burnout! I'm going to try it myself!

Tao of K-drama: Where were you?

In the show, Because This Is My First Life, Yoon Ji-ho, the K-drama-writing heroine, needs to reset her relationship with Nam Se-hee, the man she loves -- she needs him to open up his "Room 19," And so she goes away for a few months. He develops the idea that she has gone to Mongolia and he suffers with longing for her. She reappears, ready to woo him on a new basis. He is shocked to see her suddenly and demands to know where she has been. 

"Insadong," she says.

"Insadong????" he replies. 

If I hadn't been to Seoul, I wouldn't have understood the shock of this. Insadong is a lively neighborhood near the historic center of the city, largely frequented by tourists. He would never have gone there, but it was literally a stone's throw away. It is NOT Mongolia. 

The actors play the scene brilliantly and I laugh out loud every time I see it. 

I once read The Tenth Month by Laura Z. Hobson, a novel about Theodora Gray, a woman who gets pregnant from an affair and decides to keep the baby. Because it is a decision unthinkable at that time, she plots to protect the baby from the stain of illegitimacy. She moves from the East Side of New York City to the West Side and after its birth "adopts" her own child. My mother Maggie Brown had the same predicament and moved from Jersey City, NJ, to Newark, eventually settling in Orange, where I grew up. 

In each case the woman -- Yoon Ji-ho, Theodora Gray, Maggie Brown -- was empowered by a reset of the situation. Yoon Ji-ho's thoughtful exploration of her own situation, and her clever solution, is heartwarming. At the same time, by showing her self-awareness and intellectualism, the show illuminates the writing of K-drama itself. It confirmed my hypothesis that the writers of these shows are literate and psychologically-minded, often with a very good sense of humor. 

The ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi proposed that people have the agency to put new patterns on the world. By her reset, Yoon Ji-ho and Nam Se-hee are freed to define their own terms for love and marriage. "It's OK to make it your way," she tells us in a voiceover at the end. 

And that is lovely message as we stand at the threshold of 2025. 

Tao of K-drama: How DO you handle the truth?

I love K-drama because it teaches me so many things about the life. On November 30th, I posted the revelation of truth in the K-drama She Would Never Know.  Then, on Sunday, December 1st, I read the  Sunday Opinion section of the NY Times, which had a number of pieces on the challenge of facing the truth. At the heart of that problem is Jack Nicholson's famous line in A Few Good Men, "You don't want the truth -- you can't handle the truth." 

The cover story of the Times' section is Sarah Wildman's magnificent, "If my dying daughter could face her mortality, why couldn't we?" Wildman describes the long journey of the family as her daughter died of an incurable cancer. Doctors kept talking of "hope" to the exclusion of time and space to talk about that other thing -- dying -- which shouldn't be but does get conflated with "no hope." It reminded me of the conversation I had with a friend who worked in palliative care. I told her doctors had said there were no more treatments for my nephew's leukemia. She said, "You know that means he's dying, don't you?" I would have to say I didn't know that, and I didn't want to know that -- but it put us in the bind that Wildman is describing, with the dying child left alone with the truth because we don't know how to handle it. 

Nathaniel Rich's "A place that looks death in the face, and keeps living," was almost a counterpoint to Wildman's story of bewilderment and isolation. Rich talked about New Orleans and climate change, arguing that everyone in the city knew that the city might be swallowed by sea. They weren't in denial about this, but rather in active conversation, planning and action. He wrote, "New Orleans has a striking competitive advantage. It knows that every hurricane season poses an existential threat." 

He continues:

I've never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise -- and hurricane fatalism. Yo become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.

The essay arrives at the conclusion that finite lives -- whether of a person or a city -- are not worthless. Learning to live with acceptance of limits -- taking joy in what we have, rather than thinking it has to last forever -- is the great challenge. 

The truth is hard all the time. Even small truths -- we have to floss, eat green leafy vegetables and exercise are truths that many of us (me included) fall flat in accepting. In a way these are stand-ins for the bigger trrouble-makers -- the knowledge that it's all finite. How can it be that this beautiful, wonderful world and the lives we live here won't go on forever? 

Despite our wish to hide or dissemble or steer away the truth, it will come to us. And when that happens we need our communities to hold us close, to talk with us about answers, to go through it together.