@Fern wrote:
I loved the music at the end of episode 6, when the many, many types of bread were being shown. It’s from Mozart’s Magic Fluten opera, when the bird catcher Papageno gets happily reunited with his love interest, Papagena. They talk about how many, many (many!) children they will have. The word for bread in Korean sounds similar to Pa-. (This may well have been used as an advertisement by a bakery?) Sweet!
I don’t know if this aria has been used for a bread commercial in Korea, but I can see how the catchy tune can be used to sell “pang.”
Papageno thinks that he’s an odd bird. He is, in fact, a very strange and peculiar half-bird/half-human. So, he’s ecstatic to find a woman who’s just as odd as he is, Papagena.
Relating this to Park HaKyung, her bread obsession makes her odd. She knows trivia about the origin of bread in the Joseon times and she carries with her a map of bakeries in Jeju Island. On her day off, she flies to the island to visit 12 bakeries she’s picked out. In her mind, buying bread from all twelve of them constitutes a perfect trip.
😂 She’s like Papageno and Papagena who imagine that begetting many, many little sons and daughters is perfect bliss.
Now, HaKyung happily stops at the bakeries and buys a variety of breads. At her eighth bakery, she sees a little girl who’s just as obsessive about bread as she is, if not more so.
But unlike HaKyung who collects assorted types of bread and knows their individual names, the little girl is searching for one, only one kind of bread. And she doesn’t even know its name.
She calls it a “snail bread.”
During the interview of the breadshop owners, they confirm that many bread lovers visit their shops. According to them, these bread lovers buy lots of bread, and they have excellent palates. Well, HaKyung is qualified to be called a bread lover judging from her haul of bread. But I’m not sure about her palate.
It’s the little girl who exhibits discriminating taste buds. Since she doesn’t know her bread’s name, she relies on the taste of the “free” bread or the red bean bun that’s given away at the shops.
She goes from one bakery to another tasting the free bread. She checks not only its flavor, but also its chewiness and moistness.
I thought it’s symbolic that she reverses the course of HaKyung’s solo bread trip. She doesn’t follow an organized map. Instead, she skips and runs on a spontaneous and incidental route.
When she finally finds the right bread, she races home. She proudly offers it at the death memorial for her deceased mother. This great reveal is the crux of the episode. That’s how her bread obsession differs from HaKyung.
For HaKyung her bread obsession is a new adventure. For the little girl, her bread obsession is a connection to the past, to her mother, and to her mother’s obsession with the roll cake. In a way, she’s honoring her mother’s memory by carrying on a tradition.
At the memorial, her mother is remembered for having a fondness for the bread. The little girl is proud that she bought it herself.
Friend: SoJeong (the mother) loved this bread. She brought it to share with us whenever we went diving.
Little girl: I got this bread all by myself.
Grandma: That’s amazing. But weren’t you scared alone?
Little girl. No. I felt looked after by someone.
Grandma: Really? Who?
Little girl: Just someone who loves bread.
So there you go. HaKyung’s and the little girl’s bread obsessions made them kindred spirit for a brief moment in time.
I’ll add screenshots when I’ve the chance later.
Ah! Another Bread-ful post LOL. Thanks @pkml3. What a nice juxtaposition of the journeys of HK and the little girl, Yoo Ra, in their hunt for bread. At first they were on two separate trips with divergent aims, but their paths became one. ‘Kindred spirits,’ as you say. It’s perhaps a indirect comment on how despite our differences, we can find some common understanding.
I like that despite her obsession in getting bread for herself (in which case she should have gone forward to new bakeries), HK stopped to notice granny and Yoo Ra, put her own obsession aside, and decided to join them when it was a case of retracing her steps.
I appreciated that she honoured the granny’s desire to hide the fact that she was watching Yoo Ra, eventhough she was not as good at concealment as granny was, LOL.
I thought it displayed a great deal of patience and loving self-control on the part of granny, who had to scamper all over town, following Yoo Ra, when she could have taken the quicker, easier path of calling out to her and showing her the right bakery. It was the sweetest thing that granny pretended she didn’t know where Yoo Ra had been, and welcomed her back. She let Yoo Ra own the joy of having found and bought the snail bread by herself.
I’ve noticed how often we, adults, short-change children in the great joy of discovery and independence, by wanting something to be done quickly and well, so that we take over and do it for them.
This sweet bread journey has certainly offered food for thought, and taking a leaf from snail bread, we might chew over it as slowly as a snail goes.
Yes,@GB.
There’s a big contrast there, too. The little girl was met by family. haKyung went home to an empty house.
Heh! Yes, Yoo Ra and family had bread for the day, and HK had a suitcase full of bread-children to keep her blissfully munching for days after. LOL.
That final revelation that the roll was for her deceased mother fell like a ton of bricks (in a good way).
For Ha Kyung her search for Jeju bread was a novelty, for little Yoo Ra it was an act of love. I liked a lot that Ha Kyung ended up buying the little girl’s favourite bread as it was the recommendation of a person that grew up with all those flavours around yet this one was different and precious to her, not unlike some Little Prince that had to travel across the Universe and confront himself against a wall made of roses to finally find (thanks to a little fox) that there could be trillions upon trillions of roses yet his was special since he had a connection with her.
And at the end of the day we all long for connections with our loved ones.
A Little Bread Princess of sorts 😀
@FGB what a lovely analogy with The Little Prince. It should have, but didn’t occur to me, that the one type of bun HK was piling up on was the red bean bun that Yoo Ra liked. But, of course!
Yes, connections with our loved ones … more elusive than locating the one particular kind of bread but perhaps more precious as a result. 😄
@FGB4877, I had a head’s up about the mother from @GB’s post, but it still affected me. The little girl character is so steady and well adjusted despite not having her mother. It’s clear that she is being raised well in a loving environment.
@packmule3, yes, HK returns home to her lone duck, but within her bread collection is the red-bean bun that was the little girl’s favourite. I liked how the little girl tested the red-bean samples with her eyes closed, for the taste to better match with her memory. HK saved only one bread out to eat fresh that night and it was the same. She savoured it with her eyes wide open, but it was a discovery for her, rather than a recollection.
I wonder if this drama is as appreciated in SK? I certainly hope so. It’s quiet, quirky and lovely.
I was just thinking that among all of the bakery breads that were shown, the only ‘bread’ I didn’t see was a madeleine. Either I missed it or it was simply there in red bean bun form.
I wonder if food memory might be another Kdrama trope? It comes up so often.
Loved your sly reference, dear @Fern, and I was thinking the very same before opening this Post today. Regrettably I haven’t found a complete copy of Marcel Proust’s Magnus Opum 😉 .