Aside from the opening credits, another element of the kdrama that we pay attention to on this blog is the timeline. We like to order the events in a logical chronology to understand cause and effect, anticipate the next movement, and spot plotholes.
As of Episode 6, this is how I understood the sequence of events. Since it’s largely based on BoGeol’s explanation to WooHak, I’m going to assume that BoGeol is finally telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
1. Kiho’s homeroom teacher called his father to report cash found in his locker. The cash was presumed stolen.
2. The boys took precautionary measures before the father arrived home, like hiding all the sharp objects. They locked their bedroom door and hid in the closet.
2. Yelling for KiHo, the father broke down the door. He found them in the closet.
3. The mother rushed in to stop the father. She was noticeably limping. She was thrown to the floor.
4. While the father’s attention was on the mother, the boys tried to run out of the room. But the father grabbed ahold of KiHo and flung him across the room.
Father: Your homeroom teacher called KiHo and said they found this in your locker. How could a cop’s son steal money?
Hyung/ChaeHo/WooHak: He didn’t steal it. He saved it. For a birthday gift. He secretly worked part-time to buy you a birthday gift. Right?
The Hyung was lying to protect KiHo.
Note his cover-up. No wonder the father immediately didn’t believe the report from KiHo’s coworkers at the island that KiHo was saving up money for his father’s birthday. That lie had been repeated once too often.
The mother tried to sway her husband’s mind.
Mother: I see. We’re so proud of KiHo. Right, dear?
Father: (yelling) ChaeHo-ya! What did I say I hated the most? It was making up ridiculous lies!
KiHo: I saved up to run away.
KiHo stood up, literally and metaphorically. He was standing up to his father’s bullying. And note this: he spoke the truth. Since his father said that he hated lies the most, he thought the truth would somehow exempt him from his father’s wrath.
Mother: (screeching) What are you talking about? It’s not true.
Hyung/ChaeHo/WooHak: (protecting KiHo) That’s not true.
Father: (grabbing his shoulders) Run away? I’m a cop. A cop who chases culprits that steal billions to the ends of the earth to catch them.
My comments:
a. His father bragged about his job. His specialty was white-collar crimes like embezzlement. But on the island, he was only on patrol duty, answering community complaints of disorderly conduct. Then after he returned to Seoul, he was employed only as a night-shift security guard. His jobs showed a steady career decline.
b. However, given his previous background in white-collar crime, it should be easy for him to track down Kiho and his mother after obtaining the memory card of Daewoong’s dashcam.
c. He’s applying the same doggedness that he demonstrated when catching criminals to finding KiHo.
Father: (gripping his jaw) You wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for me. If it weren’t for me, (gripping his wife’s jaw, too) you would’ve all starved to death in the streets! If it wasn’t for me (slapping his wife) –
KiHo: You should’ve just disappeared. Then, we would’ve been happy.
Father: (grabbing him again) What did you say?
KiHo batted his hand away. Although this move probably escalated the situation, I like that he wasn’t afraid to show a physical rejection of his father.
KiHo: Even if we were in the streets and even if we starved to death, we would’ve been a lot happier.
My comments:
a. BoGeol is right in his observation in Episode 1 that between WooHak and him, he’s the savage one and WooHak the pushover. He alone was challenging their father. However, by confronting his father, he enraged him more.
b. KiHo’s display of defiance differed from his nonaggressive stance on the island. Remember when his father came home to beat him up?
From Episode 1:
Father: How dare you hoard money behind my back? For what? Where are you running off to now?
KiHo: That’s not why!
Father: You spoke to your mother, didn’t you? Did that bitch tell you to come? Tell me! Where is that bitch? Where is she hiding?
KiHo: Father!
Father: I fed you! I put a roof over your head. And you’re still ungrateful!
KiHo: (no answer)
He had no comeback for his father then. It seems to me that he had “learned” his lesson after ChaeHo’s injury.
5. The father picked up a kitchen chair to beat KiHo with it. ChaeHo rushed to his younger brother’s side and covered him with his own body.
ChaeHo took the blow intended for KiHo.
BoGeol: That’s when you hurt your head. You were unconscious for quite some time. You had lost all your memory when you woke up.
For now, I’ve no reason to doubt the authenticity of BoGeol’s story. As I said in my Episode 6 write-up on “Secrets vs Lies”, BoGeol preferred secrecy to lies. He would keep secrets to protect his loved ones, but he avoided lying as much as possible.
6. This is WooHak’s follow up. He told Mokha what he remembered after he woke up.
From Episode 4:
WH: Here, look. From here to here. It’s my scar.
MH: Goodness gracious. Gosh!
WH: When I woke up from surgery, it felt like my life began from high school. I didn’t recognize [my mother] but she said she was my mom. I didn’t recognize my dad either. Then I met BoGeol long after I was discharged. He felt like a total stranger.
Note here: this is when KiHo/BoGeul managed to escape the father and leave the island. He returned to his mother and Hyung.
MH: You don’t have any memories at all? Maybe if you look at old photos…
WH: They said our house caught on fire. And our photos were all burned up. It’s okay. I recovered thanks to my family, and it wasn’t too bad. It’s just a shame that I lost all of my childhood friends. I’d love to find them, but I can’t. There’s no way since I don’t even remember them.
Note to @Fern, I wasn’t the one who said that their house caught on fire. WooHak did. 🙂 My theory then was either the father burned the house down out of rage or KiHo burned the house down to remove all traces of them. Now, we know that WooHak had been lied to and that the house didn’t catch on fire. In fact, the house was kept intact like a mausoleum of the family who once lived there.
Putting together BoGeol’s and WooHak’s accounts of the events, we get these basic facts:
1. ChaeHo/WooHak was unconscious for a long time.
2. Only their mother and fake father were by WooHak’s side when he regained consciousness.
3. ChaeHo/WooHak only met BoGeol “long after” his hospital discharge. He didn’t recognize him either.
Those are the facts.
And now, these are the assumptions based on BoGeol’s and WooHak’s narratives. It’s safe to assume that:
1. The reason WooHak didn’t see BoGeol for a long time was because BoGeol had been “spirited away” to the island by their father.
The long time WooHak was unconscious in the hospital + long time after his discharge = long time BoGeol was stuck on the island with their father.
Remember, too, that MoHak’s middle school bestie called BoGeol a “newbie” and transferee.
2. By Episode 6, WooHak realized that he wasn’t KiHo.
The whole time that ChaeHo was unconscious in the hospital and then recuperating outside the hospital, his brother KiHo was on the island with their dad.
This was the time KiHo met MokHa. This was the time KiHo described in Episode 1, as “their own different season.”
3. The flashdrive WooHak gave to MokHa came from BoGeol/KiHo himself.
Remember now: the flashdrive was inside the backpack KiHo gave to Mokha. Mokha dropped the backpack when her father chased her on the boat. The backpack must have been returned to KiHo after his discharge from the island hospital.
Hmmm…isn’t that a coincidence, too? Both brothers were hospitalized for head trauma, roughly around the same time. While ChaeHo was in a Seoul hospital because their dad whacked him on the head, KiHo was in an island hospital because he got beaten up by Mokha’s dad.
Both brothers were protecting somebody they saw as weaker and more vulnerable than them.
4. For some unknown reason, the mother stayed with ChaeHo at the hospital while the father took KiHo with him to the island.
This is important: we need to know why the mother consented to the father taking KiHo with him after she saw what he had done to ChaeHo. We don’t know:
if she was coerced,
if she compromised to save one son first before the other, or
if she simply ran away with ChaeHo out of fear.
I find it strange that the father didn’t know the location of his wife nor the hospital of his son, given his police contacts in Seoul. The mother could have applied for protective services and records of ChaeHo’s hospitalization became confidential.
5. The fake father arrived in their lives while Chaeho/WooHak was unconscious.
My comments:
a. I’m not Korean but I’m willing to hazard a guess that, back then, their mother would have encountered shame and criticism for living with a man who wasn’t her husband. The stigma of cohabitation could possibly have been greater than the stigma of being a victim of domestic violence.
b. I also don’t know how the mother could have found another man so quickly to step in as her pretend husband. Curious.
6. After KiHo escaped his father and reunited with his mother and his Hyung again in Seoul, he was given a new name, BoGeol. His father had been searching for him but couldn’t find him since he and the rest of the family assumed new identities.
This is the statement of KiHo’s pier coworkers to Mokha when she asked them what happened to KiHo.
From Episode 2
Man 1: He became a lunatic after you were gone. He destroyed your restaurant’s water tanks. He never went to school and always stared at the sea. Then, he got the urge to run away once again and did just that. Not only that, he reported his own father for domestic violence. Officer Jung insisted that he was innocent. But the police were merciless. He was fired immediately that day. KiHo is the worst son ever. Goodness, and he’s still looking for his son.
Man 2: After hearing KiHo was seen in Seoul, he abandoned his house and has been searching Seoul for his son ever since. His son left him, but he still loves him. That’s what parents do. I wonder where KiHo is. He’s probably dead. If not, how could he have gone unnoticed for 15 years?
In summary, this is the timeline based on the puzzle pieces given by BoGeol and WooHak.
The mother and two sons were living in an abusive home.
KiHo ended their abusive situation in a confrontation with their dad.
ChaeHo ended up in the hospital with their mother accompanying him.
KiHo ended up transferring to an island with their father.
He sought to escape and return to his mother.
He met Mokha.
They decided to run away together.
Their plans failed.
Mokha was stranded on an island. KiHo ended up in the hospital.
He ran away again and reported his dad for child abuse.
His dad followed him to Seoul and had been looking for him ever since.
That’s it, folks.
Thanks for this. I didn’t remember seeing the limp in their Seoul home chair incident.
@Birdie007,
She was limping as she walked in the boys’ bedroom to stop their father from hurting them. 🙂
Of course, this doesn’t mean anything, really. We can pin her limp on him. But it’s also possible that her limp wasn’t due to injury from physical abuse, but a disease. We don’t know yet.
Wow!! I’ve read everything.
It’s like a prosecutor file or something like that. 👍
There is a dark zone while Woo Hak is in hospital. Many questions. Why Ki Ho goes with father. How mother could build fake identity, it’s not easy.
How Ki Ho manage to accuse his father for domestic violence. I think it’s the cam-record we see in episode 1. My assumption is Ki Ho had a plan B: recording when his father beats him.
My biggest question is why the father wasn’t put in jail for attacking his son so violently that he ended up in the hospital unconscious for months. That makes absolutely no sense to me. I assume he wouldn’t have gotten the job as a patrol officer on the island if he already been accused of domestic violence, and attacking his own son. Why wouldn’t the family want to bring charges if it meant the father would be put in jail and away from them?
@BethB
Re. your questions
Why the father wasn’t put in jail
It’s the same reason why the father was merely fired from his police job on the island instead of jailed for child abuse despite KiHo giving credible evidence of abuse. He had the photos, and presumably, videos.
The consequence? Job termination for the father, but no jail time. No reparation for the victim, KiHo.
Why the mother didn’t bring charges
As to why the wife didn’t bring charges after ChaeHo was almost killed, I’m going to speculate here that KiHo was held “hostage” by the father. If she squealed, KiHo would get harmed.
In real life, there are many reasons why a domestic abuse victim wouldn’t report the abuser. There’s fear, threats, financial dependence, misplaced guilt, low self-esteem, PTSD, children, shame, loss of status, lack of legal counsel, and ill-judged belief that a) the abuser would change his/her way and b) love conquers all.
For us who aren’t in that situation, it’s easy to question the victim’s decision-making process. But for those who are trapped in domestic abuse, nothing is as black-and-white as it seems.
Thank you, @packmule3. Every thing you wrote above makes sense. I had initially thought that Ki-Ho joined the family after living on the island and the father came to find him and nearly killed Chae Ho, but your timeline makes more sense.
If I were married to a vindictive, un-convicted, physically abusive ex-police detective, I would want to live in secret, too. The original family house is extremely creepy.
Back in episode 1, I thought it was interesting that Ki-Ho had the latest phone and video recording equipment. His father didn’t seem to be the type to spoil him, but he must have given him money for those things. It made Ki-Ho initially seem like a bit of a rich kid compared to the others.
I wasn’t questioning the victim(s) so much as questioning the South Korean legal system. I cannot believe that someone could beat someone else up to the point of unconsciousness, and there would be no charges filed. When the boy showed up in the hospital beaten up, surely there was some kind of investigation, whether the family pressed charges or not—? Assuming the dad was demoted, and ended up being a patrol officer on an island, that still doesn’t seem enough punishment for a grown man who cracked open a boy’s skull with a chair leg. Or, maybe his connections within the police department kept him from being charged? Or, worse, parents in SK aren’t charged with assault when they beat up their kids??
@BethB,
I think you should watch the drama again because you’re missing some critical points.
1. ChaeHo was NOT repeatedly beaten up with the chair.
We only saw the father swinging once so we can only assume that chair made body contact once. After he hit ChaeHo’s head, he stopped. ChaeHo would have been instantly knocked unconscious after one blow to the head. Blood would have been gushing from the open wound. The mom and KiHo would have been screaming.
The father would have stopped because he knew he crossed the line.
2. Note this. If you rewatch Ep 1, you’ll see that the father hit KiHo on the back, arms, and places where bruises could be hidden. (I already pointed out that both Kiho and Mokha wore long sleeves despite it being a hot summer.)
This should tell you that the father learned to hit “discriminately” after what happened to ChaeHo.
3. The father didn’t repeatedly hit ChaeHo with the chair. The hospital scene only showed a bandage around his head. And WooHak only remembered a head injury, ONE long scar on his head.
And because of absence of other injuries typically associated with physical abuse (e.g., hairline fracture, broken ribs, bruised torso, etc.), it would have been easy to write off ChaeHo’s head injury as “accidental.” The mother could have been coerced to say that the head injury was a result of an “accidental” slip in the kitchen.
We don’t know anything about the Korean legal system, much less their laws and regulations re domestic violence in 2007. I don’t think a critique of their penal codes is the intention of this screenwriter. (I would have dropped this kdrama anyway if it did venture into legal territory.) In my opinion, she wants to show that family abuse is a public issue that’s underreported because:
a. Society tends to view it as a family matter to be settled privately.
b. Police view domestic abuse more leniently than, say, theft, destruction of property, or drug abuse.
c. Parents think corporal punishment is a warranted use of force to discipline their “wayward” children.
d. Victims are without a voice. They have no one to advocate for them.
[sorry that I got so far off topic under this post about the Timeline!]
@packmule3 Thanks for all your comments about the question of child abuse. My questions about the abuse were answered in a later episode when the mother referred to his concussion in front of an authority as “when he hurt himself.” With the angry dad sitting next to her, it made sense that she wouldn’t have pressed charges because there would be time limit on how long the abusive dad would actually be in jail (if any time at all), meaning he probably would come out even angrier and more violent than before.
However, assuming the dad beat his kids on a regular basis, I thought there might be bruises elsewhere on ChaeHo’s body (like there was on KiHo’s limbs when he was in middle school) when he arrived at the hospital. It’s harder to explain new and old bruises as a one-time accident. That is what I thought would trigger an investigation by the “authorities,” as it would these days in the USA, even if the mother insisted he was a clumsy boy who was always hurting himself.
But SK isn’t the USA. I looked around on the Internet about this and saw that SK parents hitting their kids is still somewhat the norm, and is referred to as “the beating of love.” I assume that’s one reason it was included in this script.