Adventures in Asia

I can’t even… my feeeeeeeeeeeeeeels! I don’t usually watch recently aired Korean TV shows, but after thoroughly enjoying “Man from the Stars” I decided to go ahead a watch another drama from within the last year: the highly-anticipated, star-studded, the one, the only, “The Heirs”! Written by Kim Eun Sook, who also wrote “Secret Garden” (my favorite drama), and starring Lee Min Ho of “City Hunter” (also another favorite). Also starring… a ridiculous number of Korean celebrities. Where to begin? Here’s my rendition of the cast list: Mr. Terrible Sweater (Kim Tan): Lee Min Ho (LMH) of “Boys Over Flowers” and “City Hunter” Miss Lost Puppy (Cha Eun Sang): wide-eyed Park Shin Hye of “You’re Beautiful” and “Heartstrings” Creeper (Choi Young Do): Kim Woo Bin – Okay, IDK where he came from, but he should def stick around (Apparently he’s a model) Best Friend (Yoon Chan Young): Kang Min Hyuk of “Heartstrings” and band CN Blue Miss Ditz (Lee Bo Na): Krystal Jung of ...

So I’ve already blogged about how Korean TV is taking over the world. Yet when I first moved to China, I wondered how popular Korean media would be. I mean, China is geographically close to South Korea, but who knows if the Chinese are into their music/TV shows? Turns out some of my teenage students listen to kpop groups like EXO and Super Junior – no surprises there. (Those boy bands release whole songs in Mandarin in addition to Korean.) What was a little shocking was when I overheard my Chinese coworkers (women in their thirties) gushing about the latest kdrama: “Man From the Stars.” (Also translated as “My Love From Another Star” or “You Who Came From the Stars.”) Then my roomie discovered news articles about how Chinese leaders are quaking in their shoes over the immense popularity of the Korean show, because “Why can’t China make something this good?” Then we found more articles about the addictive tendencies of Chinese viewers. For example, ap...