well looks like I'm once again not of high enough a calibre. though tbh that isn't very surprising.

pas assez, toujours pas assez

On the current show I'm watching (Jejoongwon), which deserves a reflective blog post because it's rather different from the past mostly romcom/ fantasy Kdramas I've watched. Apart from Kill Me, Heal Me which did bring up some interesting things about DID.

Jejoongwon (originally known as Gwanghyewon, or "House of Extended Grace"; the name was later changed to Jejoongwon and then Severance Hospital) was established in 1885 by Emperor Gojong at the suggestion of one of the newly arrived American medical missionaries, Horace Newton Allen. The first modern Western hospital in Joseon, historical records show that Jejoongwon treated sick people regardless of their economic status despite the hierarchical society of the era. With Allen as its first hospital director, Jejoongwon accepted its first batch of 16 students.

Hwang Jung was born to a family of butchers. Considered the lowest social rank in Joseon along with gravediggers and executioners, butchers weren't allowed to have family names, thus Hwang Jung is initially called "Little Dog." Expected to become a butcher like his father before him, the remarkably intelligent and literate Hwang Jung dreams of becoming something more. The death of his mother, who was unable to get treatment because of her low social status, drives him to walk a different path and pursue Western medicine. He becomes first a groundskeeper then a student at Jejoongwon, and works his way up to become Joseon's first surgeon and one of the country's premier doctors. He later joins the independence movement, while remaining a humane and caring physician. (Hwang Jung is based on real-life historical figure Park Seo-yang.)

Baek Do-yang is a bright and ambitious nobleman, the only son of the Minister of Justice. His father is adamant that he enter the civil service, but despite being the top student at the royal academy, Do-yang is passionate about Western medicine and secretly reads all the medical books he can lay his hands on. He decides to give up his enviable social status and studies medicine at Jejoongwon, where he enters into an intense rivalry with Hwang Jung.

Yoo Seok-ran is a modern woman in her era. Born to wealthy, loving parents (her father is a court interpreter and merchant), unlike most young women she was permitted to be educated, and thus is fluent in English and dresses in Western clothing. She first works at Jejoongwon as Allen's interpreter and finds herself drawn to Hwang Jung, despite being engaged to Baek Do-yang whom she's known since childhood. Under Lilias Horton's mentorship, Seok-ran studies to become Joseon's first female doctor in Western medicine.

As modern medical science clashes with old practices in turn of the century Korea, the personal and professional challenges of Jejoongwon's's doctors are mirrored by the historical and social turbulence of the times.

- really length Wikipedia synopsis

(no screenshots because I'm 28 episodes in and no way I'm gonna trail through random episodes for applicable screenshots)

Clash of the Cultures
I think this is pretty much a given, since the show is about the introduction of Western medicine to the Joseon Dynasty. From the perspective of a comparably enlightened 21st century viewer with the benefits of the knowledge of history and hindsight, it can seen quite laughable (and frustrating) when The People reject and treat Western medicine (actually all things Western) as a taboo. Not only Western medicine (I mean from their perspective cutting someone wide open to save him must sound pretty ludicrous), but also Western technology (beware villagers! photography is part of the Western devils' ploy to steal the soul of children!).

As the whole Japanese political situation was also a side plot, I found it all the more frustrating how the Japanese in the show (I really, really hated them, but then again they were really obnoxiously portrayed and this is, after all, a South Korean production) kept referring to the Westerners as foreigners when they themselves were foreigners as well.  

Anyway, this clash of the cultures was highlighted even further when, in one plot line, our heroes (HJ, DY, and SR) had to make the smallpox vaccine from scratch because the ever annoying Japanese hospital-embassy (it's like synonymous in the show) refused to give them any for very obvious political purposes. It was, at first, laughable how The People and even the Royal Family resorted to talismans and exorcisms by very colourfully dressed shamans to get rid of the "Smallpox Ghost" (a similar theme was brought up in Time Slip: Dr Jin, which honestly and unfortunately, was much draggier, weirder, and more boring). But I think the nail really hit home when the shamans actually beat up and tried to stop our heroes from making the vaccine, out of really not wanting to anger the "Smallpox Ghost" or out of not wanting to lose their business (smallpox vaccine = no more phony exorcisms), we don't really know.

Women in Education
Quite early on in the show, our heroes had to take an apparently really rigorous examination (physical, translation, medical, practical, whatnot) in order to get into the medical school of Jejoongwon. Our heroine, SR, as a girl, could not, of course, take the examination. But in order to test herself and to find out if she was really up to it, she dressed up as a man (how can anyone not see through that phony moustache and glasses, seriously) to take the exam... and aced it as the top scorer.

This theme was the one which Sungkyunkwan Scandal was all about. As a female with a shot at education (as much as I lament about the process) in the 21st century where, in many places, it is law for both sexes to gain an education, it is difficult not to feel indignant for SR in this situation. Just as "women hold up half the sky", though SR was eventually expelled and the male chauvinistic pigs who kept expressing disbelief over how "a woman/ wench could outsmart all the men" were annoying the living lights out of me, SR did eventually manage to learn Western medicine in the Jejoongwon medical school, and to become a doctor, and that was that (:

Propriety vs. Life
A subset of the Clash of the Cultures. In this plot line, the Minister of War's daughter (and also the fiancee of the Chancellor's son, aka very, very important yangban elites are involved) had pleuritis (accumulation of pus in the pleural cavity, if I'm not wrong), which also happens to be a very common disease in this show (hur.). Unfortunately, all the doctors, including the two who could perform the appropriate surgery, Heron (the 2nd director of Jejoongwon) and DY were away at Jaemulpo (some faraway place, I assume). By this time, HJ had already revealed his real identity to the Jejoongwon staff and was back living at the slums. In the end, the staff at Jejoongwon had to enlist the help of HJ, the nearest person who could perform the surgery, while DY raced back to Jejoongwon on horse.

It was initially planned for HJ to assist the surgery outside the room while SR performed it under his guidance, since the patient was female and very, very important. At this point of time I was already trying not to scream at the fiance and the patient's father. I mean, come on the girl is dying in the room and you're reminding the only fellow who can save her again and again that he can't go in and blah blah blah.

They ended up being invited away (thank god), but things took a turn for the worse and HJ managed to enter the room (after some persuasion) and oversaw the surgery himself. In the end, before draining away the pus from her lungs, he also carried out a tracheotomy (which was not new after Time Slip: Dr Jin and Emergency Couple aka the medical drama that has non-existent sanitary procedures), which seemed to really wow the people present since the procedure, at the time, was not even in the Western medical books yet. Yay for HJ!

Anyway, somehow, the girl's maid was allowed to stay in the surgery room (??!?!?!?!) and she kept protesting how HJ had to stop touching the girl and not look at her and blah blah blah. Really why was she in the room anyway?

HJ eventually saved the girl and the people present promised to cover it up, that SR was the one who had saved her instead. Unfortunately, the girl remembered subconsciously, and eventually committed suicide because she felt that she had been violated. The cat was out of the bag and given that the girl had links to very, very important yangban elites, HJ was charged with high treason and put on the death row for violating a yangban girl, and for posing as a yangban on top of that.

I think this plot line really brought forth the whole Propriety vs. Life issue, which probably isn't as big an issue (as compared to other medical ethic thingamajigs) today. Leave a girl to die because cultural laws rule that you cannot touch her, or to heck with impropriety and save her life because how can one care about propriety when you're dead? That is was the question of the time.

The Caste System
 I'd say this was another really big theme in the show, given that HJ was one of the Untouchables. After the whole yangban girl and impropriety saga, HJ was eventually pardoned by King Gojong (as any good audience member knew would happen, though that didn't stop me from crying me eyes out [surprise, surprise!] at a few related scenes), and he was promoted in class and rank. However, that did not stop, unsurprisingly, stop The People (or at least some of them) from looking down on him and picking on him and calling him names and beating him up.

Seriously. To hell with you, you ignorant, hypocritical, stuck-up pricks.

But rationally speaking, such a situation would, indeed, be difficult to accept, given that for hundreds of years, they had been raised with this mentality of belonging in a caste system. Cue lower secondary history.

It's all the more painful to watch when even The People, whom we always see as shabbily dressed and being portrayed as somewhat crude, started to throw rotten food and pebbles at HJ, who was, at the time, yet to be pardoned and was in shackles. It was a relief to see SR finally step in and point out indignantly how HJ had actually saved The People as who there had not received the smallpox vaccine that he had helped to make? Yes, People, if not for HJ, you would've all been corpses floating along in the river or rotting in the dirt somewhat unmarked. Thankfully this managed to knock some sense into them and they stopped throwing stuff at him, at least.

After being pardoned, most of the other medical students at Jejoongwon (except for a few like Song Young-kyu's character Go Ui-saeng-nim who was so innocently, childishly, and naively adorable in the show, as compared to the other shows I've seen him in [the Japanese ally in Gu Family Book and the assassin in You're All Surrounded!]) still mocked him and looked down on him and called him names. In one particularly memorable scene, HJ finally stood up to all of this and pushed them flat down about how he had been pardoned by the King so by mocking him they were going against the King's order (or something like that), and also squeezing the hell out of one of the guy's hands (it sounds childish here but it was fun to watch).

There was another smaller plot line on how DY (possibly) tested blood typing with some Untouchables, an idea proposed by the ever obnoxious Watanabe, after this idea had been shot down by Allen (the 1st director of Jejoongwon). It was never shown onscreen, but DY's snobbish aristocratic yangban mindset was all the more highlighted by this assumed experiment, that the Untouchables were not human at all. I guess this is pretty ironic given that DY was testing human blood types on them, thus indicating that he knew on some level that they were human, but simply neither saw nor treated them as such since he conducted human experimentation.

On a side note, it feels really good how Allen and Heron (whom I started out as disliking but ended up really, really liking till his martyr's death because seriously the guy was a complete human representation of the Hippocratic oath [as opposed to the ratlike Japanese Watanabe whom I wanted to toss off a cliff every time he came on screen]) kept constantly standing up for HJ, because of both his extraordinary skills and his underdog situation.

I can't seem to fully describe it here (given how long-winded I am and how my thoughts seem to be jumping all about the page), but the caste system was really one of the defining themes in the first half or more of the show. Now that I'm in the second half or less though, it seems as if the main theme has switched to the politics.

Medicine and Politics
Earlier, before his death, Heron made it especially clear that he wanted to focus solely on medicine and not to meddle in politics. Though this is ultimately ethically correct and laudable, it was, still, ironic and unavoidable given that he was, after all, an American missionary with consular jurisdiction on very foreign soil.

After Heron's death, DY eventually went to study medicine in Japan with a Japanese government scholarship, and returned to be the Head of Surgery in the Japanese hospital in Joseon. Aka the direct rival of Jejoongwon. In a situation similar to Heron's, he staunchly insisted that he was simply following where the best medical facilities and technology were. And that as a doctor, it did not matter where he practiced medicine; the patients that he healed and helped were all that mattered.

In a negative parallel of Heron's case, although DY's belief was true, the political aspect could still not be fully ignored, that the Japanese hospital was set up in order to belittle the Joseon people, and thus posed a threat to the nation. On a side note, it does seem complicated and a little hypocritical how I (and maybe other audience members) slam the Japanese for setting up a hospital with deep ties to the political situation, then say that medicine and politics are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps, it is the fact that in the show, the Japanese specifically aimed to use medicine to achieve their political agenda (I constantly try to comfort myself by reminding myself that sound 50 decades after the period in the show, the Japanese eventually got defeated), painting a really obnoxious picture of them. Even more ironic is how Watanabe coined himself "Imperial Japan's Hippocrates", when he was obviously not following the Hippocratic Oath at all (one of the earliest instances being pretending to only treat HJ's mother who had pleuritis [again] because HJ was a butcher and could not pay).

So. Summary: DY, your line of thought was ethically correct, but couldn't you have done it with someone other than the Japanese...?!

Modernisation
Before assassinating Empress Myeong Seong, the Japanese guard guy, besides very happily accepting her derogatory taunts about how Japan was the "dog" that wanted to eat the "meat" that was Joseon, pointed out how Joseon was once a prosperous and culturally rich nation, but eventually became the state that it was at because of how it was a hermit nation and all, closing itself off to all foreign attempts to interact with it.

This question of whether the empire brought it upon itself by being a hermit nation is one that I've always been asking. Whose fault is it? It's strange but true how this instance of the force of modernisation/ globalisation is still at work today, though maybe on a smaller scale. Had Joseon opened up like Japan did during the Meiji Restoration, would it have been stronger? And was Japan really at fault, given that they were copying what they saw in the West: how the Western powers previously colonised so many nations as their own?

-----

Anyway. As seen from the numerous rather deep, reflective, and intellectual themes brought up by this show (it's 36 episodes long, but they pass really quickly unlike some shows cough Time Slip: Dr Jin cough Pride and Prejudice). Finally, an intellectual show that make up for all the nonsensical light-hearted romcoms I've been watching!

Jokes aside, I really hope to learn about/ study more of such culture-against-culture, brink-of-modernisation instances. They're pretty fun to look into. Sometimes I romanticise history too much for my own good. Hah.

omgggggg I WANNA SQUISH THEM AHHHHHHHHHHHHH

You are now 18, standing on the precipice,
trembling before your own greatness.
who say you are too young and delicate
to make anything happen for yourself.
They don’t see the part of you that smolders.
Don’t let their doubting drown out the sound
of your own heartbeat.
Your bravery builds beyond you. You are needed
by all the little girls still living in secret,
writing oceans made of monsters and
throwing like lightening.
You are stronger than the world has ever believed you to be.
The world laid out before you to set on fire.
All you have to do
is burn.
This is your call to leap.
There will always being those
You are the first drop of a hurricane.
You don’t need to grow up to find greatness.

- Clementine Von Radics

conjugating is always so bloody painful I want to cry

so I took an inkblot test for the fun of it

and now to stress over scholarship applications. good god when will this nightmare end. as if I'm not sheepish enough from constantly bugging the same teachers to do up references for me.

save my damned soul