Spring Days!!

This drama centered on the staple ingredient of Korean series: the quintessential love triangle set against the background of a modern but thoroughly dysfunctional family. The patriarch Dr.Go, is the Head of a major hospital, a strict authoritarian man whose apparent mission in life is to make his two sons, Eun-Ho and Eun-Sup, doctors whether they like it or not. Eun-Ho, his son from his first marriage, is already a qualified doctor whereas his son from his second marriage, Eun-Sup, is a musician at heart and loathed to be a doctor. Actually, he had an aversion to blood due to some traumatic incident earlier in his life (he apparently witnessed his mother's suicide attempt). The circumstances of the break-up of his first marriage were not very clear, especially when you are watching a poorly translated version of this drama. He apparently forbade Eun Ho to see his mother after the separation. Eun Ho eventually managed to find his way to an old teacher of his father in an island clinic who has information regarding the whereabouts of his mother. Even though told not to by Dr. Go, the old teacher eventually capitulated and told Eun Ho where to find his mother. In the island clinic, Eun Ho met the old teacher's granddaughter, Jung-Eun, who stopped talking from the age of ten, when abandoned by her mother. Through a series of incidences, some may call it therapy, they fell in love with each other and Eun Ho eventually managed to make Jung-Eun talk, by which time he was already on the boat to locate his mother. He promised to come back for her.

Eun Ho had a joyous and somewhat bittersweet reunion with his mother. He planned to take his mother back to the island and marry Jung Eun but first, he has to clear it with his father. On the way to the bus station, in a heavy snow storm, they met with a terrible accident resulting in her death and Eun Ho to lose his memory (another K-drama staple). Upon learning this, Jung Eun rushed to Seoul to look after Eun Ho, only to be devastated by the discovery that he does not even remember her. Jung Eun stayed in Eun Sup's apartment whilst the latter moved into hospital quarters. In the long process of recovery Eun Sup was thrown together a lot with Jung Eun and fell deeply in love with her. Thrown against these dynamics is Eun Sup's mother, a highly neurotic and insecure former nightclub girl whose explosive and mercurial temperaments provide the twists and turns common in this kind of drama. Thrown in are third parties, the spurned and the unrequited love to the two main male characters, whose connivance added spice to the already tangled relationships.

Apart from the love triangle, the sub message of this drama is unresolved sibling rivalry stemming largely due to poor parenting from parents who themselves are dysfunctional. There are issues of abandonment galore; it seems that almost every character in this story experienced intentional or unintentional physical and/or emotional abandonment. Eun Ho was particularly traumatized by the separation from his mother, enjoying an extremely short reunion only to lose her again.