I Came for TVXQ and Stayed for the Stories

It all started because my younger sister was into TVXQ.

This is how many permanent changes seem to begin in families: one sibling becomes obsessed with something, and suddenly everybody else is involved too. So when Sungkyunkwan Scandal came out in 2010, my siblings and I started watching it together. We waited for every new episode and then went looking for whatever subtitled version we could find. We were certainly not waiting patiently for a dub. Patience had no place in this arrangement.

We started watching for Park Yoochun. This was his Korean television-drama debut, and as TVXQ-adjacent people, we were naturally curious. Then Song Joong-ki appeared on the screen as Gu Yong-ha, and I felt like I was going to drool every time he was there. (The Korea Times)

There is no dignified or sophisticated way to put that. It is simply the truth.

The cast was almost unfairly attractive, the acting was decent, and the drama was funny, warm and entertaining. At its centre was Kim Yoon-hee, a young woman in the Joseon era who disguised herself as a man so that she could study at Sungkyunkwan, an institution women were not allowed to attend.

This was not exactly a new idea. A woman dressing as a man and walking into a world closed to women is an age-old storytelling device. Shakespeare did it in Twelfth Night, and storytellers were playing with disguised identities long before him. But a trope does not have to be new to work. I love a good cliché. When it is done properly, it can make me laugh, ache and occasionally cry over something I knew was coming from the beginning.

The idea was deeply attractive to the younger me: a clever woman putting on men’s clothes and claiming access to an education she had been denied. Honestly, it is still attractive to the 36-year-old me. Maybe even more so now.

At the time, however, I was not sitting there performing literary analysis. I was watching a pretty girl pretending to be a boy while several equally pretty men complicated her life. I was entertained. Song Joong-ki kept appearing. My siblings were beside me. We had another episode to wait for. That was enough.

And somehow, it opened a door that never closed again.

After Sungkyunkwan Scandal, I followed the TVXQ members into their acting projects. Then one drama led to another. I watched the funny ones, the ridiculous ones, the painfully romantic ones and stories with queer characters and themes. Some were wonderful. Some were objectively questionable. I watched them anyway.

I also developed a particular love for historical dramas. That path eventually took me to shows such as Dr. Jin and The Moon Embracing the Sun. Korean dramas opened the door, and Chinese and Japanese dramas soon followed. Now they are simply part of my regular rotation, alongside the animated shows I love. At the moment, I am watching Alchemy of Souls—another historical fantasy full of beautiful people, complicated identities, impossible magic and enough emotional suffering to keep me perfectly happy.

Looking back, Sungkyunkwan Scandal was an almost suspiciously perfect gateway drama for me. It had comedy, romance, friendship, political conflict, historical clothing, gender disguise and people staring intensely at one another while trying not to reveal important secrets. Apparently, that was the exact formula required to rearrange my viewing habits forever.

I later learned that Sungkyunkwan was not invented for the drama. The historic institution was established in 1398 as Joseon’s highest national educational institution, and today’s Sungkyunkwan University traces its history back to it. (Sungkyunkwan University’s history)

There is also something wonderfully ridiculous about the fact that Song Joong-ki was studying Business Administration at the modern Sungkyunkwan University while appearing in a drama about students at the historical Sungkyunkwan. He later graduated in 2012. So while I was drooling over Gu Yong-ha, Song Joong-ki was, in fact, playing a student of his own university’s distant predecessor. (The Korea Times)

The series was adapted from Jung Eun-gwol’s novel The Lives of Sungkyunkwan Confucian Scholars. In another delightful bit of connection, Jung Eun-gwol also wrote the novel that became The Moon Embracing the Sun—one of the historical dramas I found farther down the very path Sungkyunkwan Scandal had started me on. (Korean Literature Now: Jung Eun-gwol)

And apparently, I was not the only person captivated by Song Joong-ki’s Gu Yong-ha. He and Yoo Ah-in, who played Moon Jae-shin, won a Best Couple Award at the 2010 KBS Drama Awards—even though their characters were not the drama’s central romantic couple. Park Yoochun and Park Min-young won one too. The viewers clearly looked at the official romance, looked at the two men’s chemistry, and decided there was room for both. (2010 KBS Drama Awards results)

Even Park Min-young’s apparently comfortable male disguise came with a less glamorous reality. She said the looser costume allowed her to sit, lie down and roll around more freely than the princess clothes she had previously worn—but concealing that her character was a woman required binding her body during a very hot summer. So, as usual, even the comfortable historical costume was not actually comfortable. (2010 cast press conference)

None of these facts was why I loved the drama then. We did not start it because Sungkyunkwan was founded in 1398 or because one actor happened to attend its modern descendant. We watched because my younger sister loved TVXQ, because Yoochun was in it, because the story was fun, and because Song Joong-ki walked onto the screen and apparently removed my ability to behave normally.

But that is how a gateway works. You enter for one small reason and discover an entire world waiting behind it.

More than fifteen years later, watching Korean, Chinese and Japanese dramas is part of my ordinary life. I have travelled through dynasties, palaces, schools, hospitals, fantasy kingdoms and an unreasonable number of love triangles. I have watched excellent dramas, terrible dramas and terrible dramas that I enjoyed far more than some excellent ones.

And it all began with my siblings, a TVXQ obsession, a girl dressed as a boy, and the impatient wait for the next episode of Sungkyunkwan Scandal.