It all started when, the summer of my junior year of high school, my father brought home something called “Meteor Garden.”
(There are about 2394872393478343 of you with Asian backgrounds who just gasped and said, “Meteor Garden! That one stole my Asian drama virginity! And then when it finally did call, it was like it’d gotten worse in the sack instead of better!” As somebody who concluded that abusive relationship on my living room couch middle of my senior year sobbing my eyes out at the end of “Meteor Garden II” all I can say is: yes, yes I know.)
I’d seen Asian TV before — no second generation Chinese kid has managed to completely escape the Chinese New Year countdown variety show, and no one should: it’s good Communist motherland TV for us to grow glorious in our heathen American ways! — but you know, I’d never seen hot Asian guys. I pretty much thought there was something wrong with the Asian Y chromosome (well, something MORE wrong) — we will not speak of the One Who Was Hit On By Construction Workers, And Then Was Foolish Enough To Call To Tell Me About It, And Was Somehow Surprised When I Made Asian Twink Jokes For About A Thousand Years.
Anyway, the point was:
Then along came my Future Husband, whom my entire family — I’m not making this up, it’s entirely too embarrassing to be a joke — now actually refers to exclusively as The Future Son-In-Law. We work on the theory that Vic Zhou loves me, he just doesn’t know it yet, and as soon as he realizes — our eyes will meet across the white-lit showroom of a Ferrari dealership; he will be buying another speed toy, I will be stalking him — we will touch one another inappropriately and have somewhat less than optimally attractive babies because I’m bringing down our average, but I’m sure he’ll love me enough to forgive me.
That was it folks. I realized that China, Taiwan, Korea, and indeed even Japan (who else watched that wretch-awful and yet still unspeakably amazing “Majou no Jouken“? Don’t lie. It changed your life, shut up. And you’ll never be able to listen to Utada Hikaru’s “First Love,” ever again) dramas! They were…melodramatic. They had…sometimes horrifyingly poor production values. Couples expressed their eternal love and simmering sexual tension by not touching one another at all — kissing was all fake and awkward looking! Guys, it was a brand new world and I was all over it like cheap perfume on a Lindsey Lohan hanger-oner.
And now, I spend a lot of time watching Korean dramas, mostly because there’s a huge abundance of them, which helps because 90 percent of them have some sort of abusive relationship that would have, and I quote a conversation I had with somebody the other day “slapping the motherfucking life out of the man who was shoving me into the wall and then flinging his scrawny ass, 30 lbs dripping wet body out of a window.” (Who else “My Name Is Kim Sam Soon through the rage blackouts?)
At the moment, the two that have captured my attention are Witch Amusement, starring some adorable faces we might remember from “Goong” and some adorable faces we might remember from “My Name is Kim Sam Soon” who could not act in that drama to save his blessed life, but who was pretty to look at!. And also the concurrently airing “The Devil,” starring universally agreed cross-gender hawt-ass my future man slave of sexual plaything-ness. (I’m not kidding. I will fight all of Korea for him. Don’t worry: Vic knows how to share.)
Just be prepared — there might be episode reviews. I have to talk about this sickness with somebody.
Oh, and because you’ve all been so good to read the whole damn thing — gratuitous eye meat!
(For more mansluttishness of the Joo Ji Hoon (twink cowboy) variety go here — for more mansluttishness of the look don’t touch because he is mine and we are going to have babies and I am not kidding, I would fight Korea for Joo Ji Hoon but I will fight the entire continent of Asia for Future Husband, go here.)
