The best K-drama of 2025 made me realise I should be a better daughter

Then came the line that settled into me like a bruise. On the boat, Geum-myeong tells her father, “You always give me 120 things when you only have 100.” Suddenly, I saw my father insisting that something was ‘on sale’ to justify buying it for me. I saw my mother sliding the sweetest mango slice onto my plate, pretending she didn’t want it. Their love has always arrived in surplus, stretching past their own limits as if love was an elastic band that never snaps. What I once mistook for ‘never enough’ was, in fact, everything they had.

But it was the father’s soft plea, “Come back if you don’t like it; always come back to me,” that lingered in my chest long after the credits rolled. It felt like something my father would say without ever saying it: the kind of love that lets you leave without fear and return without shame. A love that stands quietly at the doorway, pretending not to wait for you, even as it waits for you. And for the first time in a long while, I felt the urge to go home.

Yoo Eun-mi/Netflix

By the finale, I had cried through nearly every episode, partly because I watched it on the brink of my period and woke up with eyes swollen enough for my ophthalmologist to ask if I’d “been through something.” If only you knew. “Allergies,” I lied. But beneath the hormonal chaos, something steadier surfaced: an awareness that my parents are ageing in ways I hadn’t paused to notice.

When Life Gives You Tangerines didn’t teach me anything revolutionary. It simply returned me to truths I had conveniently forgotten. That time is finite. That love is imperfect. That daughterhood is a privilege we only recognise once distance forces us to earn it. Maybe it’s dramatic to say a K-drama changed me—even if it was the best K-drama of 2025—but some stories are made to do more than entertain you. They excavate you. They remind you that the people who raised you are not background characters in the movie of your life; they are the origin story.