First, 'Winter Sonata', Now, 'Jewel in the Palace'

My wife is following that Korean series ‘Jewel in the Palace’ which is dubbed into Cantonese on Channel 30 (Astro). I’m not a big fan of these slow moving dramas, but apparently there is a lot of hype going around it and other Korean dramas.

I’ve no idea what the show is about, but I’m sure most Malaysian will remember another huge craze some years ago called ‘Winter Sonata’. Oh yeah, that one was so big even the malay ladies in my office were talking about it non-stop. Even my brother and sis-in-law went on one of those ‘Winter Sonata’ tours in South Korea for their honeymoon.

According to them, the tour also consisted of some Malay middle aged couple bent on taking photo of every location the show ever visited.

Again, I’ve never watched a minute of that show, but according to my Malay colleague, her 6 year old son can sing the theme song of the show in pitch perfect Korean. This coming from a kid who can’t speak a word of English, let alone any Korean.

Then I read somewhere that a local producer released a local series called ‘Cinta Sonata’. The storyline apparently, was almost similar to it’s more famous namesake. But according to this well-known local director, he thought of the name and love storyline even before ‘Winter Sonata’ was released. Yeah, sure. Malaysia Boleh.

Well, coming back to this Jewel in the Palace. Kind of reminds me of the show ‘Koo Sin Lian’ back in the 80’s. Wow, that was a long series, I think it was 60 episodes long, it was showed on Sunday afternoon. There was even a Japanese version, called ‘Oshin’.

For those who can’t remember it was one long, teary show about a hardworking farm girl who leaves home to work in a restaurant in the city. Every week there was at least one scene where the grandmother would wake up from a nightmare, run out of their wooden shack are cry, ‘Xiao Lian! Xiao Lian!”.

Seems like these Mandarin/Korean/Japanese dramas haven’t changed much all these years…



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