The Moment | When It Clicked
The first time I saw it, I thought it was a special occasion. A birthday, maybe. An anniversary. Someone important was visiting.It was a Tuesday.
The drama was Reply 1988, and the families of Ssangmun-dong had pulled their doors open and were eating together the way people eat when food is the whole point — not the side dish of the evening, not the thing you do before the actual activity. The table was covered. I counted at least twelve small dishes before I gave up counting and just stared. And then one of the mothers stood up, went back to the kitchen, and came back with more.
I paused the episode and sat with a very specific feeling: the gentle, humbling realisation that what I had always called "making dinner" was, by some standards, barely trying.