They 'censored' you up, your mum and dad

A captured image from a TV show, "My Golden Kids." /Courtesy of Channel A

By Scott Shepherd

The opening line of "This Be The Verse", Philip Larkin's famous poem on parenthood, is far too vulgar for the delicate sensibilities of a reader of The Korea Times, so I won't repeat it here. But as those well-read in British poetry know, the central claim of Larkin's poem is that your parents mess you up. Here's the rest of the first stanza:

They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

And while we're on the topic of 20th-century British literature, a character in the Julian Barnes novel "England, England" lived by the mantra that after the age of 25, you were not allowed to blame anything on your parents. Of course, it didn't apply if your parents had done something terrible ― had raped and murdered you and stolen all your money and sold you into prostitution ― but in the course of an average life, if you were averagely competent and averagely intelligent, and more so if you were more so, then you were not allowed to blame your parents. […] Damage is a normal part of childhood. Not allowed to blame anything on them anymore. Not allowed.

I hope you can forgive all the quotations. My wife and I are thinking about having kids, and perhaps inevitably my wife has recently been obsessed with the psychiatrist Dr. Oh Eun-young's television series, "My Golden Kids." So while everyone else has been hooked on "Extraordinary Attorney Woo", we've been undertaking sporadic binges of Oh's show.

Netflix only has Korean subtitles for the show, meaning that while I can follow along, our viewing experience involves the occasional pausing for my wife to explain some difficult or technical words that Oh has used. The experience also includes a huge range of emotions: it usually kicks off with fury or confusion at the kids' behavior, then progresses to frustration or bemusement at the interaction between the parents and children, before everything breaks down into a flood of raw emotions as Oh and her little electronic elephant get to the throbbing heart of the issue. After a good on-set cry for pretty much everyone, along comes the hope for a resolution to the seemingly intractable problems.

For those who have yet to see the show, this may all sound a bit confusing, but it's really a very good watch, and more than that: it seems to be making a real impact on the lives of parents and children. It is, to use a word popular among today's young ones, wholesome.

The way Oh with her leonine hair swoops in and gets to the nub of a relationship issue feels almost Holmesian, except that while Sherlock was a fictional creation, Oh is very much real. Granted, the show is perhaps a little dishonest in implying that Oh is making her diagnosis at the very moment of filming; clearly Oh and her team do a lot of investigation and observation beforehand and have already carefully decided how to present the video segments to best explain the situation. But this is TV, and the format that the producers have chosen works well, even if it implies that Oh can penetrate to the heart of all of your problems after watching only a few short clips of your life.

I've been struck by many things while watching "My Golden Kids." Above all, I can't help comparing it with the British show, "Jeremy Kyle," and the American one, "Dr. Phil," programs which nominally do something similar to "My Golden Kids," but which scrape the very bottom of the barrel, seeking out the most lurid and noxious of situations and reveling in their putrid stench. The presenters on those shows cynically bully and mock their guests and actively encourage their audiences to join in. Indeed, "The Jeremy Kyle Show" (which a judge once described as "human bear-baiting") was eventually cancelled after the death of a guest.

"My Golden Kids" is in a different league, and it's probably wrong to sully the name of the best of Korean TV with some of the very worst that comes from Britain or America. In a time when our screens seem always full of juicy depictions of hatred and division, Oh treats her guests with kindness and respect, pointing out necessary changes in a way which leaves dignity intact.

Still, it frankly astonishes me that so many parents have the courage to go on national TV and expose such personal moments to the world. Ultimately, it seems to come down to their love for their children: they can't figure out how to solve their problems, so they turn to an expert for help, even at the cost of publicly revealing things usually kept private. I applaud the parents for their courage and I hope that if I'm ever in that kind of situation, I'll have the humility to do what it takes to fix things.

I'm a firm believer in the mantra from "England, England" that you shouldn't blame your parents for your problems. Plus, pace Larkin, I don't really feel like my parents messed me up (admittedly, they read this column so I have to say that). Nonetheless, the more I watch the show, the more convinced I am that in many cases Larkin was right. What is so admirable about "My Golden Kids" is that Oh is a living counterweight to the problems Larkin expresses: she teaches parents how to stop causing so much damage, how to stop passing on so many of their faults to their kids and adding new ones. Of course, nothing is perfect, and the families on the show, like all families, will still have problems, but Oh is making a great contribution to their personal lives, not to mention to the public life of Korea.

The next step is for Netflix to provide English translations: forget Squid Game and BLACKPINK, this is the side Korea should be proudly showing to the world. It may not be glamorous (apart from Oh's hair), and it certainly doesn't depict the fantastical Korea that proponents of Hallyu usually seek to portray, but it's a powerful show which helps families in all their brokenness to make steps towards fixing their relationships and showing their love to each other properly. And we certainly need more of that.

Dr. Scott Shepherd is a British-American academic. He has taught in universities in the U.K. and Korea, and is currently an assistant professor of English at Chongshin University in Seoul. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.