The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See

Two girls grow up as best friends and become haenyeo during Jeju under Japanese rule. Young-sook is the daughter of the chief of their collective of divers, while Mi-ja is the orphaned daughter of Japanese collaborators, a despised background. Heartbreak comes from the dangers of the sea, but even more from the unrest that followed from war and rebellion.

I've always been leery of Lisa See due to the rather western gaze of the marketing around her books. Ungenerously, her tendency towards over-explaining when applied to this setting frames things as exotic to the reader, as if in some way it is foreign to the narrator. It was only when a truly weird scene with a (modern day-ish) doctor occurs and the doctor spends pages speculating out loud about what could be causing the problems only to conclude that it was the bends that I realized it was... See's style instead of low key Orientalist. So it merely is VERY ANNOYING and off-putting.

It does reveal the importance of marketing though: her audience probably does want that over-explaining even if it's out of place, and it certainly shows off her research into the setting. (It did not even occur to other members of the book club I read it with until I pointed it out, but they were Asians a generation older than me, which I think really makes a difference in expectation of Asian American literature.)

My other complaint is that it's sometimes tonally inconsistent, varying wildly between plain and formal description/speech, but that's more minor. Other reviews online seem to take umbrage in the chores descriptions (but that's what they would have been pre-occupied with?) or the depiction of violence (WHY read anything set in this time period/location?) but I don't agree. 

But! what she does well really reveals why she is a bestseller: her female friendship and disagreeable women portrayals ranged from good to incandescent. Those complicated characters! I was not super pleased about the origin of the crack in their relationship (a boy, really), but it was turned deftly enough into an interweaving with the traumatic experiences of the time and of women in that time, that it is more accurately, a boy and the secrets and trauma around him, which at least is not trite.

I can't say I'll be seeking out more of her work, but-- I'm sad about it, if that makes sense? Good female friendship in a non-Western setting in English is hard to find, but I simply have a very low tolerance for over-explanation.

CW: If you know anything about this era of history... violence, massacre, rape, domestic violence, death of major characters.

Reset / 开端

(These two reviews were going to go into a media diet post, but they're both a little long for it...)

Time loop of a bus explosion, as the main characters struggle to find out how to stop it when they have limited time and resources before the event. Our main characters are Li Shiqing, a college student, and Xiao Heyun, a game developer, and it explores the sometimes complicated histories of the other passengers on the bus.

I'll say the pacing and tension was quite uneven, though it's always going to be a struggle to balance stakes in a time loop show, especially, as halfcactus  pointed out, when we know the episode count. (I did spend most of episode 15 suggesting more and more outlandish points when the male lead could die to make the "romance under threat of death" convincing.) As a result, I thought it could have easily been tightened up.

The time spent exploring the other people on the bus was mostly interesting, but all the time on the cops and their ~feelings~ landed quite flat and broke the pace. (The loyalty subplot with puppy policeman would have been way more compelling if he weren't so fond of unnecessary aggression.) Shame, because objectively, the actors playing the cops were some of the best, they just weren't given enough material to work with and too much time for the pieces they played (maybe they wanted to get their money's worth from the actors lol). The main characters did get to learn and get better over the course of the series, but tbh, any character consistency sometimes lost in favor of The Story.

The self awareness with which it dealt with the genre sometimes worked--I especially liked the moment when even though the Xiao Heyun is a nerd, he isn't familiar enough with /this particular/ genre--and sometimes ended in some weird moralizing about video games. There were some moments where the writers were good about addressing potential plot holes (ep 11 had a great moment where male lead's genuinely good memory allays suspicion about why he knows so much), and sometimes... not... (IP addresses do not work that way, except for plot convenience). I'd say ep 11 and 12 were the peak of the show, and then the final episode's solution on how they fix everything was a bit too pat, after they spent eps 13 and 14 trying to raise the stakes One More Time!

That all makes me sound like I didn't like it, but overall I did, I'm just a hater lol. But more seriously, it was a solid mystery, had good characters with interesting motivations (a strength of cdramas generally IMO), and was primarily let down by the tension issues.

CW: cop interrogations, trauma from undergoing interrogations, surveillance state, bombings, permanent death (both adult and child), groping on public transport