A bar called Camellia, and a woman who does not raise her voice

A Korean essay on the 2019 KBS2 series When the Camellia Blooms, written by Lim Sang-choon and directed by Cha Yeong-hoon, does not begin with a romance plot. It begins with character. Gong Hyo-jin’s Oh Dong-baek runs a bar called Camellia and is raising a son, Pil-gu, played by Kim Kang-hoon. In the neighborhood she is easy to pick on. People short her even on a bunch of radish, and she does not once argue back.

On the surface she looks simple, always smiling, easily cowed when neighbors scold or envy her. She can seem too kind to know how the world works, and therefore easy to cheat. The longer the writer watches, though, the more a hard thing is felt inside her, and a blow that has not yet come out. She goes her own way quietly, the essay says, even when she has rarely been treated well, and she still knows how to treat other people.

Yong-sik, who would rather think than run, and still runs

Kang Ha-neul’s Hwang Yong-sik, in the essay’s account, is a policeman at the local box. He is honest and even valiant, and he has a sense of justice, but he is not a man with a plan for every case. He would rather be Sherlock Holmes, who uses his head, than 007, who runs with his body; his head, the writer adds, is not especially good. He can be rustic, awkward, and a little embarrassing to stand beside.

The same paragraph does not leave him there. There is, the essay says, a sharpness that arrives from an unexpected angle, and a way of stepping in just when something is about to happen to Dong-baek. When people harass her, he is immediately in front of her. When she is about to be hurt, he is the one trying to keep watch. The contrast with Dong-baek is not that he is strong and she is weak. Both look mild. Their mildness is not the whole of them.

A drama used as a way to guess at living people

The series ran from 18 September to 21 November 2019, on Wednesday and Thursday nights. The essay’s assignment is to guess at the characters’ temperaments and to give reasons. Dong-baek and Yong-sik are the reasons it stays with. Around them the writer sees people who are unlike their neighbors and, at the same time, quite like them.

The piece does not turn the series into a social-policy paper. It treats a small-town bar and a police box as places where a person can be underestimated for a long time and still not be empty. A longer Korean version of this character reading is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student essay on the 2019 KBS2 drama When the Camellia Blooms, read through Oh Dong-baek at the bar Camellia and Hwang Yong-sik at the police box.

Last updated 15 November 2026