Streaming Banshees
Podcast Transcript

Episode 2: The Art of Living Well

Date: January 26, 2022

Beep: Hello, and welcome back to Streaming Banshees, your TV book club on the internet. We are getting ready to start our rewatch of Hometown Cha Cha Cha, which is very exciting.

This is Beep. You can find me on Twitter @beepsplain and I am joined, as always, by the lovely CC. 

CC: Hey guys, you can find me on Twitter @acapitalchick.

Beep: And remember that you can find our podcast on Twitter @TVBanshees. So we wanted to begin our discussion of Hometown Cha Cha Cha by discussing all the literary connections that were made by the writer of the show. 

CC: So one of the layers of genius to writer Shin Ha-eun’s script and takes it far beyond just the romantic comedy that it appears to be especially when for example you watch the first two episodes, is this connection to the famous book Walden, written by 19th Century American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. 

Walden was published in 1854 after Thoreau spent two years living in a cabin built with his own hands on Walden Pond outside Concord, Massachusetts. 

Shin Ha-eun has said in an interview that Chief Hong is based in part on Thoreau. A translation of an interview with her states "I thought that the attitude of 'becoming a firm master of one's life' in 'Walden' resembled Hong Du-Sik. He voluntarily lives with only the minimum wage. He decides when he wants to work and when he wants to rest. He is a person who finds his own standard of happiness, not worldly standards of happiness."  She and director Yu Je-won pointedly show Chief Hong reading Walden twice.

Hometown Cha Cha Cha not only explores Thoreau’s basic question of “how to live a deliberate life” in a contemporary setting but she also chose a historical model who was spurred by grief and loss to consider such questions in the first place. 

One of the reasons why we find that so meaningful is that she did so at a time when many of us are grieving in different ways and isolated in our own literal and figurative cabins. Indeed, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles last year described Walden as both the most famous act of social distancing and a lesson on the importance of community during a pandemic. It is almost as if Shin Ha-eun is having a conversation with Thoreau across nearly two hundred years right when we all are considering these very questions in our own lives.

Beep: So one of the things that we love most about Home Cha is that a 21st century writer in Korea has prompted people to rediscover a 19th century American writer who is so often discussed, at least here in the US, either in caricature or myth – and connect it to mental health in our own lives. 

For our international listeners, Walden is a staple of secondary school reading in the United States. Writer John Updike once wrote in a forward to a 20th century edition of Walden that it “most contributed to America’s sense of self.” 

Walden is part memoir of a social experiment, part philosophical treatise and often a poetic celebration of closely observed nature. Whatever you think about it, we are still talking about a book that a man wrote after living alone in the woods almost two hundred years ago. 

CC: Thoreau lived in his cabin on land owned by his mentor, the famous writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau and Emerson were members of the Transcendentalist movement which was based in Concord. 

The Transcendentalists believed in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight or emotion over logic –that only through experience can we find the revelation of the deepest truths. In other words, they were turning away from the age of reason and its emphasis on rules and society. They were inspired by the British Romantic movement led by Wordsworth and Coleridge, German transcendentalism, Plato, and Indian and Chinese scriptures among other influences.  Rather than man made institutions, the Transcendalists believed in Nature -- with a capital N --holding the key to the consciousness connecting with the divine -- that only by spending time in Nature can we find truth. 

It has been said that “there is a Thoreau for everybody.” His writings can serve as a guide to simplify life, a celebration of nature, a call to reject conformity & societal expectations; an inspiration for seeking healing after loss, or a model for peaceful political resistance. In the 1990s when I studied Walden in school it was framed by environmentalism -- particularly coming off of Don Henley of The Eagles’ crusade to save Walden Pond itself from development. 

You may not even realize how much Transcendentalism pervades pop culture. Chief Hong is in good company. If you have seen the movie Dead Poet Society, when Robin Williams is urging his student to carpe diem — or seize the day—-and says they should “suck the marrow out of life” — he is quoting Walden. In music, contemporary Grammy award winning indie musician Bon Iver undertook his own Walden-like social experiment and lived alone in the Wisconsin woods when he wrote his famous platinum album For Emma, Forever Ago in 2008. More on that in a bit…

In a lecture about the influence of Thoreau and his mentor Emerson on pop culture, American literature teacher Walter Bowne points to examples like the song “Everything is Awesome” in The Lego Movie highlighting how conformity is actually not awesome and we should tear up the instructions.

Or in Star Wars, how Yoda living alone in a hut and focusing on the power of his mind or the idea of “the force” existing in the natural world which leads Luke Skywalker to close his eyes and destroy the Death Star without using technology. He even points to Elsa in Disney’s Frozen as choosing not to conform and harnessing her individuality through the power of nature. All of these characters —likeChief Hong — call to mind this quote from Walden: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

Which, I don't know about you Beep, but I've heard that expression my whole life – “marching to the beat of his own drum.” In the dictionary, it's source is actually Walden.

Beep: You know, the interesting thing about that is so often it's used in a derogatory manner. To say, like, “eh, that person's a little weird, he's just kinda marching to the beat of his own drum over there.”

CC:  Right.

Beep: But it's not how it came across at all. It was not the original intention. 

CC: No, It's finding your own rhythm of life.

Yeah. So what Beep and I wanted to focus on today and what we'll be talking about throughout our rewatch of Hometown Cha Cha Cha, is how Shin Ha-eun ties this finding a new way of living specifically to trauma and mental health. She reminds us that Walden can be a touchstone for human beings who are at the end of their rope and seeking spiritual or mental health renewal

Beep: Walden today is a secular sacred place. It is a very peaceful small lake surrounded by deciduous forest.

Here is an excerpt of Thoreau’s description of the pond -- imbuing nature with human-like characteristics.

“A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.”

So Walden is a work of literature firmly rooted in a place — just like Hometown Cha Cha Cha cannot be separated from the fictional town of Gongjin. Place is a character in both the book and the drama. Both are a Romanticist celebration of nature and its pathway to a higher purpose in living.

CC: The director of Hometown Cha, Yu Je-won weaves a Romanticist love of nature throughout the show with his camera lens. The show is a love letter to the beauty of a place.  People watching have often said it feels like taking a vacation. The camera often shows us the beauty of the ocean or surrounding hills in wide shots like Wordsworth’s poetry or focuses on the tiny details like a crab on the seashore just as Thoreau recorded the movements of birds on Walden pond. 

It is in this beautiful place close to nature that the characters of Hometown Cha find truth and emotional connection; a life with meaning not defined by the societal expectations of the big city.

The characters are often out in nature. Chief Hong is shown many times surfing— sometimes he’s simply contemplating the sky as the waves roll under him. He and Hye-jin walk through the fields when they first meet or to share a promise to have a significant conversation. The grandmothers laugh in a flower field. Chief Hong & Director Ji survey the vista from a hilltop like modern day Keats or Wordsworth; Chief Hong is often shown looking at the ocean from the rocks or his yard just as Thoreau sat on his porch at the pond. 

Indeed almost every important moment in Hometown Cha Cha Cha takes place outside: Hye-jins & Chief Hong’s four meetings are outside – either at the beach or on bridge over the river, their confession is by the water under the moonlight, they say I love you on a beach, Chief Hong reckons with his hyung’s widow on the beach; he received Gam-ri’s message in desperation over a river in the middle of a city, he opens up to Hye-jin about his suicide attempt while sitting by the water; their marriage proposal takes place on the beach. Indeed, Chief Hong’s life changing advice to Hye-jin to embrace risk is framed in terms of embracing the natural elements — to walk in the rain. The funeral procession in the field frames the solemn importance of community mourning together in nature. The people of Gongjin find the sacred with one another in a field by the sea. 

Beep: I absolutely love that reference that he makes or originally says to her, you know, basically like it's gonna rain either way. So why don't you go ahead and step out in it. And then when she calls back to it, and Mi-Seon thinks that she is absolutely nuts for running out in Seoul. I mean, you're just going to have to give me a minute there whenever we get to that part, because I love that connection and I love that call back.

CC: I know. I mean, it is – you know it is embracing nature. It's nature as like a metaphor for life and embracing when it is calm and embracing, you know, when it is rain pelting you in the face – or a stormy ocean using the elements as sort of a metaphor for life is just a thread that runs throughout the whole show.

Beep: Well, and that's also something so common we do even now, when it comes to bad times in life, you know it's so common to say, “well, when it rains, it pours,” and people are talking always in that context about things that are actually happening in their life. Not about the weather.

So let's read what writer Shin Ha-eun said about the influence of Walden and Thoreau in Hometown Cha in her post series interview published in the script book. This translation is courtesy of the Twitter account @lovelyshinmina which is a really generous resource translating portions of the Homecha script book into English for fans. Shin Ha-eun said quote:

“I borrowed Walden as a book to be read by Du-sik. This is because, even metaphorically, I wanted to express the character Chief Hong. I thought that the values of Henry David Thoreau, who left the civilized society and went into the woods and built a hut near the shores of Walden Pond, were in line with the current Chief Hong. Even if it wasn’t parallelism, I knew that Henry David Thoreau had left Harvard. I had thought to myself that it would be interesting if it could be a clue to infer Chief Hong’s identity.”

“Henry David Thoreau’s famous saying ‘There is no remedy for love but to love more’ was originally written at the end of the synopsis. ‘Can the two overcome their past wounds and find salvation in the name of love?:... While organizing the script book, the sentence was brought to the planning intention. Because I thought it was a message that penetrated our drama. ….It is love for family, love for friends, and love for humanity. You may experience loss and be hurt through love, but I wanted to tell the story that healing comes from love in the end.” 

End quote. And so it is not just the details of his biography but the philosophy of Thoreau on living that are at the heart of Hometown Cha. We truly are watching a 21st century Thoreau with a surfboard grapple with what it is to live. 

CC: I wanted to pick up on first the surface parallels between Thoreau and Chief Hong. Some of these are outlined with some great photos if you want to dig in that were put together by the account @geekajhumma which I linked to within my Homecha piece “Love in the Time of a Pandemic” on our website.

Like Chief Hong, Thoreau came from a financially modest family and went to a prestigious university. For Chief Hong it is Seoul National University and for Thoreau it was Harvard. Thoreau studied Greek, Latin, Eastern philosophy, natural history, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, and science -- nearly all subjects that Chief Hong also either studied or reads about in his spare time. Like Chief Hong. Thoreau was also ambivalent about following the expected professional course. Rather than pursue a profession such as the law, medicine or the ministry as most Harvard grads of the time, Thoreau became a teacher. He founded a progressive school with his beloved older brother, John. And after that school closed, he lived at Emerson’s house and worked as a handyman doing odd jobs. 

His brother John was his closest friend— his hyung. They took a two week trip together in a boat that they built themselves that Thoreau would later write about in tribute to his brother in his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

In a New Republic article entitled “Everybody Hates Henry” which attempts to reconcile many of the myths and caricatures about Thoreau, one scholar and editor of his papers Elizabeth Witherell says that Thoreau was “active in circulating petitions for neighbors in need. He was attentive to what was going on in the community. He was involved in the Underground Railroad. He quit his first teaching job, in protest, because he was expected to administer corporal punishment, and struggled to find a new one. He loved watermelons, and threw an annual watermelon party for his friends, of whom he had plenty. Children were especially fond of him. ….he lived most of his life …..helping out as a handyman. He was very handy. He could dance, and play music.” 

Beep does that sound like anybody else that we know? 

Beep: Yeah I thought somewhere in the middle, you stopped talking about Henry and started talking about our beloved Chief Hong.

I mean, you're talking about the same person. And the interesting thing about that was even in the way that I had been taught, it's interesting that the article is called “Everybody Hates Henry,” because the only thing that I really knew about Thoreau was he basically just threw up his hands and went out into the woods.

So my perception of that was that he was essentially a hermit. Just left society and the way that these things actually connect and what he was doing simply in a smaller society is very interesting.

CC: Yeah. Maybe if he had just, you know, worn a wetsuit about town, he would have had more fangirls in the 21st century.

Beep: Yeah. I don't know. I'd have to dig up a picture of him.

So yeah, I mean, down to the watermelons, we see that in this show too. So Thoreau he's a deep thinker, he's a Jack of all trades around his village. You know, we might recognize him a little bit in this show.

It’s interesting to read his mentor Emerson’s eulogy when he died. If you close your eyes he could also be describing Chief Hong in this passage. Quote:

“He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well. If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief. Never idle or self-indulgent, he preferred, when he wanted money, earning it by some piece of manual labor agreeable to him, building a boat or a fence, planting, grafting, surveying or other short work, to any long engagements. With his hardy habits and few wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful arithmetic, he was very competent to live in any part of the world. It would cost him less to supply his wants than another. He was therefore secure of his leisure.” End quote.

CC: I mean that is our Chief Hong. Jobs on his own terms. Woodworking. Powerful arithmetic from our former engineering major. And even a day off for surfing. When you sit down and read Walden, there are excerpts from it that you can almost hear in Chief Hong’s voice. For example, “I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men.”  

Or consider this passage on his chosen lifestyle:

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

Beep: I think it's interesting here that his quote from the old book actually comes from the New Testament in the Bible. It's interesting that he's talking about just this dismissal of materialism, like all these things that you could buy and gain through these, you know, jobs or places of status – they ultimately mean nothing.

And when you die, you can't, you can't take anything with you. So I know that what he references back to all the time is that it's more about community and love and the people that you're around rather than the actual things you did or the things that you acquired.

CC: Yeah. I mean, because he and Hye-jin have very interesting conversations about materialism and while he is quite critical of her in the beginning – with her, something I personally relate to, many online orders and boxes that are being delivered. Once he understands her, her relationship with materialism that, that it is something that she worked really hard for and is symbolic of her success. You know, then he builds a box for it, for her to cherish it. And the criticism once he comes to understand it more, you know, they kinda, they kind of find a balance for it, but, but this materialism and how you define success is a thread that runs through Hometown Cha Cha Cha and was something that Thoreau was calling out, you know, with no coincidence in the 1800s during sort of the Industrial Revolution and sort of the mass accumulation of wealth by some.

Beep: And I know on our end, it's not like we're condemning either side per se. It's more like when we're talking about this lifestyle, it is the issue of striving towards your own goals or striving towards societal expectation. And so in my mind, I mean, she has worked, she has earned. There's nothing wrong with her getting anything she wants. If she, you know, so long as she can pay for it and she could do all this, she's not being irresponsible. She's, she's getting something that will make her happy. Like you said to show her success to herself that she was working towards something and now she's able to attain that and, and that's fine. It's just like you said, they ended up striking a balance of the things that matter more. 

CC: Right, right. He, you know, Chief Hong finds beauty in the ocean, and Hye-Jin finds beauty in her shoes that she displays almost as art in her apartment. 

Beep: Get it, girl. And if she can afford that it’s fine.

CC: So Thoreau, like Chief Hong, was not just a thinker but he also was a man of action.  Imagine Chief Hong chasing a thief or pursuing a harasser while I read another excerpt of Emerson’s eulogy of Thoreau. Quote: 

“He was a speaker and actor of the truth, born such, and was ever running into dramatic situations from this cause. In any circumstance it interested all bystanders to know what part Henry would take, and what he would say; and he did not disappoint expectation, but used an original judgment on each emergency.”

Beep: The interesting part here, what really sticks out to me, is that all bystanders were interested to know what part he would take because Chief Hong is going to be involved in everything – because he's literally the first person that every single other person in the town calls on. 

CC: Yeah yeah and I mean he’s nosy, it's something – he is right? I mean, we love him. We love him for it. It's why he and Hye-jin, you know, connect but he's nosy. And when people are having an argument in the middle of the town, he's going to, he's usually going to step in and get into it and referee, or, you know, as you said, as the first person everybody calls when they have a problem.

Beep: Yeah. And he's more than willing to address those problems and to make sure those people are doing okay, so that he doesn't have to be alone with the thoughts that still plague him. 

CC: Hmm, yep.

Beep: Like Chief Hong, Thoreau’s life was also deeply entwined with his village. For our international listeners, Concord is located about 25 miles outside of Boston, Massachusetts which is one of the United States’ actually very large cities. It is where the first battle of the American Revolution took place and it has a rich literary tradition.

Thoreau once described Concord as “my Rome.” If you asked Hong Chief Hong he’d probably say the same of Gongjin. 

CC: Definitely.

Beep: Emerson described Thoreau’s love for Concord as believing it was an “unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or Paris, or Rome” -- and not his tiny village in New England. He actually felt sorry for people who were born in those larger cities

CC: I bet Chief Hong does too.

Beep: I mean that is so true because these guys started in smaller places and well though Thoreau didn’t it seems nearly as much, Chief Hong has experienced the other side of it. It’s not that he was just, you know, raised in a certain way and so this is the way you should live your life. I mean he really was in that rat race and I’m not sure if something you know traumatic had not happened we’d probably still see, you know, Chief Hong climbing the ladder in finances in Seoul.

CC: Yup. 

Beep: So it’s interesting how those things are connected.

CC: Yeah I mean we can hear the echoes of “Concord in my Rome” when Chief Hong is like looking at the skyscrapers in Seoul and Hye-jin is like oh I would love to be at that restaurant eating pasta and he’s like whatever, I’d rather be on a boat eating ramen. I mean Thoreau actually I mean he writes two – at least two paragraphs in Walden are devoted simply to the taste of the huckleberries that grow in the bush. Two paragraphs about berries and how they taste. It’s like Chief Hong going nuts about the fresh fish.

Beep: Oh yeah. I mean, it connects back. It's not just that Chief Hong is reading this. It's not even just so much that he relates to that like Thoreau in himself as the inspiration for the entire character. His passion for simple living, the way he enjoys food, the company of others, brisk walks in the field like you had mentioned earlier. I mean, everything is connected to nature. Love to watch that man go surfing, whatever – it just is what it is. 

CC: It's not just thirst. It’s not just ….I mean, it is.

Beep: It's good exercise.

Beep: So Chief Hong firmly rejects the rat race back in Seoul and the grinding pursuit of materialism in that city. Thoreau said that men “live meanly; like ants.” Our lives are “frittered away by detail.” “To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.”  Or finally “Why should we live in such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”

This is also Chief Hong’s philosophy. You can hear the echoes of Thoreau in his dialogue to Hye-jin’s friends at the golf club when he tells them: “You only live once, and I already have everything that I need. A comfortable bed I’ll be sleeping in tonight, a sturdy surfboard, and the love of my life.” 

CC: Swoon. 

Beep: That is uber swoon worthy.

CC: How did Thoreau not have a girlfriend? I don't understand. 

Beep: Yeah, he must've just not wanted to marry. I feel like. Yeah, he could have easily had a line of let's just call them suitors if it were the other way.

So, but what neither of us knew about Walden — and what reframes it all in such a deeply meaningful way no matter what century you’re  in— is that until we watched Homecha we did not know that Walden was born from Thoreau’s reaction to & the processing of grief and loss. 

CC: Yeah. I mean, it's so remarkable to me that as much as Thoreau is studied in the US and, you know, we both studied him in school – I really didn't know this piece about grief and it's this theme that Shin Ha-eun teases out in her television script that is, we think so particularly important right now, 

Two years after their river journey, Thoreau’s beloved older brother John nicked the tip of his left-hand ring finger while sharpening his razor. It seemed like a minor wound. But eight days later he developed tetanus. His jaw stiffened and he experienced the convulsions associated with lockjaw. John Thoreau died at the age of 27 in the arms of his helpless brother. Biographer John McPhee writes that quote, “John Thoreau was his brother’s best friend, perhaps his only close friend.”

And so like Chief Hong, Thoreau’s older brother and closest friend died right in front of him as the result of a random accident. Thoreau was devastated.

In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Robert D. Richardson Jr. writes:

“Thoreau took it very hard and, moreover, he held his emotions inside. His family remarked how his strange initial calm sank into complete passivity. Even his interest in nature was gone; he was `denaturalized,’ as he later admitted to a correspondent. Then to the incredulous horror of his family and friends, two weeks later he came down with all the symptoms of lockjaw himself. He had not cut himself; it was purely an emotional – a sympathetic – reaction that had produced the physical symptoms.” 

Beep: I mean, if that's not a demonstration of the amount of empathy that must have dwelled within this, man, I don't know what could be.

CC: Yeah. And just utter, utter grief. 

Beep: Yeah. I mean, and it has physical manifestations like that, especially as if they kind of indicated he wasn't dealing with it. He just, he pushed it down. He wanted to look a certain way outside or else didn't know how, and that happens too, but he was literally going through the same thing his brother did simply because of that, of that loss, in that empathy.

And that brings us to tragedy #2. The very next day Ralph Waldo Emerson’s firstborn child, five year old Waldo, for whom Thoreau had served as a tutor and lived with at the Emerson’s home —contracted scarlet fever and died.

In a New Yorker piece about Emerson’s contributions to poetry,  Dan Chiasson wrote that Thoreau had “charmed Waldo by the variety of toys, whistles, boats, popguns & all kinds of instruments which he could make & mend” by his own hands.” 

So now, weeks after his brother’s death, this child whom Thoreau had delighted in teaching and playing with was also dead. 

This death obviously came as a shock to the entire village. When nine year old fellow Concord resident and future author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, came to the Emersons’ door to ask about Waldo, Emerson answered the door and simply said “Child, he is dead.” Alcott would later write that in those short span of days, Emerson had become “worn with watching and changed by sorrow.” She called it her own “first glimpse of a great grief.” 

And so we have the two tragedies that shook Thoreau to his core -- his brother and best friend and the child of his mentor whom he taught died within weeks of one another. His biographer Richardson writes that while Emerson “gave immediate expression to his grief, reaching out to others, sharing and articulating his loss …..Thoreau did not or could not.”

And that’s kind of what I was saying before. I mean he didn’t reach out, he pushed it all down. And whether it was because he felt like he shouldn’t or he just didn’t have the tools at that time it’s devastating. So instead he entered a period of restlessness. In 1854 a friend wrote to Thoreau and said "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.”

CC: And so like our Chief Hong walking dead eyed off the bus back to Gongjin, Thoreau went to Walden Pond. He went to write a book about this boat journey in tribute to his dead brother. But while there he discovered a new philosophy of life. 

This connection between grief and loss and recalibrating of one's life to find a deeper purpose is at the heart of Hometown Cha Cha Cha. Nearly two hundred years apart, we have two brilliant men reeling from death who retreat to houses built by their own hands and live closer to nature. They both have a hard time opening up and expressing their grief. Indeed, no one in Gongjin even knows what happened to Chief Hong. But they begin to recover from their tragedies by seeking peace in natural surroundings away from the frenetic life of civilization. 

They both are specifically drawn to bodies of water. Thoreau would sit on his porch and watch the birds in the pond. He bathed daily in Walden Pond and described it with an almost sacred reverence. In the depths of despair, Chief Hong is drawn to a bridge on the river hoping it can bring him back to the sea. Years later he finds peace as he surfs in the ocean and looks up at the sky or he sits on the rocks and fished as Thoreau did. Chief Hong is always shown sitting by the water when he needs to think. They slowly recover and find a new purpose in how they live: to actually just focus on living.  

Imagine Chief Hong in his yard eating a tangerine and looking at the ocean or sitting on the sand after surfing while I read this passage from Walden:

“Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.”

Now imagine Chief Hong on his boat at night looking at the stars or sitting on the rocks fishing with Walden in his hand: 

“Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me.” End quote.

The script and the direction in Hometown Cha Cha Cha very carefully depict Chief Hong thinking as he is out in nature either sitting alone on his boat, or on the rocks, or walking. His engagement with the natural world is contemplative.  

Beep: I love that word. For some reason the word contemplative just makes me happy. 

CC: Yeah. I mean, and it's almost like using nature as a way to discipline your mind. To stop and slow down. 

Beep: Yeah. Cause you have the quiet around you.

CC: Right.

Beep: Thoreau spent much of his own life and time walking and observing — which is also how we first meet Chief Hong. He’s always walking, always observing. In fact, he spends almost the entire first episode walking. He is almost always depicted on foot — I actually like the interaction they have about whether he has a car or not.

CC: Right. Because you wouldn’t think it.

Beep: So for all we know right now he is just walking or running from one task to another all over town. And as we see at the end of the episode, he is an astute observer. His close observation of Hye-jin  —her loneliness, and her sadness — and he’s not being able to draw his eyes away from her and that’s the foundation of their beginning. 

And Chief Hong sees this because he is a lonely man despite being surrounded by people. According to the Thoreau scholar Elizabeth Witherell, “Thoreau was not a person who revealed himself easily.” In other words, sounds like he was actually the hedgehog who did not easily lay down his spikes.

But like Chief Hong, Thoreau was not a hermit. He enjoyed the society of his village. He welcomed visitors to his cabin. Thoreau said at Walden he kept three chairs. Quote: “One for solitude, two for friendship and three for society.”  End quote. They just both kept the people around them at an emotional arms length.

CC: And that is how Shin Ha-eun constructs the character of Chief Hong hand in hand with the acting of Kim Seon-ho. Chief Hong is a mystery - to both us and Hye-jin. His lifestyle is the first thing we know about him but we have to wait to find out the why.

He is a deeply wounded man who wears this cheerful mask and found a new way to live out of loss but nobody knows what happened to him. Were it not for his tragic loss, Beep like you say, he might still be an investment banker toiling away in Seoul. When Hye-jin asks him why he lives like this, Chief Hong evades the question & like Thoreau he responds only with Romantic philosophy about the beauty of looking at rice patties in the moonlight. 

When I reread Walden after the show, I couldn’t help but feel like Hye-jin. When Thoreau writes in Walden quote “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” 

And I’m like Hye-jin yeah that’s a beautiful sentiment but you’re not telling us why you went. You’re leaving out the grief and the tragedy. He’s keeping the reader at an emotional arms length and focusing on the philosophical inquiry like Chief Hong when we first meet him. But at Walden, Thoreau wrote the memoir A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in tribute to his brother. It was an artistic act of remembering someone he lost. And yet in that book Thoreau never names him. The deeper meaning is like Chief Hong’s photograph of his hyung hidden inside a book by Tolstoy asking about the meaning of life.

Beep: Yeah. I mean that, that, and its own physical way is the way that chief Hong has hidden his grief. It's literally stuck between pages in a book that nobody would ever see in his home.

CC: And the whole inquiry about what should my life be stems from that loss of the man in that photograph. 

Beep: Yep. But whether it is Thoreau at the pond, Chief Hong in Gongjin or the audience seeking refuge from challenging times by watching Homecha when we ourselves cannot travel, the theme that connects it all is to find “healing”— it’s something that the cast and crew said often in talking about the show.

In a piece for a contemporary Transcendentalist blog, Abby Mangel wrote that Thoreau “found a sort of solace in the idyllic landscape; here was an atmosphere of tranquility that, at least temporarily, purged the pain and strife of the human condition. Absorbed into the forest’s flora and fauna, Thoreau would restore his soul.” And so does Chief Hong. The man we see in the present is a far cry from the shadow of a man who first returned to Gongjin.

CC: Yeah. And that's sometimes I don't know about you Beep but sometimes it felt, we had mentioned this in our first podcast that escaping to this beautiful place of Gongjin felt like rest for the soul for me watching. And that it felt like therapy

Beep:  Visually.

CC: Yeah. Yeah. Which, which readings, reading Walden and some of the beautiful descriptions of nature can, can also feel like that. It's your mind traveling, whether it's through reading Walden or whether it's the beautiful images of Hometown Cha Cha Cha. 

We mentioned Bon Iver before and I wanted to dig in a little bit for just a moment because like Chief Hong, Bon Iver, which is the moniker for musician Justin Vernon, lived in the 21st century as Thoreau.  He wrote his classic and beloved album “For Emma, Forever Ago” while living alone in a rustic cabin during a bitter Wisconsin winter. GiveFor Emma, Forever Ago another listen with Walden and Hometown Cha Cha Cha in mind — the imagery of his lyrics and the ethereal and contemplative sound is like Thoreau’s poetic descriptions of nature or director Yu Je-won’s camera’s eye -- they are all through different mediums exploring the idea of quote “leaving the inauthentic superfluous lifestyle of civilization behind.” 

But like Thoreau and Chief Hong, Bon Iver sought refuge in the Wisconsin woods in the dead of winter because he was depressed. He was reeling from a terrible break up with his girlfriend, chronic illness, and his first band had fallen apart. He felt a deep frustration with spending all of his time working to pay rent instead of being able to focus on music. He was at a spiritual and creative crossroads. 

And so he ended up at his father’s hunting cabin in the Wisconsin woods. He lived there alone, hunting for his food, stripping wood, clearing brush, and stacking lumber. He viewed the time as quote "an opportunity to escape the trap of society, to not pay bills, to play music and live really cheaply." He sounds like Chief Hong making soap and carving wood. Bon Iver later said “I had nothing but the sound of my own thoughts, and they were really loud when that's all that was going on.”

During that time, he wrote an album that would turn out, like Hometoen Cha Cha Cha or Walden, to be a masterpiece, For Emma, Forever Ago. The name Bon Iver means ‘good winter’ in French. This idea of escaping from society during a time of loss and depression and finding spiritual renewal brings us back to a central theme of Walden and Hometown Cha. 

The most intriguing part of his contemporary Walden experiment is like Shin Ha-eun, Bon Iver is frank about tying it to grief. The “Emma” of his album title is not an actual woman. Bon Iver has said that “Emma isn’t a person. Emma is a place that you get stuck in. Emma’s a pain that you can’t erase.” 

A pain you can’t erase. 

Whether it’s Thoreau at a pond in Massachusetts, Chief Hong in a Korean seaside village, or Bon Iver in a Wisconsin cabin, these real and fictional humans were stripped down by life and in turn they stripped life down to try to find its essence. It is this connection between recovering from loss and grief and finding a new purpose —the will to do things your own way— that is at the center of all of these works and it is so on point for the times that we live in. 

Shin Ha-eun makes the source of the trauma the central mystery— she has us all on the edge of our seats wondering what happened to this person that we care about? She turns a 21st century spotlight on the mental health aspect of the familiar story of a man seeking refuge in the woods. She focuses on the why. And then she suggests that the answer cannot come from ourselves alone. She forces Chief Hong through the words of Gam-ri and the steady presence of Hye-jin to come out of his cabin for good. 

Trauma and loss can —and perhaps should —-shake us from our set path or what Thoreau described as the mass of men leading “lives of quiet desperation.”  

This phrase — lives of quiet desperation, could describe every single character in Gongjin when we first encounter them. But Shin Ha-eun does not end the story at the cabin. She draws her characters out of it. She makes the connection between recovering from loss fully to “the fruits and flower of people” --- that true healing cannot be complete if you stay alone. That honesty and intimacy are the key to building the boat to climb into together to face life. It is no coincidence that Hye-jin walks into Chief Hong’s cabin and sits inside of it with him when he finally begins to tell her his story and cries. 

Beep: I love that there is a shift that everything that happens outside, there are so many important things that happen within the community. But when it comes to him, being able to let out the deepest and darkest part, not only of himself, but of his story – that's when someone is allowed into his space. It's such an excellent physical demonstration of even though you live in that village or among people, it doesn't mean that you necessarily go shouting your why? Around the whole, you know, around the whole town, he brings one person literally in and opens up to them and that's just, that's beautiful. 

CC: It's and also when he finally truly grieves for Gam-ri, it's inside his quote unquote cabin and how that is a, you know, the cabin is both a physical place. The house is a physical place, but it's also a metaphor for his emotional state and his mind, you know, when Gam-ri says come out of your house, she doesn't just mean the way he physically locked himself inside a house, but emotionally how he has.

Beep: Over sixteen episodes, Hometown Cha answers Thoreau’s question “What sort of space is that which “separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?” In the words of Washington Post writer Ron Charles, “it is only the space that we tolerate.” There is a space we seek for peace and then a space we put between us and others. Shin Ha-eun’s characters find their happy endings in achieving that balance. And that embracing of others — community —and the small pleasures in life is the essence of Gam-ri’s parting wisdom. 

At the end of Walden, Thoreau wrote “So the seasons went rolling on into summer.” This is echoed in episode 16 with Chief Hong on his bike beside the ocean “And the blissful days continued to pour in.” Both Thoreau and Bon Iver never returned to their cabins once they left. And once Chief Hong opens up to Hye-jin, he too never looks back. 

Hometown Cha is the story of explaining why Chief Hong lives the way that he does and how he comes out of his figurative cabin to open himself up to intimacy and a future. Hye-jin finds a family in her new community and purpose in village life rather than the hectic solitude of the city. From Thoreau with a surfboard, to the big city dentist to the villagers of Gongjin finding different versions of their own emotional truths —- the characters of Hometown Cha come to define their own version of success and happiness far from the judging eye of society as symbolized by the city. They belong to themselves and they belong to each other; individuals, together. Because as Thoreau wrote in Walden in words that could have come from Gam-ri’s letter “we belong to the community.”

 

CC: Thank you for joining us on this sort of geek, deep dive between the connections, between Shin Ha-eun’s script for Hometown Cha Cha Cha and Henry David Thoreau. We thought it was a really important foundation for rewatching the show to kind of flesh this all out. And it's a thread that we'll be picking up on throughout.

We just wanted to mention our indebtedness to another podcast and if you're interested in going deeper into Thoreau and the Transcendalists, Tthe BBC's “In Our Time” podcast, “Thoreau and the American Idyll,” which is available on all platforms in addition to the other scholars and writers that we mentioned specifically.

Beep: I will also put this information in our show notes, or you can also find it in the transcripts on our website.

CC: So thank you for joining us on this little mini-sode. We are going to be back in one week to break down episodes one and two and meet our Chief Hong and Ms. Dentist properly in breaking down scene by scene.

Beep: Please also remember you can find all of our information on our website, streamingbanshees.com. Go there now and subscribe to our updates so that you're always in the know. 

Also be sure to check out our Twitter @TVBanshees and follow there. We actually have some cool stuff coming up. We're going to be doing some Twitter Spaces and discussing more about Walden for anyone who might be reading it or are interested in doing more geek dives with us.

CC: So we'll see you in one week for our rewatch of episodes one and two of Hometown Cha Cha Cha. And in the meantime, we hope that you too can march to the beat of your own drum. We'll see you soon.