Longing for the Closest Country We Cannot Visit
Among the many countries that people dream of visiting, there is one place that South Koreans often think about but almost none of us can freely enter.
The South Korean passport is one of the world's most powerful. It allows visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to around 187 countries and territories. Yet there is one country, only a few kilometers away, that this passport cannot take us to.
It is a place where people speak the same language, share the same history, and even look just like us. Yet it remains separated by one of the world's last Cold War borders. It is North Korea. For South Koreans, North Korea is perhaps the closest place that feels like the most distant foreign country. That is exactly why we are so fascinated by this drama.
A World That Feels Familiar Yet Completely Different
Stories occasionally emerge about life inside North Korea. Markets where almost anything can supposedly be traded—from vegetables and medicine to counterfeit luxury bags and South Korean dramas secretly passed from hand to hand.
Modern shopping streets in Pyongyang, such as Ryomyong Street, often compared to Seoul's fashionable districts. Traditional dishes unfamiliar even to many South Koreans—Kaesong-style kimchi wraps, pollack sikhae, vegetable-filled blood sausage, Eobokjaengban hot pot, artificial meat rice, clam bulgogi, and countless regional specialties. The food, the language, the customs, and especially the ordinary lives of the people living there all seem both strangely familiar and completely unknown. That mixture of familiarity and mystery has fascinated generations of South Koreans.
Like Dorothy Blown Into Another World
The premise of Crash Landing on You feels almost like a fairy tale. Just as Dorothy was swept away by a tornado into the magical land of Oz, one woman is carried by an unexpected storm into an entirely different world. Yoon Se-ri, a successful South Korean businesswoman, is enjoying a weekend paragliding flight when a sudden tornado throws her across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea. There she meets Captain Ri Jeong-hyeok, a quiet North Korean army officer whose calm sense of duty slowly changes both of their lives. Someone once said, "The wrong train sometimes takes you to the right destination."
Sometimes life feels exactly like that. Sometimes it seems as if we have been caught in a storm, standing alone in a frightening and unfamiliar place. Sometimes we believe that only we have suffered terrible bad luck. But perhaps those unexpected moments are where life's greatest encounters begin. Dorothy found the Wizard of Oz after being swept away by a tornado. The pilot stranded in the desert met The Little Prince after an emergency landing. Likewise, some of the most meaningful relationships in our lives begin not with careful plans but with accidents, misfortune, and unexpected detours.
That simple idea lies at the very heart of Crash Landing on You.
A Story Unexpectedly Landed in the Hearts of the World
When writer Park Ji-eun accepted one of the drama's major awards, she reflected on how life's greatest relationships often begin exactly where we experience failure.
She expressed the hope that wonderful encounters might begin in the very place where someone had fallen. That sentiment perfectly describes the drama itself. It unexpectedly "crash-landed" in the hearts of audiences around the world. The series premiered in December 2019 and concluded in February 2020—just as COVID-19 began spreading across the globe. As millions of people suddenly found themselves confined to their homes, Netflix introduced them to a place that few had ever imagined visiting.
North Korea.
A country closed off from most of the world became, paradoxically, one of television's most talked-about settings. For international viewers, it offered a rare glimpse into a society they had only heard about through news headlines. For South Koreans, it awakened something even deeper. It reminded us of the place just beyond the border—a country that shares our history yet remains forever out of reach. Perhaps that was why the drama resonated so powerfully. It wasn't simply a love story.
It became a story about longing—for places we cannot visit, people we cannot meet, and lives we can only imagine.
Comments