Dangmi Station in Chunan

# My Liberation Notes: The Drama That Made a Nation Say  "Worship Me"

## The Story

The three Yeom siblings — Ki-jeong, Chang-hee, and Mi-jeong — live in Sanpo, a fictional town on the fringes of Gyeonggi Province, and spend hours every day riding a village bus and switching subway lines just to get to work in Seoul. Trapped in that grinding routine, the youngest sibling, Mi-jeong (Kim Ji-won), can't find anywhere her heart feels at rest — until she blurts out a strange request to Mr. Gu (Son Suk-ku), a mysterious drifter who's recently shown up in the village: "Worship me." Built around a relationship that no ordinary word like "love" quite captures, the show follows all three siblings as they slowly find their way out of exhausted routine and toward something like genuine liberation.

## The Writer: Park Hae-young, a Name That Became a Genre

You can't really talk about this show without talking about its writer, Park Hae-young. Born in 1972, he lived an ordinary working life until, around age 27, the 1998 Asian financial crisis shut down the publishing company he worked for — a turning point that redirected his entire career. He went through a broadcasting academy and entered the industry in 1998 as an assistant writer on the SBS sitcom LA Arirang, officially debuting later with Old Miss Diary (2004).

What makes that background interesting is something Park himself has pointed to: the instability he lived through in that period resurfaces again and again in the instability of his characters. He's summed up his own writing philosophy in one line: "Genuinely cherishing and loving your characters is the whole essence of drama." His style — prioritizing emotion over plot, dialogue over incident — can feel unfamiliar at first, but tends to stay with viewers long after the episode ends.

## Park Hae-young's Signature Style

A few threads run through everything Park writes.

1. Lives on the margins, people the world passed over — My Mister's Lee Ji-an was a young woman crushed by loan-shark debt; My Liberation Notes' Yeom siblings are ordinary office workers worn down by an endless commute from the edge of the city. Instead of glamorous leads, Park writes characters carrying the kind of quiet deficiency most people recognize in themselves but rarely admit to.

2. Relationships too big for the word "love"** — Where My Mister traced a kind of humanity that crossed a generational gap between Park Dong-hoon and Lee Ji-an, My Liberation Notes coined an entirely new word — "worship" — to describe what happens between Mi-jeong and Mr. Gu. The emphasis lands less on romance and more on two people fully holding each other's emptiness.

3. Dialogue that reaches past everyday speech** — Lines like "Worship me" or "Have you arrived at peace?" aren't things people actually say in casual conversation, and that's part of what makes them land. Critics sometimes call the dialogue overly literary or deliberate, but it's also what produces the lines audiences keep quoting years later.

4. Endings that refuse to force a fix** — Rather than neatly healing a character's wounds by the finale, Park tends to let the cracks stand and show people continuing to live with them intact — widely considered the clearest signature of his authorial voice.

## Her Key Works ( I Love all of her works !)

- 'Old Miss Diary (2004)' — Park's debut, following a radio DJ in her 30s navigating work and love; a lighthearted but pointed look at how single women in their 30s were once dismissed as "old maids."

- 'Oh Hae-young Again' (2016) — A romantic comedy tangling two women who share the same name; underneath the comedy, it traced one woman's struggle with inferiority and helped establish Park as a name to watch.

- 'My Mister' (2018) — Starring Lee Sun-kyun and IU (Lee Ji-eun). A worn-down middle-aged man and a young woman backed into a corner by life end up saving each other. It swept Korea's top writing honors — the Korean Broadcasting Writers Award, the Baeksang Arts Award for Best Screenplay, and the Asia Contents Award for Best Writer — cementing Park among Korea's top screenwriters.

- 'My Liberation Notes' (2022) — Starring Son Suk-ku and Kim Ji-won. The word "worship" became a genuine cultural moment, and the show's Netflix success carried Park's name well beyond Korea.

- 'Everyone Is Fighting Their Own Worthlessness' (2026) — Park's first new work in four years since My Liberation Notes, starring Koo Kyo-hwan and Go Youn-jung, digging even more directly into insecurity and the fear of being unremarkable.

## The Most Famous Filming Location: Seonghwan Station, Cheonan (the drama's "Dangmi Station")

As much as fans were drawn to the siblings' exhausting daily commute between Sanpo and Seoul, the location that pulled in the most visitors was the fictional "Dangmi Station" — where Mi-jeong and Mr. Gu meet for their dates. In reality, it's Seonghwan Station on Seoul Subway Line 1, in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province. The convenience store where Mi-jeong nearly threw her arms around Gu out of sheer relief, and the quiet café where the two silently ate pork cutlets together, are all still standing — letting visitors retrace the show's most tender scenes step by step.

The green, open fields of "Sanpo" itself, meanwhile, were filmed in Yeoncheon, Gyeonggi Province — as confirmed through actors Son Suk-ku and Kim Ji-won's own social media. Sitting at the very edge of Gyeonggi Province, somehow both the closest and the most rural-feeling place to Seoul, Yeoncheon captures exactly the exhausted, in-between world this drama was built to portray.