What Extraordinary Attorney Woo Reveals About Everyday Korea
Kimbap, workplace culture, an unforgettable village tree, and a different way of seeing people
It has been quite a while since I watched Extraordinary Attorney Woo. I no longer remember every case or every detail of the story.
But some things have stayed with me.
These may seem like small details in a drama about a brilliant young lawyer on the autism spectrum. But for me, they are what make Extraordinary Attorney Woo particularly interesting as a Korean drama.
Behind the courtroom stories, it shows pieces of everyday Korean life that Korean viewers may hardly notice because they are so familiar.
For international viewers, however, those ordinary details can tell another story about Korea.
Kimbap Means Something Different to Me
Woo Young-woo eats kimbap almost every day.
She likes it because she can see the ingredients. Unlike foods where something unexpected might be hidden inside, kimbap is predictable. She knows what she is about to eat. It makes perfect sense for her character. But whenever I see kimbap, I think of something completely different.
I think of school picnics.
Today, kimbap shops are everywhere in Korea. You can easily buy a roll for a quick meal.
It wasn't always like that.
When I was a child, kimbap shops were nowhere near as common as they are today. Kimbap was a special food, and to me it was one of the most delicious foods imaginable.
Above all, kimbap meant a school picnic.
It was practical, of course. It was easy to pack in a lunchbox, carry on a bus and eat outdoors. But for children of my generation, the connection was almost automatic.
Picnic meant kimbap, and kimbap meant picnic.
My mother would wake up early and make it herself.
And there is one particular kimbap memory that I still remember clearly after all these years.
The Two Kimbap Lunchboxes
I was the president of my class at the time. On school picnic days, the class president and vice president were sometimes expected to bring lunch for the homeroom teacher and assistant homeroom teacher.
That meant I needed more than my own lunch.
There was a problem.
My family was not well-off, and my mother was already very busy. Asking her to prepare extra kimbap felt like asking for too much. I couldn't bring myself to tell her. I worried about it all night.
For the first time, I regretted becoming president.
Why did I have to run for president?
To an adult, an extra lunchbox might sound like a very small problem. To a child who knows that money is tight at home, it can feel enormous.
Eventually, I fell asleep without saying anything to my mother.
The next morning, I woke up. And there they were.
Two kimbap lunchboxes.
My mother had already made them. I hadn't said a word. Somehow, she knew. I cried.
I remember being incredibly happy that morning. I carried the lunchboxes to the picnic and gave one to my teacher.
Many decades have passed, but I have never forgotten it.
That is probably why the kimbap in Extraordinary Attorney Woo touches a very personal memory for me.
Young-woo's father prepares kimbap for his daughter every day. He doesn't need a long speech to show that he cares about her. He makes her food.
My mother didn't tell me that morning that she understood what I was worried about.
She simply made another lunchbox.
There is a Korean expression that appears constantly in everyday life:
“밥 먹었어?” — “Have you eaten?”
It sounds like a question about food.
Often, it means much more.
It can mean:
Are you okay?
Are you taking care of yourself?
I'm worried about you.
For me, that is what the kimbap in this drama brings back. Not simply rice wrapped in seaweed. A school picnic, two lunchboxes, and my mother.
Young-woo's Father and a Familiar Korean Kind of Parenting
Perhaps this is also why Young-woo's relationship with her father feels familiar to me.
Young-woo is an adult. She has graduated from law school and has begun her career as an attorney.
Yet her father still worries about whether she has eaten, how she is doing at work and what is happening in her life.
This degree of parental involvement may feel different to viewers from cultures where adulthood is strongly associated with leaving home and becoming independent at a relatively young age.
In Korea, family relationships often remain closely connected well into adulthood.
Parents may continue worrying about their children's careers, housing, marriage and meals even after their children have finished university and started working.
Of course, this can be comforting.
It can also become pressure.
Korean dramas frequently explore this tension because it is familiar in Korean life.
For Young-woo's father, the question is even more complicated.
He wants to protect his daughter, but she also needs opportunities to make decisions, make mistakes and build her own life.
Loving someone sometimes means taking care of them.
At other times, it means allowing them to try things on their own.
The Korean Workplace: Sunbae and Hoobae
Another part of Extraordinary Attorney Woo that may look different through Korean eyes is the workplace.
Korean workplaces have traditionally placed considerable importance on seniority and titles.
Two words that frequently appear in Korean life are sunbae (선배) and hoobae (후배).
A sunbae is someone who entered the same school, organization or profession before you. A hoobae is someone who came after.
The words are difficult to translate perfectly into English because they describe more than a person's position.
Ideally, a good sunbae is expected to guide and help younger or less experienced colleagues.
That is one reason I found senior attorney Jung Myung-seok interesting.
At first, he has doubts about Young-woo.
The drama doesn't pretend otherwise.
But as he works with her, he begins to recognize her ability. He teaches her when necessary, challenges her at times and gradually gives her opportunities to work as an attorney.
For me, that is one of the positive meanings of sunbae culture.
Seniority should not simply give someone authority.
It should also bring responsibility.
Korean Workplace Culture Is Changing
There is another side to Korea's relationship-based culture.
Koreans have long used words such as hakyeon (학연) and jiyeon (지연).
Hakyeon refers to connections formed through school, while jiyeon refers to connections based on one's hometown or region.
These kinds of personal networks have historically been influential in Korean society, including professional life.
But Korea is changing.
There is now much greater emphasis on merit and fairness in recruitment, and blind recruitment has been introduced in parts of the public and private sectors to reduce the influence of applicants' backgrounds.
Old and new values therefore coexist.
Seniority and personal relationships still matter, but there is also a stronger expectation that people should be judged by their ability.
Young-woo enters this kind of workplace.
She does not easily fit conventional expectations about communication or social behavior. Yet her professional ability is difficult to ignore. That creates an interesting question underneath the courtroom stories:
When convention and ability conflict, what should matter more?
A Friendship With Its Own Language
Young-woo's friendship with Dong Geu-ra-mi offers a completely different kind of relationship.
Their famous greeting—
—is funny, rhythmic and unmistakably theirs.
At work, Young-woo has to enter a social world whose rules were created by other people.
With Geu-ra-mi, the two friends have created their own rules. Even their own greeting.
I think that is why their scenes feel so comfortable. Young-woo doesn't always have to adapt to someone else's world. Sometimes another person is willing to meet her in hers.
The Village Tree I Still Remember
Of all the places in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, one remains especially vivid in my memory.
The enormous hackberry tree in Sodeok-dong.
The Sodeok-dong of the drama is fictional, but the actual tree stands in Dongbu Village in Changwon, South Korea.
The episode concerns a village threatened by road construction, but years later, I remember the atmosphere of the village more clearly than the legal details.
There was something peaceful about it.
And there was something about that tree.
Its huge canopy seemed to embrace the village beneath it.
When I watched it, I felt a sense of generosity and comfort that reminded me of a mother watching over her family.
It almost felt like a guardian of the village.
Interestingly, that feeling is not entirely imaginary.
Large old trees have long held special places in some Korean villages. They could serve as landmarks and gathering places, and some were associated with village guardian traditions and communal rituals.
The real Dongbu Village hackberry also has a long relationship with the people who live around it.
So perhaps what I felt while watching the drama—the sense that this tree was watching over the village—was part of what made the location so powerful.
When a Drama Changes the Meaning of a Place
After Extraordinary Attorney Woo became popular, the real tree and village attracted visitors.
I find this one of the most fascinating things about K-dramas.
A place can exist quietly for decades, known mostly to the people who live nearby.
Then a drama tells a story there.
Suddenly, people want to visit.
The location itself hasn't moved.
The story has changed the way people see it.
It has happened repeatedly in Korea.
Nami Island became inseparable from Winter Sonata for many drama fans.
The Jumunjin breakwater became associated with Goblin.
And a huge old tree in a quiet village in Changwon became the Sodeok-dong tree from Extraordinary Attorney Woo.
This is one reason I enjoy K-drama filming locations.
They are not always grand palaces or famous tourist attractions.
Sometimes they are ordinary places that became extraordinary because a story happened there.
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One Place I Would Really Like to Visit
The Dongbu Village tree is one filming location I genuinely want to visit someday.
Not simply because Extraordinary Attorney Woo was filmed there. I want to see whether the feeling I remember from the drama exists when I stand there myself.
The comfort of the village. The enormous branches. That strange sense of a tree protecting the people beneath it.
I would like to stand under it, look up and see how it feels in real life. Some filming locations make me want to take a photograph.
This one makes me want to stay for a while.
And Then There Are the Whales
Of course, it is impossible to talk about Extraordinary Attorney Woo without whales.
Young-woo's fascination with whales is one of the most recognizable elements of the drama. When she talks about them, her expression changes. And at important moments, whales sometimes appear visually as though an idea has suddenly surfaced in her mind.
I like those scenes because the drama briefly stops asking Young-woo to enter everyone else's world.
Instead, we are invited into hers.
The whale is not merely a beautiful image.
It gives us another way to experience how Young-woo thinks.
What This Drama Changed for Me
When I look back on Extraordinary Attorney Woo, its most lasting effect on me was not what I learned about lawyers.
It was the way the drama made me think again about disability.
Woo Young-woo is an exceptional fictional character. Her remarkable abilities should not be treated as representative of every autistic person.
Not every autistic child will become Woo Young-woo.
Nor should that be the expectation.
But the drama made me wonder about something else.
There must be many children and adults around us who experience the world differently, and whose abilities society has not yet learned to recognize.
Young-woo had remarkable talent. But talent by itself was not enough. She needed education. She needed someone willing to hire her. She needed colleagues willing to work with her. And she needed opportunities to demonstrate what she could do. Without those opportunities, her abilities might have remained unseen.
That is what stayed with me.
Not Another Woo Young-woo — A Chance to Become Themselves
I don't hope that every autistic child becomes another Woo Young-woo.
I hope something different.
I hope more people are given the opportunity to discover what they can do.
Some may have extraordinary academic abilities.
Others may be talented in completely different ways.
And some may simply need more support to participate in everyday life.
The goal should not be to turn everyone into an exceptional success story.
Perhaps the better question is:
Have we given this person a fair opportunity to become who they can be?
Extraordinary Attorney Woo made me reconsider the assumptions we make about people before we really know them.
For me, that was one of the drama's greatest strengths.
What Viewers May See Differently
This is also why I enjoy writing about Korean dramas for viewers. Subtitles can translate dialogue. They cannot always translate memory. An international viewer sees Young-woo eating kimbap. I see a school picnic and two lunchboxes my mother prepared many years ago. An viewer sees a senior lawyer working with a junior lawyer. I also see the complicated Korean relationship between sunbae and hoobae. An international viewer sees a beautiful old tree.
I see something that reminds me of the old trees that have stood at the center of Korean villages for generations.
Neither interpretation is more correct.
They are simply different layers of the same story.
And sometimes understanding those small cultural details makes a K-drama even more interesting.
The Ordinary Things We Remember
Perhaps that is why Extraordinary Attorney Woo has stayed with me. Not because everything in the drama was extraordinary. But because so many ordinary things became memorable. Kimbap. A father preparing food for his daughter. A senior guiding a junior. Two friends with their own strange greeting. Whales. A village. An old tree. And a young lawyer asking the people around her to reconsider what they thought she could do. For international viewers, these details can offer small glimpses of Korea. For me, they do something different. They make me look again at things I have known for most of my life. A roll of kimbap brings back my mother. An old tree makes me want to travel across Korea just to stand beneath it. And a television drama makes me reconsider how quickly we decide what another person is capable of. Maybe that is one of the things a good drama can do.
It doesn't just show us another world.
Sometimes it changes the way we look at our own.
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