Series: Wrestling with Confucianism — How Korea’s New Generation Is Bound by Tradition, and How It Tries to Break Free
In the recent wave of Korean dramas, it’s easy to spot a new generation of writers pushing back against rigid, conservative Confucian values, trying to free their characters from the weight of the old order. And yet, look closely enough, and there are always moments where the writers quietly step around the very questions where Confucianism and modern life collide most sharply. As a viewer — and as someone who grew up in Hong Kong, a city shaped as much by the West as by the East — I find that retreat quietly disappointing.
In the workplace drama See You At Work Tomorrow, what lingers longest isn’t the romance between the two leads, but the way marriageable adults and their parents’ generation both still struggle to shake off the pressure of tradition and “face” when it comes to marriage.
To the show’s credit, it handles outdated workplace culture and office gossip about private lives with a clarity and logic that feels genuinely of this moment. Early on, the female lead’s former boss delivers the kind of absurd, high-pressure line that could only exist in a toxic office — “even when I’m sick, I wait until after work or the weekend to be sick” — and repeatedly humiliates her and her colleagues in public. He’s eventually transferred out after his verbal and physical abuse of his staff comes to light and gets reported. It’s a small but pointed signal: this kind of workplace tyranny no longer gets a pass.
A messier thread runs alongside it. The male lead was once married to a woman who, by coincidence, now works at the same company as him and the female lead. When a spiteful coworker digs up that history and spreads it around, the rumor mutates into something uglier still — that the ex-wife, now remarried, is having an affair with him. The office lights up with gossip. It doesn’t stop there: once the two leads’ relationship becomes public, colleagues start rereading everything that came before it in a different light. As her direct supervisor, he’d always been visibly impressed by her competence and had given her plenty of opportunities to shine — and what once looked like ordinary mentorship now gets recast, retroactively, as favoritism. Someone files a formal complaint over suspected preferential treatment.
Caught between an old-fashioned moral trial over “impropriety” and a very modern conflict-of-interest problem, the show gives its younger characters a response worth applauding. The male lead and his ex-wife own their shared past without flinching. Rather than let the affair rumor fester, they go looking for whoever started it. The female lead doesn’t stay quiet and endure it either — she steps forward to vouch for his innocence and makes the relationship public on her own terms, refusing to play the passive party waiting to be protected. Most striking of all, the ex-wife brings a level of professionalism that elevates the whole subplot: she finds and submits the actual work documents that prove, plainly and objectively, that the female lead never received any special treatment. And through all of it, the divorce itself never once threatens either of their careers.
This is the show at its most defiant — a direct challenge to the old hierarchies of seniority, the rigid division of roles between men and women, and the idea that patience and endurance are virtues to be worn like medals. And it’s precisely because the writers handle this generation’s fight against workplace rumor and prejudice with such openness, reason, and nerve that their retreat on the subject of an older generation’s divorce feels so much more conservative by comparison.
The writers handle the younger generation’s fight with such openness and reason — which makes their retreat on the older generation’s divorce all the more conservative by comparison.
The female lead’s mother, after decades of being neglected by her husband, finally wants a divorce — but she’s terrified that “parents divorcing” will leave a stain on her children’s future marriages and weddings. So she settles instead for a compromise steeped in the particular grey resignation of East Asian family life: a sotsukon-style arrangement, staying legally married in name only until after her children are settled, and only then filing for an actual divorce.
When the female lead learns of her mother’s plan, she’s shocked, unable to quite process it, and later confesses to a friend, half-joking:
I’ve always supported late-life divorce — until it happened to my own parents, and something in me just sank.
To someone raised in Hong Kong, under all that Western influence, the idea of an adult holding back her own divorce for the sake of her grown children’s weddings is almost impossible to fathom — let alone to a Western audience for whom individual autonomy is close to gospel.
This should have been the show’s most explosive question. If the younger generation can face down the ugliest workplace rumor of infidelity and come out the other side through nothing but reason and due process, how do they turn around and refuse to let their parents’ marriage become a mark against their own?
Disappointingly, the back half of the series never lets the female lead sit down with her parents and actually talk it through, nor does it give her the space for a real conversation with someone about it. Instead, the writers simply route around the problem: the father, once so absorbed in work and so oblivious to his wife’s feelings, has a sudden change of heart, apologizes to his wife, and the two reconcile. By the finale, he’s handed the repair shop over to the male lead to run for a while, and the couple heads off on a sweet little trip together. It’s a warm, tidy ending — and it neatly, almost too neatly, sidesteps the two questions that actually mattered: what does a parents’ divorce mean for their marriageable children’s own search for love and family, and how should adult children even begin to think about their parents’ divorce in the first place?
By the end, the female lead has made peace with the male lead’s past and stays with him; her parents, moved by his sincerity, gradually come around to accepting his divorce. There’s something genuinely encouraging in that — a sign that Korean society is slowly loosening its grip on the stigma around divorced people. But the show ultimately reaches for the anesthetic of a happy ending to paper over the harder question, and in doing so, sends a quietly conservative message: within the Confucian framework, the family must be kept whole at almost any cost, and divorce — for oneself, for one’s parents, for one’s children — remains a mark against a life well lived.
Divorce is a setback, not a stain.
See You At Work Tomorrow gives its younger characters the courage to stand up to hierarchy and bullying at work, to protect themselves and each other. But it never quite finds the courage to grant the older generation the same right to freedom. The point this show was best positioned to make — that divorce is a setback, not a stain — is the one it flinches from at the very end. Caught between a new generation’s awakening and the pull of Confucian tradition, the drama, in the end, stops just short of the finish line.
