Sunja (played by Minha Kim) found herself on the wrong side of the law — and then face to face with a blast from her romantic past — as ‘s Season 2 premiere drew to a close. Young Sunja’s Season 2 story picked up seven years later, in 1945, with her striving to make ends meet in Osaka, selling kimchee on the street while sons Noa and Mozasu attend school. Husband Isak, Mozasu’s father, is still in jail, the outlook for his return very unknown.
With cabbage (or anything else) to pickle in rapidly dwindling supply, Sunja runs out of kimchee and is coaxed by a neighbor to sell rice wine at the black market. The difficult choice presented here marks a deviation from author Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel, in which Sunja went to work at a restaurant after exhausting her kimchee supply. The change-up “came from talking to historians and other Zainichi women (Koreans residing in Japan) from that time,” Soo Hugh, who created the TV series, tells TVLine.
“One of our historians, Jackie Kim, who works extensively with Zainichi storytelling and narratives, talks a lot about how women had to make saki wine, rice wine, to make a living during this time period, and I was like, ‘Oh!’ When she told us that, it really broke open that story. I thought that was such an incredible historical detail [that] we really wanted to bring into the show.” Plus, Sunja agreeing to peddle rice wine — and quickly getting arrested as part of a raid, upon making her first delivery — set the.