Joonah and Senghi

Most people thought he'd never excel into anything special. Even following the plastic surgery and all of the exhausting auditions that finally started to lead somewhere, the military service and the comeback - regardless of what he did, there were always voices claiming that he was too short, too thin or too average-looking for Korea to let him into their hearts. There were so many young men out there with better looks or more talent, they said. Most of those young men used to be school bullies, and Joon-ah - the bullied one.

He had been standing in a hallway on the third floor of Jangchung middle school for boys, spitting his own teeth out in a trash bin, while awaiting a beating by the head principle. He had been running until he threw up, hunted down through his neighbourhood by a hoard of relentless young boys. His mother had to chase those boys off for him. Afterwards, she scolded him for being too soft, too ugly, too everything. Joonah was a child that not even a mother could muster up any affection for, and he accepted that as a none-debatable fact. Looking at himself in the mirror, there was no question why. His face was unsymmetric, he had an overbite and his default facial expression was one of bashfulness and anxiety.

Joonah's grandmother sometimes used to tell him that he had beautiful eyes. Even as a small child, he clinged to those tiny words of encouragement.

Deep within him, an impossible dream was slowly awakening. He wanted to perform on stage, as a singer or actor. Joonah had a decent voice and a natural sense of comedic timing, which made his mother finally decide to take his college funds and invest them in a series of surgical procedures, so that his face would become more sufferable to look at.

"Joonah, always make sure to stay in your lane", she told her son. "It's not your place to work with numbers or with people, or to do any other sort of other honest job. Just keep being funny and embarassing, and make a career out of it."

The fact that his grandmother agreed with his mom, finally convinced Joonah to start going to real auditions. And as the pressure of the auditions got worse, Goodwin was born. To Goodwin, there was always a way to cheat or charm his way into a production. He was utterly shameless, and loving it.

Whenever Joonah became too average, Goodwin's cocky, loud and confident personality took the lead. The things that Joonah would shy away from or don't have the energy to do, Goodwin would take on with a grin on his face. When Joonah stayed at home, smoked too much and drank soju to fall asleep, Goodwin would set out to hike and camp, drink with his friends and not fall asleep until dawn, preferably by the campfire in the arms of some cute girl.

No wonder Goodwin got all the gigs. He ended up a permanent cast member of a popular variety show, Hazy Dayz, filming two days per week. Sometimes in a studio with guests and crazy games, sometimes on the road, driven around the country together with his five cast colleauges and a huge camera team.

With Goodwin's fame on the rise, things were looking up for Joonah too. He released a song here and there and even got casted for the occational theatre play or musical. He met a few women who were interested in him instead of Goodwin. Being Joonah turned out to be... not half-bad. And at the end of the day, he realized that him and Goodwin still were the same person. Goodwin picked up on things and allowed Joonah to thrive. He became a capable lover and learned about fashion, wine and food. He even experienced friendship, which ultimately allowed him to show bits and pieces of his true personality to his variety show cast colleauges.

But women kept coming and going. Just like Joonah's mother once pushed him into fame and then turned her back on him, the women in his life kept dominating him, only to leave. 

Maybe this was Joonah's and Goodwin's destiny, to live as scarred bachelors together, right until the end of the party.

Or so he thought.

Senghi's journey wasn't all too different from Joonah's. She too was raised by a harsh-spoken matriarc, madame Celeste Jung. As a teenager, Senghi decided to save herself by pushing her family away. That's how she came to travel to Korea for the first time, with the goal to explore her late father's birth country. 

She ended up staying in Korea a little too long, and returned back to France with a broken soul that didn't belong neither in the place she left behind, nor where she was headed. Korea traumatized her. There, she finally found a piece of herself that she always felt had been missing. But even in Korea she had felt lost, like a little kid who gets stuck at the mart's toy shelf, and whose mother is getting more and more furious looking for her.

So, she kept going back. Time and time again, trying to find her identity. Studying the Korean language, arts and writing. 

Seoul always swallowed her whole. The steep hills, the weird mix of ugly and beautiful buildings, the modern and the old parading hand in hand along Han river, painting the water surface with neon lights and the tears of workers on strike. It was all but depressing, and still, an intense awakening. It was the taste of tteokbokki, jeon and japchae. It was the scent of thick, honey-dripping pancakes prepared over an open flame by the roadside.

Acting on loneliness and lack of direction, Senghi started dating early on. Her enthusiasm resulted in a rather impressive collection of ex-boyfriends, accumulating steadily as the years went by. At 31, she finally decided that enough was enough, quit men altogether and returned to Korea for what she hoped would be the last time. With all that energy to spare, her screenplay writing career finally took off.

At last, Senghi Jung became a name in the k-drama sphere.

But success is perishable, and as it ages, it becomes more of a liability than an asset to once have had it. Following Covid and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, businesses all around the world were facing a crisis, including the big production companies and streaming services. Senghi held on by a thread, finding work at one of the bigger public TV networks, but even that didn't last in the end. 

The series of events that followed, was how the two of them eventually ended up in the same office, on that afternoon in March of 2023.