K-Drama: Hi Bye, Mama!

Hi Bye, Mama! is a heart wrenching tale of a mother who lost her life and watches over her young child as a ghost. Spooky, am I right? But that's not the direction this K-Drama takes. It is a lovely story that guts you in the feels and makes you wish you could go in and fix everything yourself, like in Dramaworld, another kind of K-Drama...  but not really.

Our main character is Cha Yu-ri. She is dead. This is a fact that we learn very early on in the series, so not really a spoiler, but the circumstances around her death though... that is something that is revealed later on. She has a daughter, Cho Seo-woo, and her husband, Cho Gang-hwa, who she left behind when she died. Gang-hwa remarried to a nurse, Oh Min-jeong. Yu-ri watches over all of them as she is reluctant to move on, wanting to spend more time with Seo-woo, who is only about five years of age.

As she spends time with Seo-woo though, some side effects start to occur...

(SPOILER WARNING! START)

Within the first ten minutes or so of the first episode, we see Yu-ri and Gang-hwa's love story from the moment they met all the way to their marriage. It took them three seconds within seeing each other to fall in love and they were together for thirteen years before her death. Soon we see Seo-woo just bit more grown and she's about to do something dangerous and Yu-ri cries out for her and she is unable to stop her, another woman does and is revealed to be Gang-hwa's new wife, Oh Min-jeong. Yu-ri has been watching over Seo-woo since her birth, not having gotten the chance to hold her baby even once before dying, and it started having side effects. Seo-woo can see ghosts!

Yu-ri is extremely distraught by this and one night she curses out the deities and whatnot, screaming that it's unfair that she can't even be around her child without something like this happening. And so she becomes human. Yu-ri has 49 days to take back her place, where she would've been had she not died, and she will come back to life. Yu-ri doesn't want to do that though, to Gang-hwa and Min-jeong, opting to just try and keep ghosts away from Seo-woo until her time is up and she will go up. 

Things don't really work out the way she wants them to though. Her plan was to not get caught by anyone who knew her but the very first person who catches her was Gang-hwa. Soon, Yu-ri gets a job at the kindergarten that Seo-woo attends as a kitchen attendant to try and exorcise the ghosts hanging around there. Eventually, Hyeon-jeong, Yu-ri's best friend who helped introduce her to Gang-hwa, with the help of her now husband, Geun-sang, bumps into Yu-ri as she is leaving the kindergarten. Hyeon-jeong then takes Yu-ri to her bar and calls forth a meeting between the four of them, discussing why she's back and how. Yu-ri lied to them saying that she's only there for 49 days to do something she doesn't remember and that she doesn't know how she got back. She wants her coming back to be a secret so even her family doesn't know. 

As time goes on, Yu-ri slowly becomes friends with Min-jeong accidentally. Min-jeong is very unaware of her real identity and Seo-woo and Yu-ri spend more time together. More flashbacks show Yu-ri's life and of those around her, letting the audience grasp at the impact her death caused. Eventually, Hyeon-jeong finds out the secret of Yu-ri's revival and what will happen after 49 days and Yu-ri's family finally she her with their own eyes... 

(SPOILER WARNING! END)

This was a really heart-breaking series, truly. In all honesty, with how the series was headed, I couldn't tell if Yu-ri was really going to take back her place or not. People kept pushing her to but she was pushing back. And all those heart-breaking scenes when someone found her and were crying for her. Those got me. 

This is a K-Drama that I absolutely recommend you watch. It is heavy on the heart at times, but is overall a light-hearted show, showing what happens to the ones you love after death. 

I am truly sorry that this post was so short, but this is definitely worth a watch and I don't want to spoil the big question here. Also, life has been hectic as of late, I just moved states New Year's Eve and have been trying to settle in for a bit. Hopefully my next posts will be of a sufficient length and thank you all for reading!

P.S. Is it just me or was anyone else rooting for the Oh Min-jeong/Cha Yu-ri ship? Their friendship gave me feels and I really wanted them to get together several times. They would be so cute together! Seriously, I just wanted them to just push Gang-hwa out of the picture and raise Seo-woo together, is that too much to ask?