His desire to make himself seem older and more mature is driven by his desire for her to see him as a man rather than a child (with this the school uniform does not help).
While Jang Hye-sung regularly refers to Su-ha as her dongsaeng (a non-gender-specific term for a younger sibling), Su-ha resists calling her Noona, trying to put himself on the same level with her throughout the show. It’s an artefact of the normalisation of older man/younger woman relationships. older brother) but a younger man often avoids referring to a romantic interest as ‘Noona’. It says something about Korean culture and its language that it’s normal – even desirable – for a woman to refer to her boyfriend as ‘Oppa’ (lit. Nonetheless, he uses his telepathy to help her with her cases as he starts to suspect that the recently-released Min Joon-kook has returned for his revenge. When she and Su-ha reunite over a case involving a classmate, he is crushed that she doesn’t recognise or remember him and that his idealised version of her is so far from whom she has become. She gets a job as a public defender for the steady pay cheque and finds herself working with idealistic and enthusiastic lawyer, Cha Kwan-woo (a dorky and amenable Yoon Sang-hyun), whom she starts dating. She no longer believes in justice and merely works to earn money. Jang Hye-sung in contrast has dived headfirst into cynicism, going through a routine as a lawyer with little enthusiasm. And that ultimately is what I Hear Your Voice explores: how does justice get served for those who can’t be heard, either physically or socially? The answer of course is that those who have a voice need to speak for them.įast forward 12 years, Park Su-ha is in his final year of highschool and has built up a fantasy version of his “first love”: the girl who risked her life to get justice for his father and whom he has sworn to protect from Min Joon-kook. But, as he discovers in his father’s trial, the truth is worthless if you’re voiceless. While his head injury has rendered him mute, Park Su-ha finds it has also given him a gift – telepathy. She nonetheless comes quickly to regret testifying when the perpetrator, Min Joon-kook (Jung Woong-in) threatens vengeance on herself and her family. Jang Hye-sung’s decision was influenced by her own recent encounter with injustice and her strained relationship with former friend turned nemesis, Seo Do-yeon. Justice is served by 19-year-old witness, Jang Hye-sung, who risks her life to testify. Rendered mute by the head injury he received at the time, he is unable to communicate properly and faces the prospect of his father’s murderer walking free. When he was a child, Park Su-ha witnessed his father’s murder in a staged car crash. Show just works, despite everything about it that shouldn’t work: the cliched childhood connection through shared trauma, the large age gap, the overuse of kdrama tropes and the somewhat preachy writing about justice.ĭespite (or maybe even because of) all this, I Hear Your Voice really is the classic kdrama I remember it being and I’m happy to recommend it as a gateway drama to people exploring Korean content for the first time. Having rewatched I Hear Your Voice for the first time in a long time, I’m happy to report that the show holds up far more than I expected. In the case of I Hear Your Voice though, the romance is an issue only for the lead themselves and this is only one of the drama’s refreshing decisions. A true Noona romance is one where the age difference is an issue – either for the characters or for the people around them – in a way that it wouldn’t be if the leads’ genders were reversed. The popularity of Noona romances therefore comes from their inherent trangressiveness. Romances between a young woman and an older man are normalised so reversing this dynamic comes with a challenge to cultural mores and social standards. older sister) – are a product of Korea’s deeply hierarchical, age-based and hyper-patriarchal culture. Noona romances – where the woman is older than the man and is therefore his ‘Noona’ (lit. It’s almost the same age gap as the actors themselves. I Hear Your Voice was a Noona romance with a very large 12-year age gap between Lee Jong-suk’s 19/20 year old Park Su-ha and Lee Bo-young’s 31/32 year old Jang Hye-sung. This 2013 drama starred acting heavyweight Lee Bo-young as a public defender who gets help from – and eventually has a romance with – a much-younger telepath, played by the A-list model and actor, Lee Jong-suk. I Hear Your Voice is one of the first Korean dramas I remember watching.
For new viewers, there are some old gems hidden behind Netflix’s algorithm and I Hear Your Voice is one of them. With Netflix purchasing half of Korea’s back catalogue, this nostalgia tour has been made much easier. The Covid19 lockdown has provided a good chance to catch up on some classic dramas.
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