Love Is (Not) Everything : How Korean Popular Culture Makes an Anti-American Romantic Myth

By employing a symptomatic reading, this paper seeks to re-examine a South Korean television melodrama, Descendants of the Sun (released by the KBS Drama Production in 2016), in the political context of the post-Cold War. The paper argues that the intimate relationship on the screen is projected as a panacea not merely for the ideological confrontation on the Korean Peninsula, but also for the de-colonization of Asia. This romantic story between a South Korean Captain and a female physician is set in the Middle East, which is like a capsule that carries more ironic narratives of anti-American hegemony. In order to protect his lover, the Korean Captain betrays the political order from the White House and kills the former American military official, which should be regarded as an imaginative challenge to U.S. domination in Asia. Meanwhile, under the slogan of righteousness, love, and global peace, the mission of assisting Uruk’s (the present location: Iraq) state reconstruction, conducted by the South Korean peacekeeping force and voluntary Korean doctors, reveals a potential ambition in reshaping South Korea as a leading Asian power in the contemporary world. In this vein, this romantic drama is inextricably interwoven with an ascending nationalist discourse, thereby building a new Asian order in the name of love. However, a paradoxical proposition arises: when the de-colonization ambition is achieved through the re-colonization, how the shadow of the Cold War could be dispelled on both practical and discursive levels?