Written by Gwang Jin and Directed by Kim Seong-yoon
Production companies: Showbox and Zium Content
Some stories change. Others wait for us to change before they reveal what they have been saying all along. Rewatching Itaewon Class in 2026 felt less like returning to a television series and more like meeting an old friend after years apart. The story had not changed. I had.
Itaewon is one of Seoul’s most vibrant and multicultural neighborhoods, a place where languages and lives naturally intersect, the perfect setting for people searching, each in their own way, for somewhere they could simply exist as themselves. At first glance the narrative seems driven by injustice. Beneath that surface lies something quieter: a story about conviction, about choosing who we become when life keeps inviting us to become someone else.
Success, the series tells us, is not defeating an enemy. It is becoming someone who stays true to their convictions despite every setback. The victories that shape us most deeply are rarely visible: choosing kindness when resentment would be easier, refusing a shortcut that costs us a piece of ourselves, or simply deciding our values are still worth carrying. Resilience, I have come to believe, has never been about enduring suffering. It has always been about protecting the parts of ourselves that suffering tries to convince us to abandon.
On this second viewing, the series surprised me with its gentle wisdom about second chances. Redemption is not something we hand to another person. It begins when someone chooses to believe there is still more to us than our worst moment, or the labels we have been given. The story also refuses to look away from prejudice, exploring the discrimination faced by former convicts, transgender individuals, foreigners, and those who live between accepted definitions of identity. It reminded me of The Childe in this way, another work that reveals how difficult belonging becomes when society lets difference matter more than humanity. These stories travel so well across cultures because they are never really about one country. They are about the invisible borders we continue to draw around one another.
Principles always come with a cost. Integrity sounds beautiful in comfortable rooms, yet its true weight appears only when keeping it means giving up convenience or recognition. That cost is what quietly earns trust, built one consistent act at a time. Perhaps this is what makes genuine leadership so rare, not authority or charisma, but the ability to create a place where others feel safe enough to become who they were always capable of being.
I found myself reflecting on failure, too. We spend so much of life trying to avoid it, as though it proves we are moving in the wrong direction, yet failure has often been the place where my own life grew more honest and more compassionate. As a cultural facilitator, I was especially moved by the way the series portrays multiculturalism in Itaewon, not as a backdrop, but as a living space where people from different worlds find room to exist and belong. The older I become, the less I seek stories about extraordinary people. I am drawn instead to ordinary people who keep choosing decency after disappointment, hope after loss, and integrity when no one would blame them for letting it go.
None of this would carry the same weight without the performances. Ahn Bo Hyun and Park Seo Joon anchor the story with work that never asks for applause, only belief.
Perhaps that is why this series still resonates years after it first aired. It offers no easy answers, only the quiet question of what success looks like when it is not found at a finish line: choosing compassion in a world that rewards certainty, believing in people after disappointment, becoming even when becoming asks everything of us.
Perhaps that is the kind of success worth carrying long after the applause has faded.
Image courtesy of Showbox
Originally Published on: Nov 2, 2023
