Princess Hours is sincerely, embarrassingly good

By Staff Writer Kayla Li

The DVD skipped sometimes. I was four years old, lying on the cold marble floor of my grandmother’s house in Singapore, the stone pressing up through my skin like a kindness against the heat. The air was thick and humid and sticky. I was looking up at the TV, watching Princess Hours on a screen full of static, eating a lemon vanilla popsicle. I just knew I could not look away.

I did not understand the language, nor the plot — the arranged marriage, the palace rivalries, the misunderstandings sustained across entire episodes — and yet I felt the atmosphere of it the way you feel a melody before you know the words. There were colors I had no vocabulary for yet: the gold light pooling in palace hallways, the shimmer of silk and costume, a world so warm and whole that I did not question it, only absorbed it.

“Perhaps Love,” the drama’s sweeping theme song, played at my parents’ wedding before I ever knew it belonged to a drama. It existed for me in two places at once, suspended at the edge of both the screen and my own family’s story. Even now, I find it difficult to separate the fictional love it carries from the real one I grew up beside. 

Princess Hours is a 2006 Korean drama, and the production wears its era openly: the pacing slow in a way contemporary television rarely permits itself, the styling unmistakably 2006, the cinematography soft and slightly luminous. Someone watching it now with any critical sense would likely recognize every beat before it arrives — and still be unable to turn away. 

What it has, and what I have rarely found as easily since, is the quality of something unashamed of its own warmth. It commits fully to its emotions, without the irony modern storytelling uses to keep audiences at a distance.

There is a scene near the end of the drama where the two leads kiss in the middle of a crowded street. It is, objectively, over the top. It is also the moment the whole drama has been building toward — the point where all the slowness and patience finally collapses into an undeniable love. It is completely, embarrassingly sincere, and that sincerity, as unfashionable as it may be, is what has made it last.

Cliches only feel worn when you have heard the song before. I heard this one before I had anything to compare it to, before I had any critical distance to protect me, and it left a shape in me I now recognize as love. I know it on a quiet late afternoon during the first year of the pandemic, the house stilled, my brother and father playing in the backyard, my mother and I on the couch watching Princess Hours together. Being present with someone inside a piece of media you have both carried — that, too, is a form of love. 

I have rewatched Princess Hours at least seven times. I always come back to it, and I am not entirely sure why. Only that when I have nothing new to reach for, I reach for this. Each time, I notice more of the seams, more of the melodrama, more of the absurdity I could not have named at four. And each time, it still plays. 

Nostalgia, I have come to understand, is not the belief that something was perfect. It is the recognition that something was first, that it played in you before you had the words for what you were hearing, and left a shape that everything after has had to find some way to fit. Princess Hours gave me a skewed idea of love, in both senses of the word: unrealistic in the way all first loves are unrealistic, and also somehow bigger than romance. 

First loves, in stories as much as in life, are not worth returning to because they are flawless. They are worth returning to because they were first, and Princess Hours was mine. Because somewhere in you, there is still a version of yourself lying on a cold marble floor, the air thick with heat, a melting popsicle in your hand, looking up at something you do not yet understand and choosing, without hesitation, to stay.