Cherry Navarro Manansala has been watching K-Dramas long before Hyun Bin and Son Ye-jin crash landed into our lives. A working mother of two, she chanced upon Princess Hours while pregnant in 2006. An alternate history drama, it featured Kim Jeong Hoon, Yoon Eun Hye, and Joo Ji Hoon. Cherry remembered watching it on and off to pass the time, but never warmed up to it.

What got Cherry hooked was Boys Over Flowers in 2009. Rich boy meets poor girl in a high school setting with underdog undertones and Lee Min-ho—resistance was futile. Plus, at 16 episodes, sometimes extended to 24, K-Drama has the satisfaction of coming to an end. This is unlike local telenovelas that run for years and years. Ang Probinsyano, for instance, began in 2015, and it’s still running, I think.

So taken was Cherry by Lee Min-ho that she looked for other K-Dramas with him in it, leading her to watch Personal Taste and City Hunter. Watching Personal Taste, Cherry was amazed at how different Lee Min-ho looked. In Boys Over Flowers, he was a high schooler with curly, ahjumma hair. That’s hairstyle better suited for old-fashioned middle-aged women. In Personal Taste, he was an architect pretending to be gay.

Cherry was suitably impressed. She found herself following other actors as well, widening her K-Drama world further. She would switch biases, or favorites, every now and then but her ultimate crush is and will forever be, Gong Yoo. He’s the unconventionally handsome actor who stole the hearts of K-Drama fans in Coffee Prince, and had horror fans grappling the edge of their seats in Train to Busan.

She observed how wonderfully produced these K-Dramas were. The actors looked different from one K-Drama to the next, from their hair, makeup, and demeanor to their cars, clothes, and cellphones. The dramas were filmed in beautiful locations, featured Korean food, set with a nice soundtrack, and launched with the appropriate merchandise. Watching behind-the-scene videos proved to be as enjoyable as viewing the episodes, moreso when flipping through the official photo book of the K-Drama stars.

There was no stopping Cherry then. She welcomed the distraction as a break from the daily grind of work.

But as she watched one K-Drama after another, the passing fancy became a deepening interest. Cherry wanted to know more about South Korea’s history, culture, and language. She felt that she was missing pop culture cues and historical references which would have made her K-Drama experience more enjoyable.

She learned to cook Korean food, changed her hairstyle and got bangs, and made the switch from Clinique and Estee Lauder to Korean beauty brands. In 2011, she flew to Seoul with her husband, and made stops at the locations she saw in K-Dramas, from the Seoul Tower and DMZ to Nami Island. This was long before they started having K-Drama tours.

In 2012, she decided to enroll in a Korean language class at Ateneo de Manila University. With her were OFWs, businessmen, and fellow K-Drama fanatics—people she would not have ordinarily met in her life as a corporate executive. What was more surprising was that she would become friends with her classmates, and she would eventually go on fan meets and trips with them.

On a dare, she decided to take TOPIK, Test of Proficiency in Korean. A written test for non-native speakers, it measures proficiency in reading, writing, and listening comprehension in the Korean language. She took the Level 1 test in her first year of Korean class. That she passed was something short of a miracle.

Cherry would go back to South Korea year after year, bringing her family along, sometimes friends, immersing in the culture and language. When K-Drama became a worldwide cultural phenomenon on lockdown, friends, including yours truly, turned to her for advice. She is, after all, the woman who has a file of all the K-Dramas she’s ever watched, 200 and counting, 20 not yet finished, ranked accordingly.

K-Drama beginners would do well to watch her all-time top five: Coffee Prince, Goblin, Crash Landing On You, Descendants of the Sun, and Love from Another Star with the Reply series as runners-up.

However, she would also tweak her recommendation depending on the beginner’s taste, genre, and preferred actors.

Watching K-Drama has made life a thousandfold more exciting for Cherry. She didn’t just enjoy it on the couch. She engaged, and a whole new world opened up for her. It is fortunate that we are finally catching up to what she has discovered.

When Cherry retires, she hopes to pursue her Korean language classes once again. Her ultimate ambition: translate K-Dramas into English and see her credits as an episode rolls in, “Subtitle Translation by Cherry Manansala.”

I know I will read her name on the credits of a Gong Yoo K-Drama one day, soon!