Let’s Talk About Chu is Netflix’s latest addition to its plethora of Asian romantic shows that keep you from ditching the platform. I know you’ve thought about it. Somehow, the streaming giant manages to hold global appeal thanks to the unique little shows and films it brings to the platform. Let’s Talk About Chu could very loosely be called Taiwan’s Sex Education. However, I don’t actually think there’s anything similar between the shows except for a lead who educates their friends and families about intimacy and relationships (at least here she’s female and not a complete prick), but I can see why the comparisons have been made. Let’s Talk About Chu mainly revolves around Chu Ai, a sex-positive mini-adult who is navigating the ups and downs of adulting in this day and age. She spends her days as a wax technician and her evenings as a sex educator on the in-world equivalent of YouTube. On the one hand, she’s struggling with her own idea of love, and on the other, her two siblings and parents are also having trouble with their own relationships. Will the Chu family be able to make it to the other side of this turmoil? Let’s find out in the recap.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens In The Show?
Chu Ai is in a friends-with-benefits arrangment with a boy named Ping-Ke, a friend from college. She’s got rules in this relationship that allow her to keep it “only sex, no love.” Chu Ai also has a channel called Let’s Talk About Sex, and she’s trying really hard to make it go viral, but it’s stagnant, and so she’s burdened to work at the parlor for some petty cash. Her mother, of course, hates both jobs and doesn’t care for her daughter’s potential (sigh). Chu Ai’s brother, Yu-Sen, is in a relationship with a man with whom he’s not entirely compatible. Chu Ai seems to see this better than anyone, but her brother obviously knows what he’s doing. He’s also got an IQ of 140 but spends most of his time gambling at a nearby club, where he’s a regular. Their oldest sister, Wei-Wei, is married to a man who used to be her professor, and they have a big age gap. The couple doesn’t want to have kids because they believe the environmental conditions aren’t great for raising a child. However, the Chu mom is determined that the professor will leave Wei-Wei if they don’t have kids, old-school thinking and all that. In reality, she’s struggling because her husband doesn’t have the time to even look at her, and she’s left dissatisfied.
The most shocking bit, though, is that the mom catches her husband pleasuring himself, and it’s the last straw for her. You see, they’ve been having many problems, and she keeps threatening to divorce him; however, this time she throws him out of the house after he doesn’t realize what he’s done. Even the mom has her needs after all. The Chu family’s dad has a factory in Indonesia, and after much fighting, the mom tells him to go back to Indonesia and never show her his face. Chu Ai’s fling Ping-Ke is the son of a rich man, but his father has another family of his own. Ping-Ke lives with his mother, who is a mistress and single mom. He loves his mother dearly and would do anything for her. Still, he lives off his father’s credit cards while simultaneously avoiding him like the plague. In reality, Ping-Ke saw his parents in a compromising position when he was a child, and it’s scarred him as an adult. He hates his father because he thinks he’s hurting his mother, but he’s way off there (oops).
Chu Ai also has an ex who she thinks she’s still in love with, named Bonner. He’s just moved back to Taiwan and asked her to meet him. They hit it off again and decide to get together, but he tells her really quickly that he loves her, which makes her worry. She’s avoidant and hates the idea of love, but she does think she has feelings for him. On the other hand, she’s actually catching feelings for Ping-Ke, who has also fallen for her. While she does partially accept her feelings for him, making him overjoyed, she ends up hurting his feelings after speaking about him and his father, which results in Ping-Ke cutting Chu Ai out of his life. Elsewhere, her brother Yu-Sen ends up getting drunk one night because of his boyfriend’s nature and ends up playing drunk poker. He ends up borrowing too much money from the boss, which he later can’t pay up. The boss, Li Yueh, is a proper gangster, and he makes Yu-Sen gamble for him in order to pay him back. This works out really well for them at first, but then they get beat up by people from one of the big clubs and switch locations. That’s when they realize they’re actually very attracted to each other.
Let’s Talk About Chu is very fond of tropes, and this is your classic “good boy-bad boy” situation, where the good guy is a great influence on the dark and mysterious gangster, which we get to see through his relationship with his grandmother. Unfortunately, Li Yueh’s grandmother passes away, and Yu-Sen helps him through the pain. Ultimately, Li Yueh decides to switch it up and become a good person, leaving his gangster ways and going to prison. Wei-Wei doesn’t have it as easy. She believes her husband is cheating on her with one of his new students, whom he spends a lot of time with because she’s young and stunning like Wei-Wei was back in the day. Her insecurity manifests in the form of paranoia and irritability, and ultimately, she ends up almost cheating on him with a couple on a retreat. Ironically, this retreat was meant to help her feel closer to her partner (oops). On the other hand, her husband does think about cheating a couple of times, and the student is persistent in trying to take him to bed, but he ends up pleasuring himself and realizing his own faults too. The only good thing that happens for Ai in all of this is that she gets to go on a talk show hosted by one of her favorite vloggers. This would give her the exposure she needs to boost her social media presence and help her reach her goals.
What Happens On The Talk Show?
It turns out that Chu Ai’s notion of love is skewed because, when she was 5, her father left her in a car and went to a hostess bar. When she woke up and saw that he wasn’t around, she walked through the building to find him, only to see everything that happened in such a place (trauma!). Ever since, she’s believed her father satisfied himself elsewhere while still loving her mother, I suppose this is why she always wants to separate love from sex. On the show, Ai gets bombarded with questions about her ideas, and she’s unable to answer them well because, through her personal experience, she hasn’t been able to keep the two things separate. She did end up falling in love with Ping-Ke, and so she feels like her entire life’s been a lie. This is when she finally decides to confront her father and speak about what she’s been through. Her father tells her that he was actually borrowing money, and he was currently working in the building where the hostess bar used to be to repay that debt. It’s an illegal job to sell fake medicines, which is why he has not been picking up anyone’s calls. Chu Ai finally admits that he was the reason she essentially hates love because she’s afraid of being left behind in the car again.
What Happens Between Her Parents?
You can see some deep-rooted gender conformity in Let’s Talk About Chu, when Ai talks to her mother about her father cheating on her. Ai’s mother defends her father in that situation, even though she has been angry with him the whole time. We can see a big difference in the way Ai views the problem and the way her mother does. However, it never really gets addressed, and at the end of the day, the parents get back together, much to the happiness of the children, despite the father having mistreated the mother. I suppose that’s what you get from a romantic comedy. On the other hand, Ping-Ke finally stops judging his mother and understands that his father and she actually love each other. Moreover, he notices that his father has the same concerns about his mother as he does, so they’ve got something to bond over.
Yu-Sen and Li Yueh return to Taipei, and Yu-Sen learns about his father’s factory in Indonesia losing a ton of money because of his father. This is why his father has been hiding and avoiding their mother. He promises to help repay the money, and Li Yueh gives him the money he had saved up for his grandmother’s treatment just before turning himself in to the police. He asks Yu-Sen to wait for him, and in a clip from six months later, we see them practicing for Li Yueh’s trial together. Seeing that her parents are back together, Chu Ai swallows her pride and apologizes to Ping-Ke, getting together with him for real this time.
At the end of Let’s Talk About Chu, the parents are living a happy life together and planning an overseas trip. On the other hand, Wei-Wei has written a book, finally completing the piece she was working on this whole time based on her real-life experiences. Her relationship with the professor is better than ever, and they’re very happy without kids. In the end, Ai jokes about not wanting to live with Ping-Ke, and he throws a tantrum until she tells him she was joking, and they show us what a loving couple they are.
