# The Making of an Ordinary Woman (2019)

> A Taiwanese woman born in the 1960s grows up in her family's Chinese herbal medicine shop and navigates love, marriage and the seniority of family life.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/78635

## Facts

- Seasons: 2
- Episodes: 20
- Episode runtime: 50 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: comedy, drama, family
- Created by: Yen Yi-wen
- Network: CTS
- Cast: Hsieh Ying-shiuan, Bella Wu, James Wen, Bamboo Chen, Yang Li-yin, Sara Yu, Joseph Hsia, Lan Wei-hua
- TMDB rating: 8.5/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10752444/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: mild
- Complexity: accessible
- Violence: none
- Tone: warm, wry, intimate, gentle, nostalgic

## What critics say

Critics and audiences broadly warm to its grounded, affectionate portrait of a Taiwanese woman's life across decades of family and marriage pressures.

## Synopsis

The Making of an Ordinary Woman (2019-2021) is a Taiwanese family comedy-drama series created by Yen Yi-wen for CTS. Hsieh Ying-shiuan plays Chen Chia Ling, a woman born in the 1960s who grows up in a Chinese herbal medicine store in southern Taiwan, and Bella Wu plays her younger self. Her world is crowded with the people around her: James Wen as Jiang Xian Rong, Bamboo Chen as Chen Chin-Wen, and Yang Li-yin as Chen Lee Yueh-Ying, whose relationships pull against one another. The engine of the series is the everyday collision of love, marriage, and the rules of seniority within a household, with each episode built from family meals, shop routines, quarrels over obligations, and the slow reshaping of a woman's expectations. Told across two seasons and twenty episodes of roughly fifty minutes, it unfolds as one continuing story of a life rather than a case-of-the-week format. The tone is warm and wry, with domestic humor balancing quieter ache, and the mood is intimate and lived-in. Set in Taiwan from the 1960s onward, it is a grounded portrait of family pressure and personal change. Fans of Eat Drink Man Woman, Little Women and Modern Family will find resonance here.

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