Does Eve have a hidden connection to Ryong’s family in ‘When The Stars Gossip’?
Eve's connection to Ryong's family in When the Stars Gossip is confirmed by Episode 14: Jung Na-mi is Eve's biological mother, as proven by a DNA test.
Spoiler warning: This article covers plot developments across the complete run of “When the Stars Gossip,” including revelations from Episodes 13 and 14.
The answer is yes, and the series confirms it by Episode 14. Jung Na-mi (Jung Young-joo), the youngest of the three women who raised Gong Ryong (Lee Min-ho), is Eve Kim’s (Gong Hyo-jin) biological mother. The two leads are not blood relatives, but being placed in that family configuration gives their romance a complication the show’s second half spends several episodes working through. What the first half seeds through quietly odd behavioral moments, Episodes 13 and 14 resolve with a DNA test and a face-to-face meeting neither character was prepared for.
Two orphans, two kinds of loss
Both leads carry the loneliness of people who grew up without their original families. Eve is a Korean American adoptee. Her birth mother left her in a taxi on Christmas Eve, and when Eve later contacted the adoption agency, there was no record of anyone ever having searched for her. The name she was given carries its own irony: she was abandoned on the night the name refers to.
Ryong, an OB-GYN who enters the space station as a tourist with an unauthorized fertility-research mission, grew up raised collectively by three women who run a restaurant together. None of the three is his biological mother. Multiple recaps describe them as adoptive aunties rather than formal guardians. The symmetry is part of the show’s premise: two people shaped by abandonment and improvised family structures, neither able to fully explain why they understand each other.
Writer Seo Sook-hyang placed one piece of early foreshadowing in the episodes before the family connection becomes explicit. Several episodes into the run, Ryong’s mothers visit a shaman who remarks in passing that only one of the three has ever given birth. At the time, the line appears to mark the shaman as unreliable, since none of the women is Ryong’s biological mother. Its actual meaning only becomes clear later.
The dinner in Episode 12
Ryong’s mothers invite Eve to their restaurant under the pretext of a thank-you for helping bring Ryong home safely, but the conversation that follows functions as a careful interrogation. By this point, Ryong and Eve have returned from the space station and are quietly seeing each other. When Eve mentions that she was adopted by an American family after being abandoned on Christmas Eve, and that no one had ever come looking for her, Na-mi goes quiet. Episode recaps note what one describes as a visible “light bulb moment” on her part, though the scene does not press toward any direct statement. The episode ends with Na-mi awake that night, replaying the conversation. The show gives that silence room rather than rushing toward the reveal.
The DNA test in Episodes 13 and 14
Na-mi visits Eve’s home with food and, without naming the connection outright, asks whether Eve is the baby who was left in a cab on Christmas Eve. She then describes the child as one she had not wanted, says she lived with no regrets, and explains that she only embraced motherhood after Ryong entered her life. Eve deflects in the moment. That night she runs a DNA test on a mug Na-mi left behind, using a lipstick print on the rim as the sample. The result is a 99.9 percent maternity match. Na-mi is Eve’s biological mother. Ryong and Eve are not biologically related.
In Episode 14, Eve returns to Na-mi’s home carrying food from a shared meal, a gesture that episode recaps read as wordless acceptance. The two women begin working out what their newly established relationship means, with considerably more left unspoken than said.
What the confirmed connection actually means
The series does not establish that Eve had any prior knowledge of Ryong’s family before their mission, or that a hidden personal motive led her to him. The question at the center of this article was still open when the piece was first published on February 10, 2025, which fell between the dinner episode (Episode 12, February 9) and the DNA confirmation (Episodes 13-14, February 15-16).
The claim that Kang Kang-su (Oh Jung-se), the fruit-fly researcher and financial heir who has been living aboard the station for ten months, holds unusual caution toward Eve or withholds knowledge about her origins is not supported by the completed series. According to comments from Oh Jung-se himself, Kang Kang-su’s principal dramatic function is unrequited love for Choi Go-eun (Han Ji-eun), Ryong’s former fiancee, alongside his involvement in the unauthorized fertilization experiment he conducted with Ryong. He operates primarily as a comic character with a melancholy undertow, not as a figure who knows a secret about Eve’s family.
What the confirmed biology changes is the underlying structure of Eve’s attachment to Ryong’s world. She spent her adult life never having been searched for. The woman who left her in that taxi on Christmas Eve is the same woman who built a replacement family around Ryong, the man Eve fell in love with in orbit. The show does not ask either character to find that arrangement tidy or reassuring. It is not.
