For the Love of K-Pop

There’s a part of me that wants to comfort Giaae Kwon, writer of the incredibly absorbing I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan, for the suffering she’s endured as a too-tall and chubby L.A.-bred Korean girl who’s experienced decades of self-loathing. And there’s another part of me that wants to tell her to get over it; she’s far too smart, creative, and talented a writer who should feel no obligation to apologize to anyone for anything. She’s a star in her own right.

Kwon, now a 30-something, has been obsessed with K-Pop since puberty despite her inability to starve herself into the requisite thinness the genre reveres.  She knows the women of K-Pop suffer all sorts of eating disorders and serious mental distress; that they are overworked and underpaid, and often victims of an absurdly demanding and cruel industry that gives little thought to their well-being.

Still, she can’t stop herself from feeling connected to these groups which have provided for her a soundtrack to her rather lonely life. She obsesses over the appearance of the women in these groups, loving their stick thin bodies and V-shaped faces, and admiring their synchronized sweet singing and dancing.  She writes “The rules of K-Pop fandom are pretty simple: be loyal.  Your boy band must be number one. Be faithful, steady, and true.” She admits, “The only boys I have ever loved have been K-Pop idols.”  She is a proud ‘bbasooni,’; which is nothing short of an unrepentant groupie.

Her first infatuation was for Tony, a member of H.O.T., who debuted in 1996 from SM Entertainment. The group got famous for its catchy pop songs and razor-sharp choreography.  She wonders what it is about Koreans that make them so susceptible to excessive fandom, thinking it might have something to do with the Korean concept of han, which means consumed by feelings of melancholy and fire. This unusual intensity, she feels, has something to do with Korea’s history of being subjected to the tyranny of others.

She points to the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, which was nothing less than Japan’s attempt to erase ‘Koreans’ from the world and turn them into some sort of unnamed people who were Japanese colonists.  She observes that Koreans are prone to excessive behavior, whether it is drinking or caring for their skin or the way they laugh self-consciously while covering their mouths.  And of course, their obsession with K-Pop which has now become a global phenomenon.

Kwon’s peer group growing up in Los Angeles were all Asian. She never felt like she fit in. Her parents are Korean immigrants; her father came as a young man and got a doctorate, and her mother arrived when she was ten.  But the family never practiced any Korean traditions from back home. They did enjoy watching Korean dramas, eating Korean food, and speaking the language at home.

I found myself immersed in Kwon’s story, which includes the history of her many years of emotional distress, but puzzled why Kwon allows herself to wallow in her obsession for K-Pop, which seems to promote idealized versions of beauty and thinness she admits she could never acquire. It seems like she is practicing a dangerous act of self-masochism that keeps her enthralled but unaware of the toxic effect it might be having on her. She admits to never being able to stay on a diet simply because she loves food too much, as well as taking great pleasure in cooking and baking.  We wonder why she doesn’t just let it go and look for safer spaces where she can thrive. After all, she lives in Los Angeles, which is, if nothing else, a land of reinvention and redefinition.  Why do this to herself?

Kwon sees the toxic masculinity that rules K-Pop. She does manage to pull away from her infatuation for a few years but falls back into it again when she falls for Min Yoon-gi, known professionally as Suga, who used to be part of BTS in 2013. His baby face gets to her. She insists she will never get into following any other group, but we don’t believe her.

Her fascination is so strong making us realize it must offer her something we can’t see. That’s the strange thing about obsession; it doesn’t follow logical highways of thought and intentionality.  After all, do Dylan fans ever tire of his cryptic musings?  Or do Grateful Dead groupies ever really relinquish the memories of trekking around the country following Garcia and his cohorts?  There is always some sort of magic in these alliances that baffle others who see nothing incredulous at all. There is also a quasi-religious or spiritual component to these attachments that seems applicable to Kwon, who is looking for relief from the hurt she carries inside of her.

Kwon delves into the personal lives of the K-Pop stars she reveres.  Many of them often sign away their rights and leave the industry messed up and without any substantial financial compensation.  She gives us a breakdown of the management styles of K-Pop’s biggest companies which are SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment. In the mid-2010’s, HYBE emerged. She explains how a star is born.

 First, the company releases profiles and photos of its stars. Next, it organizes fan clubs , and each one receives light sticks of a certain color to give to fans to wave at their concerts.  All the groups have active accounts on YouTube, Instagram, and X, as well as Weverse and Bubble. Management doesn’t allow idols to have any romantic interests, since this is part of the group’s allure. Fans fantasize that the singers are addressing them. Kwon never says so directly, but we sense she still finds solace in these imaginary relationships believing something about it as ‘real.’  She has admitted to never having a serious romantic or sexual relationship with anyone, and one wonders if she’s in an adolescent time loop of sorts, never able to move on to authentic intimacy with anyone.

Kwon would most likely disagree with my assessment. She writes defiantly: “To a fan, what an idol makes you feel is very real.  The connection you feel, the hop, the joy-all that means something, and it has a tangible effect on our lives.”  She believes her earlier infatuation with H.O.T.’s music prompted her to find new ways of existing and being creative which finally led to her beloved writing life. K-Pop provided a refuge for her.

She claims she still finds comfort “in sinking into the familiarity of their songs, singing alone, and swaying my body in dance movements, much like my classmates did on the car ride to Disneyland so many years ago.”  She credits K-Pop with giving her the strength to relinquish Christianity which she believes held a stranglehold over her.  We hear her strong praises and begin to understand that despite not being able to mimic the exquisite  ‘perfection’ in appearance and bearing K-Pop stars are able to radiate, she was able to take something from them that led her to a better sense of herself.

Kwon bounces back and forth between her own personal journey, which includes visits to therapists, long struggles with depression, and her eventual ongoing search to develop her nonfiction narrative voice with stories of her various obsessions with K-Pop stars.  We sense at times she jumps off her personal story and into K-Pop to give herself time and space before returning to her own story. She does develop a new group of writing buddies online, and achieves some sort of rapprochement with her worried parents, who are still smarting that she dropped out of law school but now seem ready to support her in whatever endeavor she chooses.  We hear nothing about a significant other, nor anything about sexual or romantic issues. Its seems she leaves  a lot left unsaid.

But we also hear the beginning of a new resilience in her thinking about who gets to say how anybody should live their life, or what that life should look like.  he starts asking new questions like “How do you measure a life?” and “What defines success?”  She speaks of how difficult it is to maintain a creative life.  She begins to delve deeply into the questions feminism raises, noting that much of Korea considers “feminist’ a deeply tainted word.

Kwon starts questioning the wisdom of Korean parents who place way too high a burden on their children’s shoulders instead of offering them a safe space as they struggle to find themselves, and starts thinking about sexuality asking “What does it mean to take agency over your own sexuality as a woman, though?  And how much agency do any of us really have when we live in a patriarchal world, constantly confronting images of what a woman ‘should’ look like and being told how a woman should be?”  We hear in these new waves of provocative thought a bold new persona emerging that might finally have the strength to throw off the shackles that have hampered her.