“Be Faithful, Steady, and True.” What K-Pop Taught Me About My Korean-American Identity

The rules of K-pop fandom are pretty simple: be loyal. Your boy band must be number one. Be faithful, steady, and true. No one had to teach me the rules for me to know them. I was born and raised in the United States and grew up with K-pop from a distance, the internet at the time a fledgling technological wonder that required a phone line and constant arguments with your parents because they needed the phone, they were waiting for a call, but you also needed the line—you needed to log onto Soompi, the primary Korean American forum at the time, to get more news about H.O.T., the K-pop boy band that established the formula for idol groups that still exists today.

H.O.T. was made up of five members: 문희준 (Moon Heejun, the leader), 강타 (Kangta, birth name 안칠현; [Ahn Chilhyun], the main vocalist), 장우혁 (Jang Woohyuk, the main dancer), 토니안 (Tony An, Korean name 안승호 [An Seungho], the One From America and my bias), and 이재원 (Lee Jaewon, the maknae). H.O.T. debuted in 1996 from SM Entertainment, and they sang and rapped catchy pop songs while performing what became known as 칼군무 (kalgunmu, knife, or razor-sharp, choreography). Their fan club name was Club H.O.T., their fan color white, their primary rival SechsKies, a six-member boy band from DSP Entertainment, which meant that SechsKies was dead to me, as were any of my friends who listened to them, because H.O.T. was my boy band, mine, and I had to be loyal to them, not only I myself but also the people I kept in my life.

I joke that fandom is built into Koreans because we do nothing in moderation—we feel deeply, drink to excess, glom onto trends, whether it’s the American Brand of the Moment (Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, The North Face) or protesting American meat en masse. Korean Koreans like to have the same eyebrows (straight and fluffy, not arched), and we like our intense skin care routines and no-makeup makeup. We yell a lot and talk about our bowel movements during meals, and we tend to throw our bodies around when we laugh, alternating between covering our mouths and clapping—why we clap or whom we’re applauding, I have yet to figure out in my thirty-some years of being alive, but I know that was written into my body, too, just like my obsessive fandom.

Many Koreans and Korean Americans like to attribute this intensity to the concept of han, which, to put it reductively, means this simultaneous melancholy and fire within us that comes from a centuries-long history of conquest and war. We like to argue that, as a people, we feel too much because of han, this way of being that is impossible to translate adequately in a pithy manner. Koreans and Korean Americans both like to call upon han to explain away rage and depression and any extreme emotion with a negative connotation, really, never mind that han has its roots in colonialism, as the Japanese came up with this idea of Korean melancholy as a way of Othering their inferior Korean subjects.

When Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910 after having occupied the country since the late 1800s, its intent was to fold Korea into itself as a way of legitimizing its move into the Korean peninsula, from which imperial Japan would conquer the rest of Asia. Japan claimed that there were ties between Korea and Japan that made the annexation valid, an act of bringing Koreans back into the empire, so to speak. However, Japanese imperialism couldn’t actually put Koreanness and Japaneseness on equal footing—to this day, ethnic Koreans who were taken to Japan and have remained there are unable to have Japanese citizenship, even though there are now multiple generations of Zainichi Koreans born and living in Japan. Attributing han, this innate melancholy, to Koreans was a way for the Japanese to delineate between the two, even claiming that this melancholy made Koreans physically distinguishable.

Not that I grew up with much awareness of this history, though—I was born in the mid-eighties in Flushing, Queens, to 1.5-generation immigrant parents, 1.5 because they both immigrated to the US at younger ages, my mother when she was ten, my father after graduating from college. My younger brother and I were both born in New York City and are considered second-generation Korean Americans, and I was fortunate to grow up in a Korean community in suburban Los Angeles, a statement that makes me pause because growing up within a Korean community is also what caused me the most harm.

My first year of high school, I started being intentionally body-shamed by my Korean community because my overweight body didn’t conform to Korean beauty standards. This would go on for over a decade, complete with name-calling, insults, and mockery, and I was told that I would never date, have friends, or even be gainfully employed until I could bring my body in line. That would lead to a total fracturing of my sense of self, and, after body-shaming took ten years from me, it would take another ten years for me to heal and find myself again—and, in turn, connect with my Koreanness.

It was my Korean family and community that broke me down, but, despite that, I am and have always been fiercely proud to be Korean. Growing up in suburban Los Angeles in a primarily Korean, and entirely Asian, community, I didn’t have the experience other diasporic Asians had of being shamed for my food or my culture. My friend group was entirely Asian, hailing from Korea, Vietnam, India, and Thailand, and we were immigrant children who understood implicitly where we came from. The church my family attended was all Korean, so, while K-pop was generally deeply uncool when I was an adolescent, I was still surrounded by people who were familiar with it, who listened to it and learned the choreography and knew all the big groups, even if no one was a bbasooni like I was. We made each other mix-tapes (recorded on cassette tapes!) and shared VHS recordings of music shows and flipped through the glossy pages of Korean magazines when they arrived in the US months after being published in Korea.

Not all my friends watched Korean dramas themselves, but their parents did, borrowing episodes from the video store during weekly trips to the Korean market. I went to a high school that was diverse, but Asian kids made up the majority in honors and AP classes. Not being aware of or feeling ashamed of my Koreanness wasn’t a struggle for me growing up—instead, my shame came from not feeling Korean enough, for not having the right body to belong among Koreans. I was bilingual and bicultural, and I spoke Korean without the telltale American accent, but one look at me and it was clear—I wasn’t Korean Korean but an Other in my own community.

K-pop, therefore, occupied a strange corner of my life, my access point into a culture with which I have a weird, fractured relationship. My parents are immigrants from Korea, and I lived with my paternal grandparents through middle school. My first language was Korean. I entered an American preschool without knowing any English.

I grew up watching mostly Korean dramas, eating the food, and speaking the language, but I didn’t have much awareness of Korean culture or traditions because we didn’t observe many of them throughout my childhood and youth. My paternal grandfather was the eldest son in his family, which had meant something when he lived in Korea, but, in the US, he no longer had the responsibilities that came with that position—and, because of an injury, he avoided large gatherings, even familial ones.

That meant that I learned that Chuseok was a major Korean holiday via Korean dramas and that Seollal was celebrated by Koreans because K-pop idols would release photos of themselves wearing hanbok and sharing New Year’s greetings during the lunar new year. I got a glimpse of annual gimjangs through TV shows and learned about Korean social hierarchies and titles by watching how hoobaes acted around and responded to their sunbaes backstage at music shows and concerts.

I also internalized the misogyny running through K-pop, the way girl groups were treated differently by their companies, the public, even their fandoms. Watching groups like 소녀시대 (Girls’ Generation) frozen in their cutesy, faux-innocent personas even as they grew into young women reinforced the purity culture I was being taught in my conservative Korean church. I learned about distorted, manipulative, at times violent love as K-pop fandom created spaces for toxic desire and possessive feelings to fester and flourish, as the romance depicted in dramas and music videos involved a lot of wrist-grabbing and angry confessions of love.

Even with its more toxic elements, fandom can be a beautiful thing, and I’m not one to write it off. I am here, still alive, largely because of it. There’s a tendency to look down on pop culture, to reduce fangirls to immature girls prone to extreme behavior, high-pitched screams, and vapidity, as if being a fangirl is something to be ashamed of. For a time, I wanted to flee from the label myself, to rebrand myself essentially as someone more “serious-minded” and “mature,” and one of the reasons I wanted to leave Los Angeles so badly in my late teens and early twenties was to leave my bbasooni self behind.

Everyone I knew in Los Angeles knew I was a fangirl and had been there to witness my crazed obsessive self through my adolescence, and I wanted badly to go somewhere new and start over. I did take a bit of a break from fandom between roughly 2015 and 2022, following the industry from a distance but refusing to go near another boy band. My favorite member, 김재중 (Jaejoong), of 동방신기 (TVXQ), had left the second-generation boy band with two other members around 2010, and I had a brief dalliance with Big Bang before I could no longer stand their toxic masculinity and constant blatant cultural appropriation. By 2015, I had been in K-pop for almost twenty years and was tired. Being a bbasooni is all-encompassing; it occupies so much of your waking thoughts and requires so much time to keep updated daily about your bias and participate in online fan communities and collect and organize photos, videos, interviews. It also costs a fair amount of money to buy CDs, magazines, and other fan collectibles. I was broke and emotionally exhausted, my heart already broken twice by H.O.T.’s abrupt breakup in 1999 and TVXQ’s dramatic split in 2010.

Then, in late 2022, after avoiding them for nine years because I knew myself, who I was as a bbasooni, I got into 방탄소년단 (BTS or Bangtan), my timing impeccable as they were on hiatus as a group before going to fulfill their mandatory military service, each of the seven members releasing their own solo projects in the countdown to enlistment. It happened exactly as I expected: I immediately fell for one member and became obsessed. It helped that 슈가 (Suga), my bias, was in his late twenties then and shedding his baby face, so it felt less icky to stan him even though he is my junior. We have eight years between us. He will likely be my last idol, as the age gap between me and the idols debuting and active today is in the double digits.

That feels a little bittersweet because my life has been shaped by the ways I was a good fan. I started with H.O.T., and, to this day, I would still consider myself loyal to H.O.T. Because of this group, I have stayed with SM over the decades, which means that, of the Big Four dominating the K-pop industry, SM is the company I know best, JYP the one I know least (JYP debuted g.o.d.— Groove Overdose—also one of H.O.T.’s rivals). YG is the company I despise for its most blatant misogyny and mishandling of its groups. HYBE, formerly known as Big Hit Entertainment, the newest company of the four, mostly amuses me, but the fact that it didn’t debut a girl group until 2022 (Le Sserafim) puts me off it.

(To be fair, Big Hit collaborated with Source Music to debut a girl group, GLAM, in 2012, but the group disbanded in 2014. Source Music was acquired by HYBE in 2019.)

I don’t think I’ll ever leave K-pop behind, though, even if I don’t have a bias like I have in the past. Over the last almost thirty years, this industry has woven itself inextricably into my life, and it has, in many ways, taught me how to exist in the world, how to think critically about culture and history and gender, and how to not take things so seriously. It has taught me to value life and to be willing to share what makes me vulnerable, even (or maybe most importantly) when it comes to my broken brain. Being a bbasooni has helped me lean into my niche obsessions even when they are deeply uncool because there will be someone out there who also shares this interest and might throw up a metaphorical bat signal that yells out, Hey, you too?! Me too!

And, most of all, K-pop has protected my connection to my Koreanness even through a decade-plus of body-shaming that destroyed who I was, and, over the last ten years, as I have finally started healing from that trauma and piecing myself back together, K-pop has helped me settle into a happy place in this liminal space that is being Korean American.

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Excerpted from I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan by Giaae Kwon. Published by Henry Holt and Company, an imprint of Macmillan. Copyright © 2025 by Giaae Kwon. All rights reserved. Featured image: Dispatch photographer Min Kyung-bin, used under CC BY 3.0