On Idols, Jay Gatsby, and Other Forms of Faith
1.
On January 29, the Olympic torch relay for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics passed through Chuncheon in Gungwon Province. The last time I had really paid attention to the Olympics was when my family took me to Beijing nearly a decade ago. This year my eye alighted on the event not for the promise of feats of athleticism or sportsmanship, but on the last torchbearer of the day, the promotional ambassador from South Korea, the actor Jang Keun-suk.
In 2009 I was 16 years old, and early in the winter and into the better part of spring, I was hooked on the South Korean drama A 16-episode television series that gained international cult status, spawned remakes in Japan and Taiwan, and briefly popularized the sale of a hybrid “pig-rabbit” stuffed animal that appears in the series, the storyline follows a young nun-in-training (played by ) who is forced to disguise her identity and pretend to be male in a popular boy-band-slash-idol-group, A.N.JELL, cohabiting with the three other members of the band (played by Jang Keun-suk, , and ) all as beautiful as—well—angels. As
