NEXT STOP K-POP
OUR Great Korean Adventure began the way many great adventures do: with a misunderstanding. I was driving my 14-year-old daughter to school, as I do most mornings, steering our Subaru while sipping coffee from a tumbler, with her beside me, head down, transfixed by the flickering lights of her smartphone. On this day, for some reason, I decided enough was enough. My parental foot was coming down—hard.
“Sonya,” I barked. “We’ve got six minutes together. Stop texting your friends and talk to me.”
“I’m not texting my friends, Dad,” she said.
“Well, what are you doing on your phone?”
“I’m learning Korean.”
I nearly sideswiped a mailbox. “You’re doing what?”
At a stoplight, she handed me her phone. Sure enough, it was opened to an app with unfamiliar-to-me characters: the Hangul alphabet. My daughter was teaching herself Korean. Why?
“K-pop,” she said, as if it were obvious and I were clueless.
Her reply surprised me, confused me—and set in motion a 7,000-mile journey from our home in Silver Spring, Maryland, that, in ways large and small, altered the trajectory of our relationship.
K-pop, of course, is Korean pop music. But that’s like saying the Beatles were just a band, or David Beckham just a soccer player. Technically accurate, but woefully inadequate. K-pop is a cultural phenomenon and a multi-billion-dollar industry. K-pop is performance art, as much visual as musical. It is a manufactured cultural product that is also fan driven. It can celebrate virtues such as hard work and moral probity yet has been rocked by scandals.
Pinpointing K-pop’s origins is tricky. Many say it was born in the early 1990s. Some say it was in 2006 with a solo performer named Rain, one of the first to break out internationally. The dispute comes as no surprise; everything about K-pop is conflicted, which seems fitting for a peninsula politically carved in two and officially still at war
K-pop is,
