Dear IU, Our Bodies Are Fine
I knew my body wasn’t ‘right’; it didn’t look like the bodies of the K-pop idols and Korean actresses I grew up admiring.
This is From a K-pop Fan, With Love, a column by Giaae Kwon about her K-pop obsessions, past and present.
Wow, what’s it like to be her?
Dream High
Life must be so easy for girls with faces like theirs, bodies like theirsThe world must just open up for them. It must be so much easier to stay skinny when you’re already skinny.
Dream High
One Night of TV Entertainment
Healing Camp
Dream High
Don’t forget, in that darkness, you’re a star drawn with a left hand. Can you see? How wonderful your uniqueness is. You’re my celebrity.
Can you see? How wonderful your uniqueness isMaybe I can.
Giaae Kwon is always hungry. Her writing has also appeared in The Rumpus, Buzzfeed Reader, and elsewhere, and she writes the Substack I Love You, Egg. She lives in Brooklyn.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Giaae Kwon
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Giaae Kwon
More by this author
Dear Shinhwa, I Found My Joy in K-Pop Fandom
Joy is not something I’ve carried naturally.
Dear Tiffany, What Does It Mean to be ‘Korean Enough’?
In pretty much every K-pop group, there is the designated One From America.
Dear Irene, I’m Still Learning How to Be a Feminist Too
To be a K-pop fan is to bear witness to a whole lot of dumb shit.
More in this series
Learning How to Be Gentle in the Face of Trauma—Others’ and My Own
Bees do not attack—just as trauma survivors do not attack, but rather defend. She will not sting you unless she believes the colony’s life depends on her defense. Because when she stings you, she dies.
We Lined Up for Bread and He Massacred Us
Here in Idlib, Syria, we have gone back to the most primitive ways of living: We cook on coal. We wash our clothes by hand. But we are surviving. Some days it feels like a miracle.