Dear Shinhwa, I Found My Joy in K-Pop Fandom

Joy is not something I’ve carried naturally.

Joy is not something I’ve carried naturally.

Ten years ago, I moved across the country from Los Angeles to Brooklyn to start law school. I didn’t go to law school with great convictions for legal work; law school felt like the logical choice because I was a good writer and I wasn’t going to become a doctor or get my MBA. I was excited because it meant I could finally move to New York City, the city where I had been born, that I visited regularly because my extended family lived nearby. New York was in my blood, I thought to explain away the hold the city had on me, and I looked forward to living there, hoping that I would find home.

I didn’t have any expectations for law school, though, more dread than anything else. I anticipated law school would end in one of two ways. I would find it tolerable, or I would absolutely hate it.

It quickly became clear which it was. It didn’t take long until, instead of doing my reading and taking notes in class, I was writing stories and translating interviews with my favorite band. I couldn’t even feel embarrassed when I would be cold-called in a class of two hundred and not be able to give a basic answer. Professors would look at me with impatience, the silence in the classroom deafening as it was clear I hadn’t even bothered to Google the facts of the case being discussed, but I couldn’t be bothered to care, returning my attention to the story I was working on as the class moved on without me mentally or emotionally present.

As the academic year progressed and 2012 flowed into 2013, my depression worsened. The thought of two-and-a-half more years of this, followed by years of professional legal work, filled me with dread and ramped up my anxiety. I grew more and more suicidal as my second semester progressed, so much that I started to frighten myself with how I was thinking of dying every single day, trying to figure out the most effective plan to take my life. I’ve been living with depression and suicidal thinking since middle school, but I had only come to this point once before, and all the alarm bells were going off in my head.

As I barely held on during those first six months of 2013, up until June, when I formally withdrew from law school in an effort to save my life, I had one source of joy—Shinhwa.

*

Shinhwa debuted in 1998 from SM Entertainment, the same company that, two years before, launched H.O.T., the first idol boy band in K-pop history. Shinhwa was SME’s second boy band, a six-member group modeled on H.O.T. They sang and performed similar pop music with hip hop and R&B inflections, which would remain consistent throughout their twenty-plus-year career.

I had one source of joy—Shinhwa. 

Twenty-four years into their career, Shinhwa is the longest running boy band in K-pop history. In 2003, they left SME after their contracts expired, and they’re still together today, though the individual members are signed to different companies now. As a group, they operate under their own company, ShinCom, after finally winning the rights to their group name after years of fighting in court with SME.

After H.O.T. abruptly disbanded in 2001, Shinhwa became my favorite boyband. I loved Junjin and Minwoo, both dancers of the group, but, having witnessed the way SME treated H.O.T., paying them unfairly and playing favorites with certain members, which ultimately forced their abrupt disbandment, I didn’t have it in me to devote myself to another group like I had H.O.T.. To add to that, even if Shinhwa was from the same label, it felt traitorous, like I would be breaking a rule of fandom if I were to pledge loyalty to another idol group. Instead, I spent the next ten to fifteen years flitting from group to group, from Shinhwa to Fly to the Sky to TVXQ, with intense but brief obsessions that would burn out and fade away.

Shinhwa, though, has remained on the periphery of my attention all these years. I haven’t followed them as consistently or obsessively as I have other idols, but I come back to them constantly. Shinhwa is part of that first generation of K-pop, the immediate follow-up to H.O.T., my first ever boyband, so they’re a nostalgic link to those beginning years in the mid-/late-1990s when both I and K-pop were young, rough around the edges, and figuring ourselves out. Shinhwa continues to be.

In 2012, after a four-year hiatus as a group so all the members could fulfill their mandatory military service, Shinhwa reunited to release a new album, The Return. As part of group promotions, they launched their own variety show on the cable network JTBC called “Shinhwa Bangsong” (“Shinhwa Broadcast”). Historically, I’ve never been particularly interested in variety shows, each of which has its own set of hosts and features different celebrity guests, but “Shinhwa Broadcast” was the first variety show to center on one K-pop group. Of course, it would be Shinhwa, I thought, a group already well-known for their camaraderie and charisma. If any idol group could successfully carry the weight of playing the parts of both MC and guest, it would be these six men who had come up in K-pop and didn’t take themselves too seriously.

I looked forward to their new show, mostly out of nostalgia, hoping to “catch up” with an idol group I hadn’t seen for a few years. I had missed their presence in my life, and I was excited to be able to watch them every week on a show that would display their personalities away from the cool personas they embodied in their music and on stage. I didn’t know then how much of an impact their weekly variety show would have on me.

*

With a few exceptions, “Shinhwa Broadcast” typically followed the game format—the six members compete against each other in different themed sets that are intended to make the audience laugh, even if it’s at the expense of Shinhwa. For example, the entire show starts off with the members competing for the “best” superhero costume, aka the ones (i.e. James Bond) that look the most normal versus, say, the costume for the Invisible Man, a clear plastic jumpsuit. All the members throw themselves wholeheartedly into the game, and I’m immediately in love with this show. It’s been a few years since I’ve listened to Shinhwa, since I’ve watched anything featuring the members, but it’s so easy to settle back into the Shinhwa fandom because Shinhwa is still Shinhwa, older, yes, commanding deeper, industry-wide respect, but they’re still the same charismatic idols I loved as a high schooler. I find comfort here, laughing as they bicker over the costumes, and “Shinhwa Broadcast” helps me tap back into joy from sheer, honest delight.

At first, it’s simply because the six members are just fun to watch. As I keep watching “Shinhwa Broadcast,” though, I realize that there’s more than nostalgia that so deeply charms me. Many Korean variety shows are heavy on physical humor that tries to poke at the perfect veneers of celebrity-dom. Idols are well-trained to play along, to allow themselves to be poked at (within limits), to do it all with good humor. What makes “Shinhwa Broadcast” stand out to me, though, is how Shinhwa throws themselves into their gags and skits with gusto, unconcerned with notions of masculinity as they make public fools of themselves.

Minwoo, for example, one of the coolest members, runs around a crowded shopping center in a Wonder Woman costume, complete with tiara and boots. He’s embarrassed, yes, but he doesn’t wear that too self-consciously, laughing along and enjoying himself, which is helped by the ease the six members have with each other. They laugh boisterously, make fun of each other, and fill any space around them with noise and chaos. They’re so perfectly suited for the variety show format, their personalities unfiltered, and their camaraderie is the emotional heart that infuses the show with warmth, nostalgia, and joy.

After all, as one of the first generation of idol groups in K-pop, Shinhwa has nothing to prove, and it’s this freedom, this joyful ease, they embody that helps puncture pinpricks of light in the darkness I find myself in that year.

*

Like many other writers, I’ve been writing for most of my life, and I’ve been trying to write for publication for fifteen years. I worked on a novel-in-stories for eleven years, when I finally stopped keeping track because, in year eleven, with several rejections under my belt, I came the closest to burning my book figuratively, almost deleting all my drafts off my computer and hard drives. I couldn’t because it felt so wasteful—what a waste of my twenties, of so many years of work, of questionable life decisions made all in pursuit of being a published writer.

I didn’t publish my first essay until 2019, and I didn’t start gaining significant traction as a Writer until last year with the start of this column. 2021 was a good year for me, as I wrote this column, drafted a book proposal, signed with an agent, and I should have been buzzing with excitement. Instead, I found myself feeling flat, wondering what was wrong with me, until I finally realized somewhere in the autumn—I was snuffing out joy. I would have flares of excitement burst out of me with a new acceptance or a newly published essay, and then I would quickly suppress them because joy felt dangerous. Joy made me hope for more, lulled me into thinking I could achieve my literary ambitions.

I didn’t really make the connection until I was sitting at my desk at the end of 2021, thinking about lessons I had learned. In those long years before, as discouragement and solitude wore down on me, I had started to block myself off from hope. It was easier to swallow the constant rejection and loneliness if I didn’t let myself hope for more, for better, but the unexpected side effect of that self-preservation was that I had also started to block myself off from joy. I wouldn’t let myself sit in my small victories because I was afraid that any progress I made towards my literary ambitions would simply end in disappointment again, because I had convinced myself that it was safer to anticipate rejection instead of hoping for something great. When you don’t allow yourself to hope, you lose joy.

*

As I rewatch some of these episodes of “Shinhwa Broadcast” for this essay, I remember that year of law school. I knew I didn’t belong there; I lacked the drive and ambition of my classmates; and my brain isn’t one that easily comprehends legal logic. Legal writing felt like torture, trying to re-learn how to write in a painfully roundabout manner that irritated me.

When you don’t allow yourself to hope, you lose joy.

In the evenings, I would sometimes walk down to the YMCA to do thirty minutes on the elliptical. On my way back, I’d stop at Red Mango, and I’d go sit in the dark in my room, eating my frozen yogurt, and watch “Shinhwa Broadcast.” I was so deeply unhappy then, but, in that hour or so that I would allow myself to sink into the world of Shinhwa, I could feel free. I could laugh, sometimes so hard I would be clutching my stomach and crying, and I could hope to feel this light and buoyant all the time, not only when I was watching this show.

Shinhwa was a rare spot of joy in my miserable existence. It’s been ten years since that year in law school, but, when I think about fandom, I think about those nights. I can replay moments in the variety show that have stuck with me—Minwoo in his Wonder Woman costume being flung into a pool after getting an answer wrong, Eric and his angry aegyo as he yelled clues at his road manager, Junjin deciding to screw it and lean into rudeness during a skit where he was supposed to impress a panel of women judges. I feel warmth spread through me as laughter automatically bubbles in my chest, and I think, this is fandom. This is joy. This is why it has value.

All of this ties into—I come from a corner of the Korean immigrant world that doesn’t often see the value in pop culture or, even, in literature. The phrase commonly used to describe novels is, “쓸데없다,” which literally translates into, “It has no use.” I’ve struggled against this mentality for so long, and the last few years, namely under the Trump administration then into this pandemic, I’ve lost myself so often in despair—as a writer, what is there that I can do? What does it matter for me to sit at my desk and labor over my essays and stories? What difference does that make to a world that feels like it is lost to evil and cruelty?

But, then, I would keep coming back to fandom. It wasn’t just Shinhwa on their variety show during my year in law school—it was H.O.T. when I was a lonely middle schooler, BoA and Fly to the Sky when I was an awkward high schooler, TVXQ when I was in the worst of the body shaming that broke and isolated me, Taeyeon and IU and Dear Cloud and Nell when I was cycling through depressive suicidal episodes I didn’t think I’d survive. Maybe we can’t quantify the effects of fandom, of pop culture, on a life, but I can tell you that fandom saved mine, that it gave me joy and light when everything felt so suffocatingly dark.

Which is why I keep coming back to joy. The more time I spent in fandom while writing this column, the clearer it became to me: I believe fandom should be about joy. To be a fan should be something that brings light to your life, and it shouldn’t be a burden. This, too, should extend to writing, and, while I hope that 2022 keeps building on the writing work I started in 2021, I want to remind myself that, even if it doesn’t, it is okay, no, it is good, to feel joy. Lean into the spaces that bring you joy. Even if disappointment follows, it’s okay. Disappointment is a part of life, and sometimes it makes the light even brighter.