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.

An apple for breakfast, two sweet potatoes for lunch, a protein shake for dinner—for five days in the early 2010s, IU, Korea’s “little sister,” stuck to this diet and lost five kilograms, roughly eleven pounds.

Born Lee Jieun, IU debuted in 2008 at the age of fifteen. Her road was difficult—her family went through financially turbulent times when she was young, so she lived with her grandmother, away from her parents, for a period. She was rejected over twenty times from auditions. When she finally debuted, her debut single, “Lost Child,” was considered too dark and moody for Korea, and her mini-album sold poorly. She had to rework her image, coming back with more cutesy, digestible pop that slotted her into the mainstream.

IU has since gone on to be a megapopular, megatalented artist—she writes and produces her own music, acts, and appears in commercials for major brands, establishing herself as a CF queen with contracts with Chamisul (soju), Binggrae (banana milk), Sony Korea, and others. She’s beautiful and successful and still so young, not yet thirty. When I look at her, I often think, Wow, what’s it like to be her?

*

The last time I was in Korea was in the summer of 2012. I had just spent three weeks backpacking around Japan, and it was my first time back in Seoul since December 2001. This was also my first summer in Korea, in the stifling humidity that was so different from the dry heat I was accustomed to in suburban Los Angeles.

It was my first time back since the body-shaming had started.

I am not thin and never have been, though my body is fairly average by American standards. However, as a child of 1.5-generation immigrants, I was held to Korean standards. Korean beauty standards start with thinness. Because I wasn’t thin, I couldn’t be pretty, nor could I amount to much as a human being. For over fifteen years, this message was drilled into me: I had to lose weight. I was an embarrassment. No one would hire me or date me or want to be my friend because I was a Miss Piggy, and who wanted to be around someone who was so lazy and undisciplined? My weight was a direct reflection of my character.

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. I marveled over their double-lidded eyes and pale skin as an adolescent and envied them for their bodies, their thin arms and legs and tiny waists. As shame seeped into my brain and started breaking me down, I internalized this envy, fully accepting that my inability to whittle myself down to thinness was a moral failing on my part.

For over fifteen years, this message was drilled into me: I had to lose weight.

By 2012, I’d gone through twelve years of this. I wanted to visit Korea to see my favorite band, Nell, perform at a rock festival, so I tried not to think about The Body Thing. I knew how vicious Koreans could be about this because the predominantly Korean community I’d grown up in was the source of the body-shaming. Once, as friends and I were eating samgyupsahl at Honey Pig, the ajumma cooking our meat freely offered me dieting advice. I wish this had been an isolated occurrence.

But what I experienced in Korea was so much worse than I anticipated. Everywhere around me were women who looked like me but thin and put together, with perfect makeup and flawlessly styled outfits and coiffed hair. They were pretty in the way that yeonaein (entertainers) are, their faces touched up, their ssangapool (double lids) perfect, V-lines sharp, cheeks plump and filled out. Seoul—at least in her trendy neighborhoods—was filled with the type of women I’d only seen through my phone and computer screen.

In Korea, though, I wasn’t just watching them; they were also watching me. As I went up escalators, I’d catch ajummas going down and giving me the up-and-down and shaking their heads. I’d stand on the subway and feel people’s eyes on me. I’m five foot eight, taller than your average Korean woman, and I already stood out as a gyopo (Korean American) from the clothes I wore, my tanned skin, and my makeup-less face. In the suffocating humidity and heat, sweat rolled off me constantly, making me feel even more self-conscious because the thin Korean women around me didn’t seem to sweat at all. I didn’t want to eat anywhere or be visible in any way. I was meant to stay in Korea for three weeks and do some traveling outside of Seoul, but after ten days—after I had gone to the rock festival and heard Nell live—I fled the country.

*

In 2011, IU appeared as a lead in the drama Dream High. Her character, Kim Pilsook, has a great voice, musical talent, and perfect pitch, but all of that is overshadowed by her weight. She auditions for a spot at Kirin Arts High School, which regularly turns out stars. She shows up dressed in the sushi mascot costume from her parents’ restaurant, already aware that her weight will prejudice the judges against her. She gets accepted, but she can’t hide in a costume anymore, her weight immediately making her a subject of ridicule and demoting her from the arts class to the regular class.

For the first few episodes, IU acts in a fat suit. Her face, too, is hidden under a fat mask, and she looks sad. Pilsook struggles to lose weight because she likes food, but as she inevitably starts to get slimmer, we see more of IU emerge. IU is beautiful, checking off all the features desired by Koreans—big, double-lidded eyes, a straight nose, a narrow jawline—without having a generic face. She isn’t only pretty, but talented: writing and producing her own music, singing, acting, modeling. She’s your consummate K-pop star, except she’s broken out of that mold, solidified herself as a unique talent with national fame and popularity. Since adolescence, I’ve looked at Korean idols and actresses like her in wonder. Life must be so easy for girls with faces like theirs, bodies like theirs, I thought. The world must just open up for them. It must be so much easier to stay skinny when you’re already skinny.

As I got older, that morphed into a grudging admiration of their diets and workouts, even the discipline I thought their starvation diets must have required. In my darkest periods, I wished I could starve myself down, too, but I loved food too much to give it up. Food was too interesting, one of the only things that could light a tiny spark in my depressive brain. Back then, I hated myself for it—I wanted to be like IU instead, to be able to eat as little as she did, work my body to the brink of breakdown, all to be thin and pretty. I just didn’t have that kind of “discipline,” and wasn’t that what was wrong with me?

Halfway into Dream High, Pilsook commits to losing thirty kilograms in two hundred days. She seeks the advice of one of the teachers at Kirin, and Maeng-ssaem is impressed, saying, “Appearance is skill. Because, if you try, you can change it. In the world, there are no ugly women, just lazy ones.” All Pilsook has to do is be diligent, starting with how she eats. Maeng-ssaem breaks down Pilsook’s new meal plan pithily: In the morning, eat like a queen—rice, soup, banchan. For lunch, eat like a commoner—a hard-boiled egg, half an apple, a salad. For dinner, eat like a beggar—a sweet potato with milk. For exercise, she should jump rope for thirty minutes every day, and, with that advice, we’re off on a montage: Pilsook jumping rope, eating sweet potatoes, and sticking the cap from the day’s bottle of milk to a calendar that counts down two hundred days.

*

Instead of avoiding food, I started baking in high school. It was something my Sunday-school classmates and I liked to do, and I didn’t think much of my interest in food at the time, never mind that I rapidly deviated from the usual cookie-baking to tackle French macarons, opera cake, and palmiers. I spent all of high school on one kind of diet or another, going to the gym every night to log my requisite hour of cardio and weight machines, and baking was an acceptable hobby because it was fun, church-centered, and not for me: I only tasted, taking a bite or two from what I’d made, but that was all I was allowed.

When I went to college, I had to learn to structure my own life, which felt impossible for what I now know to be my ADHD-influenced brain. Away from family and the set schedule of high school, depressed and terrified of socializing, I gained weight—a lot of it. I had lost weight the summer before my senior year of high school, spending months going to my local Jenny Craig every Saturday to get weighed, chat with my counselor, and pick my food for the week. While my family ate home-cooked meals, I microwaved my daily selections, supplementing them with the acceptable salads and low-calorie dressings (also provided by Jenny Craig). I got to the thinnest I’ve ever been in my life, the thinnest I’ll ever be.

I loved food too much to give it up. Back then, I hated myself for it—I wanted to be like IU instead.

For the next ten years, I constantly battled with my weight. I restricted, counted calories, kept daily food logs. I worked out to net a daily caloric intake of twelve hundred calories. I cooked a lot of chicken breasts in the most bland way possible, ate a lot of salads, and obsessed over everything I would eat on “cheat days” (burgers, Korean fried chicken, toast). I marinated in self-loathing every time I fell off the diet bandwagon. I detoxed, starting by drinking juices and then nothing but water, feeling great as the water weight dropped out of me and my face started looking lean and my tongue got furry and my skin supersoft as the “toxins” seeped out of me. I’d walk miles from campus to my apartment because, yes, I did genuinely love walking, and wasn’t it nice that there was a workout I could do without really thinking about it, even if the heat was in the nineties?

All my efforts came to nothing, though. I never was able to keep any weight off because I always came back to food. I loved and wanted it too much to eat only an apple, two sweet potatoes, and a protein shake a day. Maybe I wasn’t an ugly woman, but I was a lazy one, and weren’t ugliness and laziness the same thing?

*

In 2013, on the SBS program One Night of TV Entertainment, IU mentioned her diet of an apple, two sweet potatoes, and a protein shake a day. She said that, at the time, she had been trying to lose weight she had gained while filming a drama, succeeding by losing five kilograms in five days.

IU of course isn’t the only K-pop star to go on a dangerous diet, and public reaction is often one of horror—these diets aren’t safe; they’re not healthy! However, if you search on YouTube, you’ll find numerous videos of young women trying “the IU diet.” It’s taken as a challenge, and, though many of the videos carry disclaimers that the diet is unhealthy, the YouTuber isn’t advocating that anyone actually try it, et cetera; the existence of the videos alone betrays how we generally think about bodies. If you can make it all the way through the challenge, you have the right kind of willpower. You’re good because thin is good, even if it is achieved through unhealthy means, and fat—or, even, average—is bad.

When you fail to manage your body in a communal culture like Korea’s, it becomes the moral task of the people around you to help bring your body to bear. I was always told the criticism of my body was made out of love, and, even now, I don’t doubt that many people’s intentions were good. Their actions were horribly misguided and destructive, but there wasn’t necessarily malice behind the shaming—not from the people who loved me, at least. It wasn’t their fault that, as a girl in a bigger body, I would be ostracized and rejected for how I looked.

My trip to Korea in 2012 verified everything I’d been told by Korean Americans for years. As I tried to hide my body, to press myself into corners on the subway, in cafés and restaurants, I kept thinking that my weight, my ugliness, really must be my fault. If only I could “control” what I ate, if only I could try harder and go without delicious things for a while, then maybe I could fix myself.

For better or for worse, I was never able to. As someone who lives with major depression and suicidal thinking, food is often the only thing that’s able to crack some light into the darkness. In 2016, during the longest suicidal episode of my life, I made Asian sponge cakes ad nauseam. In 2017, I started making pasta by hand; in 2018, I had a new puppy to feed and love and train; and, in 2019, there was Momofuku Kāwi, with chef Eunjo Park’s inventive takes on Korean food. Throughout 2020, when Covid-19 kept us in our homes, I took on various cooking projects to keep me from spiraling, recreating Momofuku’s take on bing and rolling lots of kimbap, even milling my own rice flour to try making garaeddeok. Maybe it’s a cruel irony that loving food is what has made my body unacceptable to so many, yet loving food is also the thing that has kept me alive.

*

The narrative that we simply recover from any of this is a false one; there is no clean break and moving on. Even today, years into my “healing journey,” every time I walk into a grocery store or a restaurant, every time I make daily choices about what I put into my mouth, I confront the same demons. When I look at myself in the mirror, I’m filled with that familiar self-hatred. I make conscious decisions not to look at nutrition labels or think about calories, and I grapple with the softness clinging to my face and body, my fluctuating weight, the jiggles in my upper arms.

In 2014, IU appeared on Healing Camp. She opened up about struggling with an eating disorder during a period in her life when she became consumed by anxiety and fear, by the uncertainty that all her present popularity and success would be taken from her. To cope, she would binge-eat, then throw everything up. Realizing that she was in a bad place, IU got treatment, though her disorder didn’t go away entirely. She’s still thin, but she was always naturally thin; now, she looks healthier and happier with herself. She says she’s doing better now.

In Dream High, Pilsook undergoes a dramatic transformation, emerging from her two hundred days thin and beautiful. The drama doesn’t just leave things there, though—Pilsook’s weight issues come back over and over again. When she’s hospitalized for Hepatitis B, she eats some samgyupsahl her mother sneaks into the hospital, gains weight, and bundles up in a coat to jump rope outside in the winter. As she gets ready to debut, her past comes to haunt her, as TV producers unearth photos of her during her “fat days,” congratulating her on her discipline in slimming down. They expect her to be ashamed of who she was, but Pilsook has a different perspective—she doesn’t want to hide her past self. When her love interest suggests that she delete her past photos from her home page, Pilsook says, “I should, right? But that’s kind of disappointing. To be embarrassed of and erase pictures from those days. Even when I was eighty-two kilograms, I was pretty happy. I got into Kirin Arts High, stood on a stage for the first time, met a lot of good friends—and met you too.”

I wish I had that kind of perspective, but the years I was body-shamed were the loneliest years of my life. I tried to hide myself away, and it’s only in the last seven years that I’ve started to emerge from that, piecing myself together and trying not to hate myself. It’s been food that’s made this possible, as I’ve finally learned to lean into my love for food. My relationship with it is still complicated and disordered, and I still don’t look in the mirror and like what I see. I still look at K-pop stars like IU and wonder what it’s like to be thin and beautiful, even knowing the struggles she herself has with her body and self-image. Maybe this isn’t the narrative or the ending some want to hear, but it’s the only truth I have to offer. Shame and dysmorphia don’t just go away.

That doesn’t mean we don’t try, though. Change can happen slowly.

Loving food is the thing that has kept me alive.

In January 2021, IU released the lead single to her forthcoming fifth album. An upbeat synth track titled “Celebrity,” the song features lyrics that encourage someone who is seen as an outsider with quirks that people don’t understand or accept: 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.

In her introductory note to her album, IU writes that she started writing the song for a friend. This friend had their own quirks, style, and personality that made IU love them even more, but those same differences meant this friend moved through life attracting the judgments of others.

“Celebrity” doesn’t directly address bodies, but the connection is there—or maybe I just hope it is, because we all exist in bodies, and our bodies are not inherently good or bad. While I personally find it difficult to accept this kind of positive messaging from IU, a young K-pop star who’s beautiful, thin, and talented, I do find hope in it. I know that she, too, understands what it’s like to tie her self-worth to her body, to be judged first and foremost for how she looks.

My weight has mostly plateaued. I try not to think too much about it, which means I still think about my weight, my body, too much. I still struggle, daily, to be okay with myself. But I know I’m not in the same place I was when I fled Korea in 2012—because when IU sings, Can you see? How wonderful your uniqueness is, instead of losing myself completely to sadness and self-hatred, comparing myself to her, I look at myself in the mirror and think, Maybe I can.