Emily Jungmin Yoon on K-Pop at Paris Review

Learn about Emily Jungmin Yoon's experience moving from Korea to Canada as an adolescent, and the ways that K-Pop popularized Korean culture on an international stage, in Yoon's piece, "The Poetic Consequences of K-Pop." Yoon starts out, writing, "[o]nce, as a preface to reading my poem 'Bell Theory,' I jokingly told the audience that I had been teased for my English when I was younger, when it wasn’t trendy to be Korean, or rather, before the boy band BTS made Korean cool." From there: 

A few people chuckled and smiled out of either discomfort or kindness, and I found myself wanting to cry as I read the poem about my clumsy English, colonized Koreans’ Japanese, and the cruel consequences of failures of tongue. I had never gotten emotional during my own reading before. I tried to control the quiver in my voice and fingers. If anyone noticed, they didn’t say anything, out of either discomfort or kindness.

I moved to Victoria, BC, Canada from Busan, Korea when I was just a few months shy of eleven years old. I knew only how to say, “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” when someone asked how I was doing. My older sister and my mother, who had quit her job to come with us, knew only that same phrase. There’s a joke that if a Korean gets hit by a car, or otherwise hurt, and an English speaker exclaims, “Oh my God, are you okay?” the Korean will automatically say, “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” So for a while, that is what we were, to everyone, always: fine.

My father stayed behind in Busan to continue producing income for our family. In a way, it felt like we had all sacrificed something, even me, who did not quite understand why we had to leave. Yet, undeniably, we were extremely privileged. The three of us had left for Canada because my parents wanted my sister and I to be educated in a system free of the intense cramming and competition that Korean students are infamously subject to. They wanted us to have more ease and less pressure to pursue our dreams, whatever those dreams ended up being.

Read more at Paris Review.