Read an excerpt from Giaae Kwon’s K-pop memoir I’ll Love You Forever

Writer Giaae Kwon has had one constant throughout her life: her love of K-pop. Like most second-generation kids, she grew up struggling to fit in and feeling at odds with her Korean-American identity — even as her favorite idols, BoA, H.O.T., and more, were always there for her. In her new book I’ll Love You Forever, out March 18, she explores how her love affair with the genre shaped her sense of self while charting its whirlwind global expansion in recent years. In this exclusive excerpt published on The FADER today, Kwon returns to Seoul, South Korea, for the first time in over a decade and contemplates how her love of Shinwha, BTS, and more prepared her for this moment.

Seoul

It’s April 3, 2023, around 10 a.m. I’m sitting on a set of steps leading down to the water at 청계천 (Cheonggyecheon), a stream and walkway running through central Seoul. It’s a cool, gray morning, my first in Seoul in eleven years, and, as I sit by the stream and sip my iced latte, I feel surprisingly calm and at peace. The lead-up to this trip has been a tangled mess of anxiety and fear, and I didn’t expect the sense of calm that settled over me and stopped the uneasy roiling in my stomach as the plane’s wheels touched down on the tarmac at Incheon International Airport yesterday. Here I am again, in the country I fled 11 years ago in fear and shame.

Startled to realize that this feels like home, I think I would like to live in Seoul. I could see a version of myself here, writing in coffee shops and traveling around to learn more about Korean food, soju, and history, which feels odd — I didn’t expect to feel so comfortable, so at ease, especially not after my disastrous trip in 2012. I grew up with my culture, toggling between two languages and consuming Korean media, but I was also severed from Korean-ness for over a decade because of body-shaming.

I’ve wanted to come back to Seoul for a while, but I didn’t expect to feel like just another person in the crowd, walking around in my cropped sweater and wide-legged jeans. When I was in middle school, I wanted a pair of white wide-legged jeans so badly because the members of Shinhwa wore them in their music video for “T.O.P. (Twinkling of Paradise)” (T.O.P., 1999), and baggy jeans were all the rage then. I was never allowed, though, because the style wasn’t considered flattering on my chubby body, so it’s a bit funny to me that, as I was shopping for this trip to Korea, I bought four pairs of wide-legged jeans, which are trendy again, finally hitting the US after months of Korean celebrities running around in them.

Shinhwa is the longest-running boy band in K-pop. They debuted in 1997 from SM Entertainment, a six-member group led by Eric Mun, and they followed H.O.T. and S.E.S. In 2004, all six members opted not to renew their contracts with SM, leaving the company for Good Entertainment. Because SM owned their group name and music, they had to go to court to win the rights to use the name Shinhwa and perform their old music, and I remember it not being smooth, per se, but also not being as contentious as one would have expected from SM. Eventually, Shinhwa opened their own company, Shinhwa Company, from which to manage their group activities, while the individual members signed with other companies to manage their solo careers. This has become a more common thing nowadays. Girls’ Generation operates similarly, with Sooyoung, Tiffany, and Seohyeon having left SM in 2014 but SM continuing to manage their occasional group activities. In 2021, Mamamoo also went this way, as Wheein signed a solo contract with another company, and, in December 2023, after months of speculation, YG announced that all four members of girl group BLACKPINK had decided not to renew their solo contracts with the company. YG would continue to manage them as a group, but the girls would individually go their own ways.

As I walk around 경복궁 (Gyeongbokgoong), gaping at the architecture of this old palace, I feel a sense of possessiveness swell in me. This is mine. As I travel more around Korea, the feeling increases: this is mine. This culture, this heritage, this history—mine. This food and language—mine. I might be a Korean American who was born and raised in the United States, but I come from this people who refused to be broken by Japanese occupiers, who survived the cruel division of their country, who stood up against military dictatorships and struggled through economic failure and rose up to become the twelfth-largest economy in the world. This fierceness runs through my blood, and these people are mine.

K-pop, too, is mine. I’ve loved this industry basically since its beginning, long before it was cool even among the Korean diaspora. I have followed it for almost three decades and can mark significant moments of my life with K-pop.

Korea is mine, and, despite having been fiercely proud to be Korean my whole life, this feeling of possessiveness is new to me, and it feels good.

Jeonju

Suga releases “사람 Pt. 2” (People, Pt. 2) (featuring IU), the prerelease track to his solo album, D-DAY, under his moniker Agust D, when I’m driving down to Jeonju. This is my first time driving in Korea, and it’s my first time driving a Kia, and I’m slightly nervous (which has nothing to do with the Kia) — the two times I have previously been certain I was going to die have been in Korean cabs.

I didn’t grow up traveling to Korea; both sets of grandparents and all my aunts and uncles, excluding two aunts, had already immigrated to the US by the time I was born. The first time I visited Korea was for two weeks over Christmas break when I was in the eighth grade, then I came back for a week in December 2001 when my paternal grandfather abruptly passed away. It was 11 years between that trip and the disastrous one in July 2012, when I cut my 21-day trip short after 10 days because I couldn’t take the open judgments of my body anymore.

So much has changed in the 11 years since I’ve been here. I moved across the country from Los Angeles to Brooklyn to go to law school. I did one year and then withdrew. I struggled to freelance for a few years while working on a novel-in-stories, but then I had to move back to L.A. with my tail between my legs because I was suicidal and depressed and couldn’t financially support myself, having been unable to find a full-time job. In L.A., I worked in an accounting office as a bookkeeper for almost two years before getting a job as a copywriter for a company in New York and moving back to Brooklyn. After working long hours and performing multiple roles there for almost a year, I left to freelance, and then the pandemic hit. In the years since, I’ve flown back and forth between Brooklyn and Los Angeles and started a job with a legal team at a software company, and I wrote a column about K-pop that grew into this book.

Eleven years ago, when I started down this period of my life marked by healing and growth, I had Shinhwa. Before Bangtan had 달려라 방탄! (Run BTS!), Shinhwa had 신화방송 (Shinhwa Broadcast), a variety show that aired on cable channel JTBC from 2012 to 2013. At the time, it was the first variety show hosted by a boy band, and Shinhwa was already a veteran of the industry, a group of six men now in their 30s who had mostly long shed the self-consciousness of idoldom and were willing and able to run with jokes, even at their own expense.

Today, as I drive around Korea for the first time, blasting K-pop on my car speakers and stopping at rest stops to eat 닭꼬치 and tiny whole potatoes and 꽈배기, I have Bangtan.

Seoul

When I go back to Seoul, I do my one K-pop pilgrimage of the trip: I go to SM Entertainment’s headquarters in Seongsudong by Seoul Forest.

I just stand there and look at the building. There are giant LED screens in the lobby flashing photos of various SM artists, and I see a few other scattered fans taking photos and softly squeeing when their bias’s photo shows up. I think there’s a spot around the corner meant for photo taking, but I take a cursory look before walking up to a restaurant nearby that I’ve bookmarked for lunch.

This is the company that, for better or for worse, has shaped me. H.O.T. introduced me to a world outside of my conservative Christian one. S.E.S. showed me from the very beginning that this world wasn’t just for men. Shinhwa taught me not to take things too seriously. BoA came alongside me, figuratively, as we grew up together, struggled with loneliness together. Fly to the Sky taught me how to fall in love with a voice, and TVXQ helped me put words and action to things inside me. Girls’ Generation taught me how to work through my internalized misogyny. After a while, I stopped following SM so obsessively, and many of the groups from the third generation, like EXO, NCT, to their newest fourth- generation boy band, RIIZE, are largely unknown to me, but it is still SM artists, from Taeyeon to Red Velvet to aespa, I continue to watch and root for. SM is, after all, the only one of K-pop’s Big Four to hold four generations of female idols and have a range of gender expression, from f(x)’s Amber to SHINee’s Taemin, and I still wish constantly that SM would do better by its women, but this is K-pop — we take what we can get, and we hope for better as the industry changes at snail’s pace.

Shinhwa is no longer with SM but is currently the longest-running boy band in K-pop history, and the group is technically still active, though it’s unclear if or when they’ll do anything new as a group of six members. In late 2022, lead vocalist Hyesung was arrested for driving under the influence, and he was convicted and fined in early 2023. If there are three things the Korean public truly can’t forgive, they are (1) driving under the influence; (2) doing drugs, even weed, even abroad; and (3) avoiding mandatory military enlistment.

Which is why Bangtan is off to fulfill their service. In the year leading up to Bangtan going off one by one, I’m thrown by how unnerved people seem, from the fandom to HYBE to the members themselves — though, to correct myself immediately, I suppose I’m most surprised by the energy Bang Sihyuk, the chair of HYBE, spends assuring the public that Bangtan will be together again in 2025, that Bangtan isn’t broken up, that this hiatus is temporary as the members serve. A friend reminds me, though, that I have grown up with K-pop; I know how this works. I have seen all my favorite idols and actors disappear for two years to fulfill their service, and I laugh every time an actor has his post-discharge comeback drama, including the obligatory shower scene (while wrapped in a towel) to show off his post-military physique.

And, so, I know: as Shinhwa came back together after gundae, so, too, will Bangtan. And, of all the boy bands since Shinhwa, I tend to think that Bangtan have the best chance to be the next longest-running boy band in K-pop.