personal essays on fandom and growing up

Giaae Kwon grew up Korean in a small, Christian community in Los Angeles. She spent time with her family, school, and church. It was a close-knit community based on traditional Korean values. She was supposed to study hard, get into a good college, and become a successful adult. She wanted that for herself, to make her parents proud, to make herself proud.

And then she found K-pop.

It wasn’t her love for K-pop that got in the way of her shiny future. That was more about undiagnosed ADHD and bullying and body shaming. But she fell in love with K-pop, and even though she didn’t make it through law school, she made it through with her adolescence because of her love of her K-pop idols and turned her fandom into a writing career where she writes about her experiences growing up through the lens of being a superfan of Korean pop bands.

As Kwon explores the bubbly catchiness of K-pop music, she talks about her struggles with depression. As she spells out just how controlled the lives of the K-pop stars are, she talks about the experience of growing up in a small community that had high expectations for its young ones. As she talks about how K-pop stars are expected to look, she talks about her own struggles with dieting and weight. These essays run deep into the details of the K-pop industry and its stars, but Kwon also digs deep into her own sorrows and challenges.

I think it would be good for me to be transparent for a minute. I am not Korean and I was not a big fan of K-pop as I grew up. I am a proud Midwestern American, and I certainly did have my own fandoms with the pop music I grew up with. I chose to read this book to learn more about an industry and a culture that I’m not very familiar with. And I found far more similarities than I expected. I too grew up in a close-knit Christian community with lots of rules about how you should look and act. I too found hope and joy in pop music and the artists who created it. I too struggled with the double standards and hypocrisy of the church. So there were things I could identify with.

And there was a lot that I learned. Kwon knows a lot about the structure of the Korean music industry and talks extensively about how it controls the young musicians who try to traverse it. But she also talks a lot about Korean culture and its history. They are not that far removed from a divisive war that literally divided the country in two and then ravaged it. They have close ties to Japan. Parental expectations are high, but they are willing to sacrifice a lot for their children. I knew some of that, but hearing about Kwon’s firsthand experience brought it to life in a way that deepened my understanding tenfold, and I am grateful for that experience.

I will say this about I’ll Love You Forever: it is not an easy book to read. Some of Kwon’s stories are soul-baring and painful to read about. I think we all had some pain growing up, but Kwon is very honest about her experiences and some of her pain ran very deep. She is doing much better now, but some of these stories of shame, body dysmorphia, bullying, and depression could potentially be triggering. A small annoyance is that since these are essays that she wrote and then collected into a book, some of the information about the K-pop industry is repetitive. But as far as that goes, for me, her skill in writing far outweighs that, and I am far more grateful than annoyed at Kwon’s assembling her thoughts into this book.

A copy of I’ll Love You Forever was provided by Henry Holt & Company, with many thanks, but the opinions are my own.