MY KOREAN FANTASY: PART ONE

The logo of AOA

I am not naturally inclined to record a song’s lyrics and endeavor to memorize them but I fondly remember the day when I downloaded PSY’s Gangnum Style from YouTube with my frail internet connection and phonetically rewrote the Korean lyrics into my broken Roman. It was a curious sight to my friends and family when I could recite a foreign but famous song from sheer memory. Gangnum Style had captured people’s imagination like no other song ever did. It became the most-watched video on YouTube, a record it held for a few years. It was just a well-celebrated music video for many as a lot of folks haven’t heard of K-Pop back in 2012. It was also the first Korean song I fell in love with.

Then I found myself enamored with multiple Japanese works of fiction. My adoration for Dragon Ball and affection for the general anime genre was shared by many weebs of Pakistan. I’m not embarrassed to confess that, when I was a teenager, I used to spend my money to buy Dragon Ball Trading Cards. I still possess a few cards that I have struggled to keep in a completely pure and almost shiny condition. They have the characters from a false Dragon Ball franchise in which the main protagonists turn into their fan-made transformation and even get green hair! When I abandoned my teenage years, I became mature enough to realize that Dragon Ball wasn’t the best work of fiction to find in the manga industry. I know consider Death Note and Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) to be the best Japanese comics ever written.

I have recently heard that Koreans will go extinct by the next 700 years. I wouldn’t have cared about this piece of information at the beginning of 2020. But, as I type these words by this year’s final month while coronavirus pandemic’s second wave is wreaking havoc upon mankind, a possible Korean extinction is a serious problem for me. I believe it happened many years ago when I found a music video on YouTube named Miniskirt. It was about some Korean girls dancing in, as suggested by the song’s frank and explicit name, in short, black skirts. My curiosity came over my faithfulness (it was Ramadan) and I dared to watch a group of seven foreign dancers seductively shaking their bodies and singing in a language that was completely alien to me. Well, I’m partially guilty for not utilizing the conveniently-placed subtitle option to cure my linguistic handicap. The Miniskirt was one of the few Korean songs I liked and it was the first AOA song I watched.

Years passed and then COVID-19 compelled us to spend some “quarantine” time at our homes. People stopped going to their offices and universities. It’s been 6 years since my family moved from Lahore. Now, our rented house was on sale and the kind owner had given us ample time to move. Another generous gentleman offered us to rent the house right in front of the previous one. So, we just moved our possessions a few meters and started living in the house where our local mosque’s pesh-imam resided just a year ago. During these days, I treated my boredom with extensive internet usage and found myself re-watching some old songs I cherished. But a specific incident that wasn’t personal forced me to become an AOA fan.

I was watching Miniskirt (listening should be the appropriate verb here) when YouTube recommended me to try some videos about a recent K-Pop controversy that didn’t interest me in any way. It was regarding a former member of AOA who had accused a current member of bullying. I promised myself that I wouldn’t involve my mind with this pesky propaganda and petty entertainment-industry issues that didn’t concern me – a self-styled scholar – and shouldn’t bother me. What do I have to do with the personal adventures or mishaps of an actor, singer, or celebrity? I have been previously infatuated with multiple women such as Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Rachel Bloom. I used to listen to Katy Perry songs in the first year of Applied Physics. I hated Taylor Swift at first because I thought she was Katy Perry’s enemy but then I grew fond of her voice and these two American women’s mutual acrimony didn’t matter to me anymore. Rachel Bloom struck me on the same day I watched Miniskirt for the first time. Her sarcasm and comedic style agreed with my newfound lust for dark and crazy humor. Her journey from Rachel Does Stuff (her YouTube channel) to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (her under-performing but critically-acclaimed TV show) kept me in her fan club. But I never cared about any work of fiction or group of performers as much as I did for Dragon Ball and AOA.

So, after ignoring the news about this recent bullying scandal for a few days, I finally found the courage to view it and read about what had happened with AOA. It was the time when these two things were true.

• I didn’t even know what the group’s name AOA stands for. I first thought it was an abbreviation for al-Salam-o-Alaikum but that was ridiculous!
• I had only watched only one AOA music video besides Miniskirt. It was Like a Cat and it was that song that made me realize I had to recognize these girls by their faces.

Let me narrate a summary of the events that had transpired. AOA was a Korean girl group that debuted in August 2012 with their song Elvis. Before that, these singers and dancers had been trained for two years. The group’s complete name was Ace of Angels and they belonged to the Korean entertainment company FNC International. AOA originally consisted of 8 members with 7 of them being complete members and the remaining one only appearing for band performances. The group’s leader was Shin Jimin, the first member to be recruited in AOA. Park Choa and Seo Yuna were the lead singers. Kim Seolhyun was the “face of the group” as she gradually became popular for her advertisements. Kim Chanmi was the youngest member as she was born in 1996. Shin Hyejeong and Kwon Mina are the final members of this group of 7 “full angels”. Choa left AOA in 2017 and, two years later, Mina followed in her footsteps. In July 2020, however, Mina exposed Jimin and claimed that the group leader had bullied her for a decade, making her life miserable. It was speculated that bullying was the reason why Mina left AOA. Jimin soon became the pariah of the K-Pop industry, her music videos getting hate messages, her contract from FNC getting terminated, and her popularity exponentially dilapidated. She soon became the most hated celebrity in South Korea. But Mina’s life was no paradise either. She suffered from a sharp decline in her mental health because Jimin’s fans were spreading hatred against her for destroying “an innocent woman’s career”. In August, Mina attempted to take her own life but was prevented when her acting agency quickly intervened and had her hospitalized. A few days later, she deactivated her Instagram account and, in September, she terminated her contract with the acting agency as well.

When I first heard Mina’s story, it resounded with my experience with bullying in school and college. Though it didn’t drive me to suicide and had no contribution in making my life hell, I know what it feels when your bullies are your friends or colleagues. It was the time when I had no idea who Mina or Jimin was. Watching Like a Cat music video again and again I only knew that one of these 7 dancers was a complete monster.