{"id":440708,"date":"2026-05-22T22:55:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T22:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/440708\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T22:55:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T22:55:13","slug":"growing-up-with-k-pop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/440708\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing Up With K-Pop"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cover <\/p>\n

minji <\/p>\n

My new school sat four miles from LA\u2019s Koreatown and was predominantly Korean\u2014a stark contrast from the majority White neighborhood I was coming from. I struggled at first to adjust to the new cultural expectations and norms, to catch jokes and conversations that flew over my head before I could make sense of them.<\/p>\n

At recess, my classmates would talk about a K-pop group called Super Junior. At first, I only pretended I knew and liked \u201cSuJu\u201d to fit in. But one day after school, a friend pulled up a music video on her computer: Super Junior\u2019s newest title track, \u201cU.\u201d<\/p>\n

minji<\/p>\n

I still remember how my ears perked up at the strum of the guitar intro, how my head bopped involuntarily as the 11 members popped and locked perfectly to the beat. I ran home that day and immediately googled how to download music so that I could add it to my mp3 player, giddy at the thought of playing it at lunch the next day. I was officially a fan.<\/p>\n

eunice <\/p>\n

Around that time, I also discovered Super Junior and felt, for the first time, the peculiar intensity of a boy band obsession. I bought their album Twins and found inside the CD a booklet with each member’s face staring back at me, names printed underneath like a roster you were supposed to memorize. We didn\u2019t call it \u201cbias\u201d back then\u2014that language hadn\u2019t reached us. But we understood, somehow, that you were meant to choose (ours was Kibum).<\/p>\n

By then, Minji and I were staying in touch over e-mail. One day she wrote that she was an ELF (\u201cEverlasting Friends\u201d, the official Super Junior fandom), and I couldn\u2019t believe it! It was thrilling to realize that we were both caught up in the same thing, in completely different places, and it became another thread holding our friendship together.<\/p>\n

\"Cover <\/p>\n

minji<\/p>\n

As the years went by, our tastes started to change. By middle school, we were fangirling over hot new groups like Girls\u2019 Generation, Wonder Girls, and BIGBANG.<\/p>\n

\"Cover <\/p>\n

minji<\/p>\n

These legendary acts were not only capturing the hearts of the Korean general public, but taking the Hallyu Wave (Korea\u2019s global pop culture boom) across Asia and into immigrant communities around the world. After my family moved back to Michigan, my high school\u2019s Asian Pacific American Club incorporated K-pop into our yearly cultural show performance. I couldn\u2019t believe that I was learning the choreography for SHINee\u2019s \u201cReplay\u201d with my non-Korean friends, performing in front of an auditorium full of non-Korean classmates. While most of my classmates couldn\u2019t point to Korea on a map, my small but tight-knit community of Asian immigrant kids were watching K-pop videos on YouTube together after school.<\/p>\n

eunice<\/p>\n

In 2012, Psy\u2019s \u201cGangnam Style\u201d became the first YouTube video to hit one billion views. At its peak, \u201cGangnam Style\u201d was generating over 11 million views per day, prompting YouTube to upgrade its view counter system, which had maxed out at 2,147,483,647 views\u2014a limit based on 32-bit integer coding. Suddenly, Psy was everywhere; for many people around the world, it was their first exposure to K-pop.<\/p>\n

I remember watching Psy teach the \u201cGangnam Style\u201d dance to Britney Spears on Ellen and getting chills. There was something thrilling about watching the world finally catch up to what we already knew. Korean music wasn\u2019t just \u201cforeign.\u201d It was fun, silly, catchy, and unmissable.<\/p>\n

Psy\u2019s \u201cGangnam Style\u201d was the first music video to hit 1 billion views Every music video on YouTube that hit 1 billion views by 2016 <\/p>\n

YouTube Views Data, 2010\u20132016<\/p>\n

Line chart of YouTube music video views over time, showing how \u201cGangnam Style\u201d reached 1 billion views in 158 days<\/p>\n

minji<\/p>\n

We were living through the \u201cGolden Age of K-Pop\u201d from opposite sides of the world\u2014one in the homeland, the other in the diaspora. Though we were too young to understand the forces driving this wave, the soft power that South Korea was amassing via these cultural exports, we were authentic participants of the buzz and excitement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"minji My new school sat four miles from LA\u2019s Koreatown and was predominantly Korean\u2014a stark contrast from the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-440708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}