REVIEW Giaae Kwon's memoir traces how K-pop saved her life
The cover of Giaae Kwon’s 2025 memoir, "I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan" / Courtesy of Henry Holt & Co.
In Korea, a bit of extra weight around the midsection can be a positive thing... for a man. I found that out shortly after arriving in Korea in April 1978. Never, though, in the decades since have I heard a single congratulatory word about even a trace of pudginess in a Korean woman.
Rather, as we learn in Giaae Kwon’s 2025 memoir, "I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan," the slightest display of obesity can lead to long-lived shaming of the individual.
South Korean women are subject to some of the strictest standards of female beauty worldwide, one of the most prominent being maintenance of a slim figure. We learn that for Kwon the shaming began in high school and lasted for a decade. Though growing up bilingual and bicultural to first-generation Korean immigrants to the U.S., she came to believe that she lacked “the right body to belong among Koreans.”
What, then, did K-pop fandom do to alleviate the trauma she experienced? There are, after all, as Kwon observes, toxic elements to K-pop such as misogyny and exploitation.
The answer, she realized in retrospect, was that K-pop fandom was a refuge for her, a refuge that offered love: as she states at the very beginning of the book, “The only boys I have ever loved have been K-pop idols.”
Tony An, singer, rapper and actor who is best known as a member of H.O.T. Courtesy of Chorokbaem E&M
She had another refuge as well: Korean TV dramas. The first she mentions, “Reply 1997,” was instrumental in introducing her to a high school girl who was well along in the tumultuous coming-of-age process that Kwon was just starting, a process driven ultimately by her attraction to the pioneering K-pop boy band H.O.T. and its sole American member, Tony An.
That attraction, growing into love, blessed her with fantasy, which in turn gained realism through imagination and engendered stories. “Fandom, ultimately, took my childhood interest in words and taught me how to be a writer,” she said.
"I’ll Love You Forever" consists of 12 chapters, the first describing the workings of K-pop fandom and most of the others focusing on a specific idol group, one of its members or a solo performer.
Chapter 7, wryly titled “Anonymous,” examines plastic surgery and body shaping. In this chapter, which Kwon mentions at the outset she did not want to write, she explains the various ways in which “Korean culture is a shame-based culture.”
I found the final two chapters, 11 and 12, the most informative about Kwon’s long and eventful journey toward wellness. We learn in this chapter that she experiences depression, anxiety and ADHD and has survived four suicide attempts.
K-pop artist Taeyeon / Korea Times file
Chapter 11 focuses on Taeyeon, formerly of Girls Generation, who like Giaae has experienced depression and shaming. The chapter begins, like the other chapters, with the titles of several K-pop songs that provide context for the chapter content. Unlike the other chapters, it also includes a short timeline of three K-pop idols who have died by suicide in the last decade. The first of them, Jonghyun of SHINee, was especially painful to Taeyeon. Reading this, I was reminded that Korea has the highest suicide rate among the OECD countries.
Kwon’s sentiments about suicide constitute one of the potentially most impactful passages in the book: “I firmly believe that every single life we lose to suicide is one we could have saved if we could get our heads out of our collective asses and stop cloaking mental health issues under so much stigma, if we could stop putting cruel, exorbitant amounts of pressure on people, if we could act like it really is okay for people not be okay instead of spouting the words as a nice catchphrase.”
The final chapter, “Shinhwa,” is named after the oldest boy band in K-pop, a group that debuted in 1997. In this chapter, Kwon has returned to Korea for the first time in 11 years. For two weeks she tours some of the major cities, each one reminding her of the idol groups and solo artists that have accompanied her from afar on her life journey. Returning to Seoul, she visits the headquarters of SM Entertainment, the company that “for better or worse, has shaped me” through its various K-pop idol bands. H.O.T., for example, showed her a world beyond the conservative Korean American Christian community in which she grew up in Los Angeles. Shinhwa taught her to not take life so seriously. With BoA she grew up struggling with loneliness. Girls' Generation helped her come to terms with her feelings about misogyny.
Members of boy band Shinhwa in 2018 / Yonhap
More generally, this trip helped Kwon take stock of her three decades with K-pop. It has been a foundational part of her life since middle school, she tells us, liberating her from her conservative upbringing, solidifying her hold on her Korean identity while growing up in the world’s most populous Korean diaspora community, and renewing in her a connection to Korean culture that been compromised by the conflict she experienced between enjoying Korean food and being shamed for the extra weight it brought to her body. Most importantly, K-pop “music has saved my life.”
This last chapter concludes with a tribute from Kwon the K-pop fan: “What a joy it is to be here. What a joy it is to have borne witness to the growth of an industry as it went from something clumsy and uncool to this shiny behemoth known around the globe. What a joy it is to be Korean.”
Author Giaae Kwon / Courtesy of Macmillan Publishers
"In I’ll Love You Forever," Kwon has duplicated Grace Jung’s accomplishment with "K-Drama School" in crediting Korea’s millennia-old culture for crucial assistance in navigating a traumatic journey from one linguistic and cultural environment to another. Let’s hope that subsequent memoirs by individuals can continue to give voice to a diaspora community that has contributed so much to the U.S. and other nations worldwide.
Bruce Fulton is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, most recently the novels "One Left" by Kim Soom (2020) and "Togani" by Gong Ji-young (2023), and editor of "The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories" (2023), the first volume of modern Korean literature among Penguin UK’s 3500-plus World Classics.