What Does the K-Wave Mean for Korean American Literature?
Image by Amber Lee. Adapted from image of the Hunminjeongeum, 1443, by King Sejong the Great (Wikimedia Commons), Stable Diffusion - Young Woman Reading a Book in her Ruined Bedroom, 2023, by Tullius Detritus (Wikimedia Commons) and Area Broken by Perpendiculars, ca. 1943, by Joseph Schillinger (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Schillinger).
In the fall of 2021, I was scrolling through my Instagram stories when I saw a video of Pachinko (2017) author Min Jin Lee sitting behind BTS on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The video swept across the backs of the boyband members, whom Lee described on Twitter as having “very good posture.” Appointed by then South Korean President Moon Jae-in as “special presidential envoys for future generations and culture,” BTS joined First Lady Kim Jung-sook and Culture, Sports and Tourism Minister Hwang Hee in presenting the Met with a gift from the South Korean government: a series of lacquerware vessels by Korean artist Chung Haecho. An extravagant convergence of fine art, pop culture, and South Korean diplomacy, the event dazzlingly reflected how the objects and agents of Korean cultural production can strategically mediate not just aesthetic experience, but also global diplomatic relations.
I begin with this anecdote about K-pop and the visual arts to explore the story of a related yet less visible phenomenon—one that I call Korean American literature’s “aura of pop.” Lee joined other members of the Korean diaspora who work in fields like music, dance, food, and literature in celebration of the present and future dissemination of Korean culture. “The eyes of the world are on Korean culture,” BTS’s RM emphasized at the reception, “but there are still many great Korean artists who are yet to be discovered.” Given Lee’s presence, along with that of other Korean American writers like Alexander Chee and Karen Chee, we might ask: were Korean American authors also included as part of that grouping?
It’s fitting that I stumbled across a recording of the event on Instagram, which, like other social media platforms, has enabled Korean American literature to engage with Korean pop culture, blurring the lines between the two. For example, on a Weverse Live in 2023, BTS’s Jungkook promoted Michelle Zauner’s hit memoir Crying in H Mart (2021). Lee’s tweets about seeing the boy band at the Met were cited in Reddit threads about the event, with BTS fans commenting on how much they had enjoyed Pachinko. Last year, Lee shared on Twitter that she had been featured in a Korean Broadcasting System documentary about her work. These platforms helped enact and publicize collaborations among governmental agencies, news networks, boy bands, and writers. Such exchanges reflect a growing phenomenon in which Korea speaks back to Korean American literature, which in turn influences that literature’s reception in the United States. It was not always this way. Korean Americans have long been viewed by Koreans as a distinct population with whom they lack shared experience, and, as scholars like Elaine Kim have noted, Korean readers have also traditionally demonstrated little interest in Korean American literature.
Why have these dynamics shifted, and what are their implications for Korean American literature? In recent years, the popularity of Korean cultural production has continued to rise as part of what some scholars call “Hallyu 3.0,” characterized by the receptivity of Western audiences and the growth of streaming services. At the same time, Korean American works like Crying in H Mart, Pachinko, and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (2020) have attained widespread attention in the United States. Crying in H Mart will be adapted into a film, and Pachinko has been turned into an Apple TV+ show. In response, the Korean government and media have orchestrated a number of ventures characterizing the success of Korean American literature as part of the expansion of the Korean Wave. As Cathy Park Hong shared with me, when she went on tour in South Korea for Minor Feelings, she received many questions surrounding the book’s success in the US. “They would ask, ‘Do you think the rising popularity of Korean American literature is because of the K-Wave?’ They already had a thesis, and they wanted me to confirm that Minor Feelings is just a piece of the puzzle.”[1] A headline about Park Hong in the JoongAng Ilbo drives home this connection: “Not only K-pop and K-movies, but also ‘Asian-American literature is now experiencing a renaissance.’”
This conflation of Korean American literature and Korean popular culture in both Korean and American media spheres decenters the “American” in “Korean American” within certain reception contexts, especially for fans of the K-wave. But the popularity of Korean media more broadly may also cause American readers of Korean American literature to view these works as continuous with, rather than distinct from, Korean culture. For example, a TikTok uploaded by Knopf Doubleday, the publisher of Crying in H Mart, shows its narrator grabbing the memoir off an H Mart shelf and putting it into her cart of groceries. Notably, the book is placed between Chapagetti and Neoguri noodles, which Parasite (2019) fans will recognize as components of the film’s viral jjapaguri dish. Here the market is no longer a site of the ethnically particular, marking, in novels like Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), immigrant enterprise and distinctly American interracial socioeconomic conflict. It has instead become a symbol of the global reach of Korean popular culture. What does this mean for the memoir nestled, likely by a Knopf intern, on its shelves?
Exchanges like these appear to extract texts from their original Korean American contexts, which usually center subjects like immigration and racialized experience in the US. Instead, Korean American literature is situated in relation to popular icons of Korean culture. In cases like the Knopf TikTok, this displacement can happen almost imperceptibly: while Zauner’s trips to H Mart indeed form a constitutive motif of the memoir, her relationship to Korean culture is one of fraught misidentification and even alienation. By positioning the book as another Korean cultural product (albeit one that is marketed and sold to American consumers), as natural on the shelf as ramen noodles, the TikTok transposes the particularity of Korean American experience onto a backdrop of global Korean cultural influence.
In some sense, this dissolution of boundaries may be said to free these works from expectations of representing an “authentic” Korean American immigrant experience. This contention would align Korean American literature with broader shifts in the American publishing landscape, with writers like Percival Everett, Ling Ma, and Kazuo Ishiguro often purposefully eliding the demands of ethnic identification. However, what makes Korean American literature distinct from other Asian American counterparts (such as the raceless narrator of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies or Nam Le’s critique of ethnic tokenization in The Boat) is that, rather than being viewed by American audiences as deracialized or transracial, its Korean Americanness instead becomes gradually indistinguishable from the “Korean.” As Chang-rae Lee told me, “There might be even more of an expectation about what a Korean American is now, because everyone thinks, ‘Well, I know [what the Korean is].’” Eunjin Choi and Rita Raley posit that the “K” prefix is “mobile and manipulable; it can and indeed does fasten on particular objects, gestures, and expressions (soju cocktails, face masks, the latest drama), but truly what is at work is something closer to atmosphere.” I want to suggest that, within Anglophone cultural spheres, recent Korean media attention and the broader cultural alignment of Korean popular media with Korean American literature have affixed the latter with this “K,” erasing the particularities of Korean American experience and transposing them into the globally-iconic sphere of the K-wave.
How does this affixing of “K” to Korean American literature influence its reception in Western contexts? Theories of popular culture offer one useful way of framing these cross-cultural encounters. As John Storey summarizes in his overview of these theories, scholars like Raymond Williams have figured popular culture as a postindustrial phenomenon comprising objects that circulate widely and are distinguished from high culture, a realm to which highly regarded and awarded literary works like Pachinko or Minor Feelings typically belong. (These types of works can be distinguished from, say, genre fiction or the popular self-published books on Amazon that Mark McGurl has explored in his recent study of contemporary literary distribution.) Cultural theorist John Fiske further asserts that popular culture “bears traces of the constant struggle . . . between power and various forms of resistance to it or evasions of it.” For both Fiske and Williams, popular culture is a site that encompasses both dominant ideological and economic forces and on-the-ground manipulation, resistance, or evasion of those forces by the people. Further, both theorists concede that the boundaries of what constitutes popular culture are notoriously difficult to pin down, and that the lines between high and low, mass and elite, shift according to their context.
While Pachinko resides comfortably within literary high culture, evidenced by its acclaim in major literary circles, its status as a finalist in the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction, and its recent inclusion in the New York Times’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” list, it also becomes a pop object when broader audiences respond to it as a television adaptation (which was acquired by Apple TV+ after a major bidding war), or in light of the Korean government’s active promotion of the novel as a distinctly “Korean” achievement. To combine the insights of Fiske and Williams, works like Pachinko, then, are not purely literary or purely popular, but a fluid amalgamation of both, received differently within different contexts. When Korean American literature becomes affiliated with Korean popular culture, inflected with its “K,” its high literary status becomes overshadowed (but not effaced) by its aura of pop. Through these interactions, the work becomes a site of contestation, caught between its own independent ambitions, the South Korean government’s claims to global soft power, and Anglophone readers’ willingness or unwillingness to probe beneath the poppy sheen of a BTS video promoting the work.
What makes certain Korean American literary works exciting to Korean government and media agencies is their potential to signify Korea’s ever-expanding reach. For some readers, this state co-optation of Korean American literature might obscure its analysis of American racial politics and its investment in working through the costs of ethnic expression within an increasingly globalized world. While Crying in H Mart marks Zauner’s attempt to reconnect with her Korean heritage following her mother’s death, the TikTok posted by Zauner’s own publisher is a particularly blatant example of the text’s commodification on the shelf, the reduction of its unopened cover to an icon of Korean culture. A BTS fan account posted an Instagram reel, which has garnered nearly 150,000 likes, depicting a viewer of Jungkook’s Weverse Live buying a spate of copies of the memoir for a giveaway. Even a 2018 Jeopardy! clue describing Pachinko as written by “Korean-born Min Jin Lee,” who often emphasizes her distinctive positionality as a Korean American, points to the nuances that can get lost in these exchanges.
Other readers, however, can still remain capable of and willing to unearth these layers of mediation, engaging with the work on its own terms. Transposed onto the realm of popular culture, this literature does not solely fall victim to South Korean hegemonic ambitions. Rather, it is also available to widespread audiences who can challenge those ambitions through thoughtful engagement with the works themselves, which so often remind us of the unstable colonial and wartime conditions that underlie Korea’s industrialization, as in Pachinko, or the distinctive irreducibility of Korean and Asian American experience, as in Minor Feelings.
Furthermore, writers themselves can participate in the contestation of the “K-ness” of Korean American literature by directly confronting, in their own works, the conditions that have collapsed the distinctions between Korea and Korean America. I want to note that it’s important not to overstate the cultural impact of Korean pop culture on Korean American literary reception; these shifts are subtle and gradual, not universally accessible but rather more legible to certain audiences who key into Korean pop cultural movements. Nevertheless, the phenomenon exists, and it appears to be shaping the self-consciousness of Korean American literary production to come. This is the most potent justification for why we cannot just ignore what happens on TikTok or Instagram. Marxian critic Nicholas Brown, writing about how the work of art has become increasingly susceptible to commodification, argues that we can now no longer assume that art is autonomous and that its composition is independent of market demands. Many artworks, Brown asserts, are pure commodities whose production is determined by projections of their use value for consumers—in short, their production is driven by a purpose external to the concerns of the work itself. Against these market pressures, works must self-consciously navigate and push back against their status as commodities. This resistance to commodification is especially relevant for Korean American literature, which, under certain conditions, enables consumers to possess a private sense of the “authentically Korean.” When Crying in H Mart becomes a giveaway item for BTS fans, what the winners receive is a personal feeling of proximity to Jungkook. To resist this tendency, writers must destabilize the assumptions underlying any simple conflation of the Korean American with the Korean, and of Korean American literature with the Korean Wave.
Several recent Korean American novels have performed this destabilization through formal innovation and the subversion of essentializing notions of Koreanness. Perhaps the most explicit treatment of the Korean American writer’s relationship to Korean popular culture occurs in Esther Yi’s debut novel Y/N. Published in 2023, Y/N probes this fraught relationship by narrating the reality-bending obsessiveness of fan culture. The novel’s unnamed protagonist, a Korean American woman living in Berlin, develops an intense attachment to the youngest member of a popular K-pop boy band, the brilliant dancer Moon. She dedicates her time to watching fan livestreams, attending formal and informal fan meet-ups, and writing Y/N (or Your/Name) fan fiction, in which readers insert themselves into intimate stories featuring their favorite idols. More than fostering a parasocial relationship with Moon, the speaker desires transcendent union with him; in fantasizing about making physical contact with him, she observes, “I felt what he felt of me; I felt what I felt like.” The novel adopts a surreal, hyper-intellectualized prose through which the narrator entertains various philosophical justifications for her obsession. This wry aloofness also animates the voices of many of the other characters, rendering it difficult at times to distinguish one voice from another. Not only the distinctions between characters but also the distinctions between the fictional reality of the narrative and the fictionality of the narrator’s Y/N stories become blurred, as the Y/N stories are interspersed with the central narrative, often without any obvious framing or break. In this way, the novel formally recreates the all-consuming nature of extreme fandom, which reorients everyday reality around a famous figure whose distance enables fans to manipulate that figure’s image to suit their own private desires.
As the novel progresses, the narrator impulsively decides to seek Moon out in Seoul. When the narrator is abruptly presented with the opportunity to meet Moon in person, she ultimately cannot stop herself from touching him, which Moon violently rejects, “adolescent cruelty glimmer[ing] in his eyes.” Rather than experiencing a real encounter with another human life, she cannot perceive Moon as anything other than a vehicle for her own personal fulfillment, which shatters the possibility of any genuine relation at all between the two. By immersing the reader into a world in which reality becomes indistinguishable from fantasy, and then abruptly pulling the deceptive realm of fantasy out from under our feet, the novel’s form and content leave us to meditate on the dangers of parasocial identification. Furthermore, the narrator’s identity as a Korean American writer generates an inevitable commentary on the dangers of conflating Korean popular culture with the Korean diasporic self. The narrator’s extreme over-identification with Moon (at one point, she even impersonates him at a fan meet-up) causes her to upend her life in the hope of living in Korea and becoming unified with a figure she believes is already a part of her.
While Yi illustrates the dangerous effects of Korean pop culture on the Korean diasporic subject, Ed Park’s 2023 novel Same Bed, Different Dreams adopts a more hopeful stance, as it considers the extent to which the Korean American writer can productively contribute to Korean cultural production. In an opening scene, Park’s protagonist, a Korean American writer named Soon, examines the windows of a Korean restaurant in New York City, which feature bright screens displaying K-pop groups, dramas, and variety shows. Soon has come to meet a Korean writer, Eujin Cho, whose name Cho’s publisher has abbreviated to Echo in order to render it more marketable to Anglophone readers. Echo’s novel, also called Same Bed, Different Dreams, is reproduced as a novel within the novel, which in turn becomes intertwined with two other narrative threads. A sprawling, semi-fictional history of the Korean Provisional Government, Echo’s book presents the KPG as a dynamic, wide-reaching association that eludes any stable definition of the “authentically Korean.” Korean history, framed through Park’s KPG, includes figures like Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ, and Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated William McKinley. This destabilization is literalized in the form of both Echo’s novel, which is divided into numbered parts that jump between perspectives, and the novel-outside-the-novel, the novel that Park has written. But the most interesting formal move comes at the novel’s close, when it is revealed that Echo is actually dead, that someone had been hired to play Echo that night at the restaurant, and that Soon is now tasked with finishing the uncompleted work. The novel ends with the completed final portion of Echo’s Same Bed, Different Dreams, which is now Soon’s Same Bed, Different Dreams, which is also Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams. Are we to read this blending of authorial voices as celebrating a seamless identification of author with reader, Korean with non-Korean?
In that opening scene, before walking into the Korean restaurant, Soon sees what he initially believes is his own reflection through the glass. “Amid these foreign illuminations was my real face,” Soon remarks. “Then my face coughed into a fist—but I was still smoking, cigarette between lips.” As it turns out, the face Soon believes to be his own is actually Echo’s, sitting inside—who, as we now know, is not Echo at all. That this misrecognition is framed by the “foreign illuminations” of K-pop videos makes explicit that the novel is invested not in a simple conflation but rather in the possibility of slippage both between Korean and Korean American and between the popular and the literary. Echo, not a living person but a marketable name promoted by the Korean culture industry, is not Soon, but, as the ultimate merging of their authorial voices suggests, he is also not not Soon. While the rapid developments of globalization—and of the K-pop groups who occupy one corner of that movement—may be inescapable, they do not foreclose the temporary possibility of collaboration, of speaking across from the Korean American to the Korean without conflating the two. The non-reductive nature of this collaboration also becomes clear through Soon’s completion of Echo’s book: rather than just melding his voice with Echo’s, Soon also writes his own personal life experiences into the book, thus asserting himself as a part of Korean history. Echo’s novel, and thereby the novel as a whole, ends with the charge that the reader is also a member of the Korean Provisional Government, extending the possibility of discursive play with Korean cultural objects to the readers of Park’s novel.
While Park himself did not conceptualize his book as one emphasizing Korean popular culture so much as one revivifying Korean history, he noted to me that “at some level [he] was conscious of these things seeping into the culture.” For Park, a character like Echo reflects “another kind of soft power, where the Korean government would really like to promote Korean authors in America.” Despite his critiques of Korean claims to soft power, Park (and Yi, for that matter) cannot remain fully immune from the Korean media’s linking of Korean American success with the Korean Wave. An article posted by Yonhap News Agency points out that not only were NewJeans and South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol listed by the New York Times as one of the “Most Stylish People of 2023,” but that Park and Yi’s novels also made the Times’s list of “100 Notable Books of 2023.” In juxtaposing NewJeans and Yoon with Park and Yi, the article suggests that Korean American literary production likewise contributes to Korean influence in the American cultural sphere.
For Ery Shin, whose debut Spring on the Peninsula was published in April 2024, the notion of the “authentically Korean” need not be abandoned entirely. Rather, Shin, who is Korean American but spent ten years in Seoul, detaches Koreanness from its representation in pop culture and instead situates it within the experiences of quotidian life in Seoul’s queer communities. In its opening scene, a character named Han launches into a lengthy diatribe about what he views as the ills of modern Korean society, which include how “Korean popular music has become an international phenomenon despite originating in the drive to replicate Western music for Korean audiences.” While the novel demonstrates its awareness of K-pop’s wider cultural circulation through Han’s perspective, Han’s critical view is not necessarily the dominant one; the novel also offers an alternative lens through which readers might view Korea as a site of local community-making rather than one compromised by global cultural ambitions. Following the entwined perspectives of a group of Korean friends, and primarily revolving around the experiences of Kai, a queer white-collar worker, the novel presents a social underworld of nightlife spaces “where all the homosexuals go to buy drinks, linger, fall in love, or just spend the night in a love motel.”
Shin’s style is formally playful and experimental, evoking the modernists in whose work she specializes as an academic. In addition to the often-unmarked transition between character perspectives, Shin’s formal experimentations also involve the novel’s reproductions of private texts and notes written by its characters, including a note Kai had written to himself in high school in which “Do not despair” is repeated across more than 10 pages. In this way, the intimate singularity and privacy of a note becomes textually interlinked with the other voices represented in the text.
For Shin, part of what allows the entwined experiences of Kai and his friends to be authentically experienced rather than subordinated to global market forces is their insulation from the limitations of queer theory as it has been pioneered in Western universities. In our conversation, Shin alluded to critiques of queer theory as a distinctively Western body of thought that cannot necessarily speak for other cultural experiences of queerness, and whose reception is often limited to elite academic audiences. “There’s another side that just lives freely, as if none of this theory, none of the baggage of the canon trickled down somehow,” Shin shared. “It’s queerness without calling itself such.” Shin’s decision not to write about Korean diasporic experience but to set her novel in the capital enables her to demonstrate how Korea cannot be made knowable by Western sources or reduced to its popular icons but is instead shaped by the networked relations of those who live, work, and love within it. Further, while Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams envisions the possibility of a Korean American collaborating with Korean influences through one of its several diegetic plotlines, here Shin expands this notion metatextually so that the novel itself reflects the Korean American composition of a Korean story. Rather than ceding to the K-wave’s absorption of Korean American literature within its sphere of influence, Shin’s novel renders the conditions of modern Korean culture as available for negotiation by the Korean American writer.
At the same time, Shin perceives the ballooning popularity of Korean media and culture as a boon, not a detriment: “I think it’s really a lovely phenomenon to see the world becoming more globalized in this way.” Several of the writers with whom I spoke expressed a similar sentiment. Despite their mixed feelings about being instrumentalized by the Korean government and media, they were unwilling to reduce the country’s international success to acts of Western imitation, as Spring on the Peninsula’s Han asserts, or to minimize their own attachments to Korean cultural output. “You could say that soft power is empowering,” Park Hong stated. “Especially if you’re a developing to developed nation, that’s the reality of cultural output from postcolonial nations.” For Park, there is a personal dimension of awe at witnessing Korea transform into a global cultural powerhouse: “There is that certain astonishment and even pride—even if K-pop isn’t really to my taste.” As scholars like Joseph Jeon have pointed out, the Korean Wave first emerged as part of a longer process of postwar development whose significance intensified in the wake of the 1997–98 IMF Crisis. Nevertheless, despite their entwinement with war, American imperial intervention, and global capitalism, Korean cultural exports are not simply reducible to market imperatives. And as Korean American writers are emphasizing now more than ever, neither is Korean American literature reducible either to Western expectations of “Koreanness” or to Korean appropriations of these works as endemic features of the K-wave.
Just as the Korean media and Anglophone audiences alike may invest Korean American literature with an aura of pop, Korean American literature will continue to look back at both Western and Korean ideas about what it means to be Korean American. This is, in part, what the literature has always aimed to accomplish, from novels like Kim Ronyoung’s Clay Walls (1986) and Lee’s Native Speaker, which center the cultural in-betweenness of immigrant experience, to cultural criticism like Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, which challenges the essentialisms plaguing Western racial interpellation. That novels like Yi’s, Park’s, and Shin’s are now addressing Korea’s contemporary soft power marks an exciting and germane development in the Korean American literary corpus. Min Jin Lee’s forthcoming novel American Hagwon will look back to Korea in a different way, probing how the importance of education for Koreans both at home and abroad is linked to widespread, and distinctly contemporary, desires for social status and economic stability.
While the increasingly global prominence of Korean popular media frequently blurs the distinctions between Korean and Korean American, Korean American writers are interested in contesting these ambiguities more explicitly and experimentally than ever. This is not to say that Korea’s growing alignment with Korean America is rejected outright. Rather, that alignment serves as a productive site through which writers might theorize the role of Korean American authorship in relation to the K-wave. Many of these recent works are novels, perhaps suggesting that novels’ marketability and mainstream circulation make them a particularly apt medium for probing the nature of pop. But these links have also been touched upon in recent years in the poetry and criticism of writers like Jack Saebyok Jung and Emily Jungmin Yoon and will likely continue to act as a fruitful subject for works across all genres. As Lee noted, this cultural moment offers an expansive opportunity for Korean American writers to write beyond the immigrant narrative trope and to engage more contemporary global trends: “The possibilities seem endless. It’s a huge artistic challenge, but that’s the challenge we kind of all wanted. We wanted to be judged by our daring, not our mechanical accuracy.” The aura of pop, then, is not merely a reductive lens for reading Koreanness into Korean American works. For the Korean American writer, it serves as an opportunity for exercising daring in a world where Korea no longer resides at the margins. Ə
[1] Direct quotes in this essay are taken from a series of personal interviews conducted by the author between January 16, 2024, and May 1, 2024, unless otherwise noted.