When N did a joint stage with girl idols, the other fans put on a brave face, muttering, “That’s purely professional.” But Manok did not hide her face crumpling up in scowls. She was intensely wary of any woman that had access to the boys. She keenly watched over not only the girl idols but even makeup artists and studio workers. (For example, she analyzed some backstage footage and found out the name of a makeup artist who seemed to regularly touch up M’s makeup. She stalked her online until she found the makeup artist’s social media and discovered that she had a boyfriend. Even then Manok remained suspicious.) Manok’s jealousy did not end there. She was jealous of the fans who took the boys’ photos and posted them on Twitter, just because M gazed into their camera lenses. I even once heard Manok feverishly whispering, “Get your dirty hands off, your hands off . . .” when she spotted another boy from the group, B, patting M on the shoulder. Later Manok told me she didn’t even remember saying these things.
Manok genuinely believed that a supernatural, fateful bond existed between M and her. She had established a myth that proved (to herself) that she and M were meant to be, and she had an unshakeable faith that an eventual fruition of her love would come to pass. But these “proofs,” in my eyes, were flimsy even when compared to other fans’ usual reasons for joining the fandom. Manok’s sole proof for her claim that M and her were “meant to be” was that M looked exactly like Manok’s first love, this first love being another idol.
Manok told me that she had opened her eyes to the male sex earlier than her peers. Her career as a fan began when she was still a child. Manok’s first love was not a boy next door or a favorite teacher—it was an idol member of the then-popular H group. Manok began sketching his face in her journals. She joined the throngs of older girls at local stationery shops buying clipboards and pens with his face printed on them. She said that in the photos of her old home, one could make out a faint inscription on the wall saying, “G oppa, I love you.” As time went on, her love for G faded, and she moved on from him to another idol and then from him to another idol for twenty years until she’d drifted in and out of love with ten groups, until she settled in the B group fandom. One day, Manok turned on the TV to watch a music show featuring B. Suddenly, she saw G dancing on the screen. Manok felt nostalgic, thinking, “Wow, oppa’s joints hadn’t aged a bit,” when she realized that it was not G after all. No, it was G, for sure, but there was no hint of the passage of time in his features. He was just as she had loved him, innocent and lovely, dancing on the screen. Manok couldn’t believe her eyes.
Manok looked him up and found out he was M, in the N group. Only nineteen. G’s age when Manok had loved him. Manok felt this was fate, and expressed her sensation in these words:
“I wonder if his soul, the soul of the nineteen-year-old G had not somehow moved into M. There is no other way to explain how alike they are. I’m not talking about their faces. G twenty years ago and M right now are so similar because they are symbols of purity. But don’t you dare presume that I only love M because I once loved G. No, I only fell in love with G because M was going to exist, in the future. I was all ready to fall in love with M, but God made a mistake, and he didn’t arrive in this world till later on. So G was given to me in my wait for M.”
Manok repeated this story often, and I was always baffled by her use of words like “soul” or “fate.” I also couldn’t find any similarities between G and M. They were nothing alike, besides the fact they were both extremely good-looking men. But ideas on looks are subjective so it wasn’t up to me to challenge Manok’s aesthetic judgment. Nor could I ask Manok to show proof of this theory. What was I going to do: Ask her to show me a photo of her seven-year-old self smiling next to a poster of G? I had no choice but to nod and smile, going along with her talk. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if Manok’s long career as a fan was propelled by this passionate talent for fantasizing.
A common maxim among the fans is “Pasooni is like a genetic disease, only people who get it, get it.” The onset and relapses varied, but mostly you caught the disease as a teenager and sometimes had the illness relapse all the way up to your sixties. As Manok and I were in our mid-twenties, this meant that we had already worshipped many other oppas before. But unlike me, whose first offline fan-life began with N, Manok was an expert. She had a history of falling in love and following other idols around. It had happened a few times in her adolescence and continuously in her twenties. Other boys that, to use her own expression, were “M’s substitutes.”
Being a fan is hard work. It involves a lot of repetition. Every week on the same day, we went to the same place at the same hour. The idols sang the same song they had sung last week, just with different costumes on. The types of events were also similar. Fans followed the changing seasons as they swarmed to flower festivals in spring, waterpark shows in the summer, autumn leaf festivals in fall, and ski resort galas in the winter. I bumbled through these, new to everything, but Manok was a pro, familiar with all the routines.
Manok would sometimes tell me about her stints with other idols. Although Manok now said they were merely M’s substitutes, she admitted that at the time she had believed them to be her true love. The stories she told me helped me understand Manok’s views on the matters of the heart. Once, after a fall festival in the mountains, I had just climbed on a bus after struggling to tell the difference between Honam-line and Yeongnam-line, when Manok told me this story.
“I don’t think I understood before—rather, I was educated to not understand. On TV, whenever a music show was on, I could see fans standing in front of the stage, watching the performances. They were screaming, their cheeks stained with tears, staring up at the singers onstage. They were pouring their hearts out so much so I wondered what such an overwhelming feeling must be like. They looked as if they could tear out their hearts or pull out their intestines on demand. My father would tsk at the screen, warning me, “Don’t you end up like them.” And I always replied dutifully, “No, I won’t, father.” It wasn’t because I particularly craved his approval. I just saw the world through his eyes, with his scope. Back then, I didn’t understand. I wondered—what makes them travel so far to scream at these idols? If they wanted to see them, they just needed to turn on the TV.
“But even then, a part of me must have known that I would end up like them. Because I remember inching closer to the screen every time a favorite singer came on, and my father had to pull me back each time.
“I grew up. I decided to go see my idol, alone, for the first time overcoming all the shame and the fear. It wasn’t a show, just a public signing event in a shopping mall. I got there a few hours before the event and bought a pair of pants and a baseball jacket. I needed pants—pants for the coming fall and a jacket for the cold days approaching. I needed to shop, and this was just a coincidence, I told myself. A shopping bag in hand, I walked to the hall where the signing was taking place, deliberately a bit later than the given starting time. I tried to walk slowly, like a normal person, but before I knew it, I found myself breaking into a run, sprinting at a breakneck speed. My heart was thumping, and the shopping bag was getting in my way, flapping in the wind like a bad prop.
“The event was over in no time and the boys said their goodbyes. They all said that they were so sorry to leave us and waved their hands at us. I was outside of the crowd, pretending to be a passerby just peeking in. I was a little ashamed, you see, because I was surrounded by middle and high school students. But like a miracle, an idol noticed me, and waved his hand at me, though I know everyone will think I was mistaken. It was a very small, personal wave, for my eyes only. He recognized me, and I recognized him. No one knows that joy until it happens to you. That day, I began my pursuit.
“Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. I’d never done this kind of a thing, except going to the local festivals with friends in high school or going to the mega-concert at Jamsil. What took me by surprise was the sheer amount of time we had to wait. I’d leave my house in the morning and come back at night, but still the only times I could meet them was either when they were onstage or the brief few minutes when they were entering or leaving venues. All the time between was spent waiting. I learned for the first time that time is slow and that a day is very long, and that so much time stretching out into infinity is a painful thing to bear. Fans form cliques and laugh and gossip together just to ease that wait.
“Sometimes there would be stabs of pain without a clear cause. I got scared, and I tried to stop following the boys around. I tried many times. But every time, the experience made up for the wait. Their presence stayed mysterious over repeated encounters, and it refused to be locked into language. Their real presence rendered everything in high relief, so that everything—even their shadows or things that might be their shadows—became amazing to me. I had discovered that power, and I couldn’t now un-discover it. My life lit up with meaning. It became fun to be alive. After he told us that he liked cherry blossoms, I started noticing cherry trees everywhere—the whole world was suddenly full of flowers, swaying in constant, gentle breezes.
“Once I was in love with an idol who was from a neighboring city. I had a view of the city from my bedroom. Every night, I made a ritual of opening the windows. The faraway lights seemed to me like traces he’d left behind. The city and I mourned him together, every night. Feeling the presence of that city was comforting. Now that I love M, that city has lost all its meaning to me. But still, when I look out the windows, I remember those moments when the absence of the loved one paradoxically made life bearable. If I wasn’t someone’s fan, I’d never have known that feeling.”
