Kacie on K-pop: Why I stopped hiding my love of K-pop

Three days before I moved into McCarthy Honors College, I tweeted on my K-pop stan account that I would be “taking an indefinite hiatus [from running my account] to focus on my uni studies.” It was a move partly for that reason, but moreso because at that point in time, I knew that the last thing I wanted to be associated with in college was K-pop. 

So it’s ironic that almost three and a half years later, I’m sitting outside at a table in the Tutor Campus Center writing the final installment of my K-pop music column for the University newspaper. It’s bittersweet to wrap up this column after a year of writing it, and to wrap up my experience at the Daily Trojan after seven semesters working here. 

If you’ve had even one conversation with me, you probably know that I like K-pop — I think I scream about my favorite idol, Stray Kids’ Lee Know, to someone at least once a day. 

But it wasn’t always like that. 

K-pop is just one of those things that people don’t really talk about — maybe it’s the fact that the most privileged person in American society is a white man, or maybe it’s the idea of the American music market being the gold standard that rendered listening to music from other countries completely irrelevant. 

I was lucky to grow up in Honolulu, Hawaii, a state with a large Asian American population, and attend a high school where liking K-pop was accepted, if not the norm. It was easy for me to talk about my love for Jungkook with my friends at school who either also listened to K-pop or at least knew what it was. 

Yet coming into college, I made the executive decision to conceal this aspect of my identity in shaping the version of myself I’d be at USC. I remember thinking that my peers would think it was weird and cringey to like K-pop, and that the only way that I’d be accepted at USC was if I hid this part of myself away. 

But my time at USC has been one filled with change and emotion and an overarching theme of self-growth. My freshman year was spent hiding — not just hiding my love for K-pop music but also hiding away from opportunities and situations that would push me out of my comfort zone and toward new experiences without safety nets of friends. I spent my sophomore year back home, where I watched and listened to more K-pop than ever before in coronavirus quarantine, and made it a mission of mine to prioritize spending time doing things I genuinely enjoyed. With that goal in mind, I came back to USC as an upperclassman ready to make the most of my time on this campus in the most genuine way possible. 

It was at this point in my college career, in which I found some of my best friends and spent my time working on things I truly loved so much, that I decided to begin this column — when I made the conscious decision to take a part of myself that I used to deliberately tuck away and shout about how much I loved it on the highest figurative rooftop in existence. It’s almost symbolic to think about the way I interacted with myself as a K-pop fan in relation to the way I interacted with myself as a USC student. 

This is all very metaphorical and philosophical for me to be writing about in an arts and entertainment column about Korean pop music, but I suppose what I’m trying to say is that this column really meant so much more to me than just that. Of course I loved plugging Stray Kids in the Daily Trojan every other week, and of course I loved analyzing trends in the K-pop industry, but moreso, I loved having a space in which I could be open and honest about something I sincerely enjoyed so much. I loved finally feeling like I was being my genuine self, and that I would be loved and appreciated on this campus because of it. 

Since the inception of this column, I enrolled in the University’s first-ever course dedicated to studying K-pop and dedicated an entire journalism class project to creating a newsletter about K-pop. I now talk shamelessly about my interests — K-pop or otherwise — and each of the facets of my identity without fear. I’ve logged back into my K-pop stan account. 

So, whether you read this column because you genuinely like K-pop, because you avidly read every article the Daily Trojan publishes or because you’re my friend, I thank you for giving me this space. As I depart from my role as Fall 2022 editor-in-chief and say goodbye to my column and to the Daily Trojan, I’ll take from it a newfound understanding of what it means to be true to myself. I hope you will too. 

Kacie Yamamoto is a senior writing about Korean pop music. She is also the editor-in-chief of the Daily Trojan. Her column “Kacie on K-pop” ran every other Friday.