Hara will be helping me out around here, especially when I'm in Korea.
-Rachel
April 2013
Hello! My name is Maisha Haq, and I am a Bangladeshi-born 17 year old girl living in America. I can speak two languages fluently, English and Bengali, and able to orally translate Hindi and Urdu without being able to write it. I am currently learning Arabic. My level of Korean is exceptional, as I can read and write Korean and pronunciation is fairly easy for me as well. I only know a few basic words and phrases, however there have been times when I listened to a Korean song and understood a couple lines without having to look at the lyrics.
My tale on how I became a devoted K-Pop fan is rather unique or as I like to compare to it to, an “uncharted territory”. During the winter of 2009, I received an unexpected friend request on Facebook from a male named Kim Kibum. I was very unfamiliar with Korean names and instantly assumed his first name to be ‘Kim’. His profile picture didn’t reveal much as it illustrated a couple of Asian guys sporting fabulous suits and luscious hair, all gathered around a sofa with a white backdrop. Being my oblivious 13 year old self, I failed to grasp on the fact that the picture looked strikingly professional, as if it were taken at a photo shoot for a celebrity.
After talking to ‘Kim’ for around half an hour I learned he was 19, South Korean, and a freshman at Harvard University. He also mentioned that he was a singer in his home country but left in order to pursue an academic future. Upon hearing this I quickly Googled his name, and when I did so, Kim Kibum from Super Junior came up. My naïve mentality came into play once again as I unknowingly refrained from looking up the Super Junior member’s profile. I then proceeded to typing in the group’s name on YouTube, thus discovering their extremely catchy and irresistibly staggering hit single, ‘Sorry Sorry’.
From then on I was able to fathom other SM artists’ songs although I didn’t know they were all from the same company at the time. The first few songs I discovered after ‘Sorry Sorry’ included Super Junior-M’s ‘Super Girl’ (the group I thought meant for Super Junior Medium because it had half the members and two new faces I was unaware who weren’t in the original line-up), Girls’ Generation (the fact that they were similarly larger in number and ‘Oh!’ was my first music video from GG made sense to me when I instantaneously made them Super Junior’s cheerleaders/girlfriends in my own delusional world), and TVXQ!’s ‘Mirotic’ (the song that had me thinking if all Korean men showed off their bodies as much as TVXQ! did).
 |
| photo cr: Seoulbeats |
From then on I was able to fathom other SM artists’ songs although I didn’t know they were all from the same company at the time. The first few songs I discovered after ‘Sorry Sorry’ included Super Junior-M’s ‘Super Girl’ (the group I thought meant for Super Junior Medium because it had half the members and two new faces I was unaware who weren’t in the original line-up), Girls’ Generation (the fact that they were similarly larger in number and ‘Oh!’ was my first music video from GG made sense to me when I instantaneously made them Super Junior’s cheerleaders/girlfriends in my own delusional world), and TVXQ!’s ‘Mirotic’ (the song that had me thinking if all Korean men showed off their bodies as much as TVXQ! did).
Apart from any further details, in order to maintain the succinctness of the composition, if I had completed thorough and auxiliary research on Suju’s Kim Kibum, I would’ve been able to catch the mastermind behind the troll-account. I found out several weeks later that it was my cousin from New York who not only had me fooled, but my older brother and another cousin as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment