The power of K-pop

I know very little about my mother's country except that it was harsh and unforgiving.

She grew up in the shadow of the Korean War, carefully avoiding American GIs in the streets, but hoarding American candy bars in the safety of her room.

Years later, homesick in a foreign country, she would take pride in South Korea's rapid economic development, its shiny new skyscrapers, and its heart-tugging soap operas sweeping through South-East Asian homes. "People love Korean dramas!" she would inform me excitedly. "Korea's cultural influence is expanding!" I would nod dismissively, not really listening.

Her greatest pride was reserved for Korean pop bands, also known as "K-pop". She would pore religiously over new albums released by Big Bang and SHINee, and blast their songs from her car stereo every time she picked me up from school. Obsessed, as I then was, in not being Othered in public by my Asian mother, I would leap into the car and slam the door shut before any of my white friends could hear the embarrassing music. Everyone else drove home to the smooth sounds of Rihanna, Shakira, and Justin Timberlake, and here I was driving home to wannabe Asian Backstreet Boys. To my sixteen year-old self, being forced to listen to K-pop was yet another reminder of my un-Australian-ness (read: absence of blonde hair and surfing skills) as well as the generational and cultural distance I felt from my mother.

Years later, leaders from North and South Korea are preparing to meet for an historic summit on the border that has separated their countries for more than six decades. Surprisingly, this "thawing" of inter-country relations has been partly attributed to the same music I was allergic to as a teenager. Earlier this year, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un professed to being "deeply moved" by performances by South Korean artists in Pyongyang, including his favorite girl band, Red Velvet. The performances, by some 160 South Korean artists, were met with a thunderous standing ovation, and marked the first time a North Korean leader attended performances by South Korean artists in Pyongyang.

Kim Jong-un's public embrace of the bubblegum harmonies of K-pop is historic for many reasons. First, South Korean loudspeakers have been blasting K-pop across the demilitarized zone for years to convey the happiness of South Korean youth living in a free democracy and puncture the information blackout in the hermetically sealed North, where residents are only permitted to consume state-sanctioned odes to the Supreme Leader. The sugary-sweet siren song of South Korean singers has long attempted to lure border soldiers to defect, prompting North Korea to threaten "all-out war" if the loudspeakers were not turned off. For Kim Jong-un to publicly embrace the same songs that have long been used by the South in psychological warfare, is a significant watershed moment.

Secondly, the popularity of K-pop in the Hermit Kingdom reflects the successful infiltration of Kim Jong-un's information monopoly by USB drives smuggled across the Chinese border. From 2010-2014, access to USB drives in North Korea jumped from 26 to 81 per cent, with many of these drives containing South Korean television shows, songs, and music videos. Flash Drives for Freedom has smuggled 2 million hours of footage into North Korea using 120,000 donated flash drives, in the hope of sparking an intellectual revolution in one of the most repressed and isolated countries in the world. While South Korean dramas convey the relative affluence and freedom that South Koreans enjoy, the USB drives also contain documentaries on the fall of the Soviet Union and the Arab Spring. The hope is that the foreign content will create a space between North Korean citizens and the regime itself, a space which, over time, could slowly grow into some form of civil society.

Some critics believe that South Korean popular culture will ultimately achieve what generations of politicians have failed to do: unify a peninsula divided by the last Cold War frontier. Numerous North Korean defectors have attributed their willingness to risk their lives for freedom to South Korean soap operas, like "Winter Sonata". This incredibly cheesy TV series featuring three (very pale) leads in a sorrowful love triangle originally aired in 2002. I begrudgingly agreed to watch it with my mother and hated every minute of it. But my problems with South Korean pop culture (including the materialism, the obsession with "Gangnam-style beauty", and the schoolgirl sexuality, to name a few) can be left aside for the moment. Having been raised on a diet of FRIENDS and The O.C., my distaste for Asian soap operas ("omg they're holding hands!") is not surprising. But Winter Sonata launched the so-called "Korean wave" in Asia and around the world. It generated $2.3 billion in economic activity between Japan and Korea, thawing decades of icy relations between Japan and its former colony, which it had long regarded as culturally, racially, and economically inferior. It even sparked fears of "cultural imperialism" as young people in South East Asia began to adopt South Korean styles of dress, makeup and plastic surgery. Rural rice farmers in Myanmar saved to purchase solar units large enough to power televisions that could receive South Korean dramas. And it triggered a wave of Korean television series that would change the language of repressed communities in the North who salute Kim Jong-un by day and watch South Korean dramas by night. North Korean defector Ahn Hyeong-seok (not his real name) doesn't regret leaving. Images of a better life in the South (projected through South Korean TV shows) had led him across the border and "it might not be completely the same as I dreamed and imagined," he says, but "I'm thankful for the hot shower in the morning...that my human rights are respected...that I have the freedom ... to love, and be loved, all of which I saw in the movies and dramas back then."

As South Korean dramas and pop songs reignite interest in reunification (at least at the grassroots), I'm forced to reflect on my teenage condescension. Korea's soft power, represented in the strength and scope of the Korean wave, should not be underestimated in the same way I used to "ugh" at Big Bang's straw-colored pixie cuts or the Sailor Moon skirts of Girls Generation. Sure, they represent a cultural sphere worlds apart from my Hollywood upbringing. But if they help to reunite families torn apart for over 60 years, who am I to judge?

Image Credit: Human Rights Foundation