Like Karina, they were the daughters of Latino immigrants and bilingual in English and Spanish, but it was Korean that they wanted to know. Three years later, a friend on Long Island told me that teen-age twins who she’d met in town were obsessed with all things Korean. One morning, a worker approached me and asked, apropos of nothing, if I was Korean-not “Chinese or Japanese?” This precision was new. Standing among the women on a street corner in a black puffy coat, I tried to make conversation in my terrible Spanish. I had heard that many employers paid low wages or didn’t pay at all some workers reported verbal abuse and sexual harassment. In the winter of 2012, I was writing a story about Latina day laborers in Brooklyn who cleaned Hasidic homes before the Sabbath-when women’s work accumulated to the point where outsourcing became necessary. I first glimpsed the swell of hallyu, the Korean wave, a decade ago.
To continue ignoring the BTS phenomenon was to risk missing something bigger than Beatlemania. The group was everywhere, and everyone seemed to be into them. But, earlier this year, BTS became inescapable. I absorbed Western critiques of K-pop’s girl and boy bands: that they’re fluffy, manufactured, and exploitative of their members-as if the same weren’t true of New Kids on the Block.
#WEST COAT JAPANESE GAY PORN SKIN#
When reporting on South Korea, I resisted the expected topics: Korean skin care, plastic surgery, dogmeat, and, yes, K-pop. I’ve long been hesitant to write about BTS.