Not Bad For Some Immigrants, Ep. 2: We Stan a Culturally Connected Queen
A former MuchMusic VJ and entertainment journalist, Hannah Sung was no stranger to boy bands and fandom—she just wasn't ever obsessed with one herself. Until the pandemic, that is. In 2020, in the depths of COVID times, Hannah was browsing Korean pop culture on YouTube when the algorithm fed her BTS. From there, she searched for the VMA performance of "Dynamite"—and from *there*, she was hooked. But her burgeoning love for the K-pop idols wasn't just about the music, or their looks, for that matter. For Hannah, BTS fandom was also a gateway to her Korean culture.
“I’ve always been really interested in learning about anything Korean," she says. "But being born and raised in Canada, sometimes it felt very distant." And also, I was born in the '70s, raised in the '80s and '90s. It's just not the same—so much more is accessible [now] through AI translations that are instantaneous and also Netflix and streamers. There's just such an abundance. It doesn't mean that when I look at Korean pop culture that I feel [represented]—I still have very much my own experience of being diasporic Korean. I'm probably Canadian first, right? But it's like being a kid in a candy shop.”
In this episode of Friday Talks: Not Bad For Some Immigrants, Hannah chats about BTS' appeal, but also how fandom has given her avenues to learn more about Korean culture, connected her to new friends and amplified the lessons she'd already been learning about feminism, power and aging.
Hosted by Friday Things founder and editor Stacy Lee Kong, Not Bad For Some Immigrants is a six-part video series about the stories we tell about immigrants in pop culture, media and real life. It rejects the focus on striving—to succeed, to assimilate, to be judged worthy of belonging in, and to, our new homes—that so often infiltrate stories about our experiences, and instead makes space for complicated, nuanced and joyful conversations about what it actually costs to build a new life, the stories we learn to tell about ourselves and what it really means to belong.