Koreaboos Love the Culture, But at What Cost?
At its most obsessive, this admiration of Korean popularity borders on appropriation
Whenever I meet a new person enamored by Korean culture — often referred to nowadays as Koreaboos — I’m reminded of a piece of romantic advice shared in an Ann Landers column: “Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocals because nobody wants to read the small print in dreams.”
Before the term Koreaboo evolved to mean what it does today, it was first and foremost the name of a news site founded in 2010. Although Flowsion Shekar had founded the webpage devoted to Korean pop culture five years prior, the growth of Korean soft power thanks to Psy’s 2012 “Gangnam Style” made the site much more relevant by 2015. Between 2010 and 2015, all things Korean became en vogue: Korean barbecue, Missha face masks, and tourism to South Korea grew by 62.5%. Euny Hong goes so far as to describe this Korean wave of popular culture, Hallyu, as “the world’s biggest, fastest cultural paradigm shift in modern history” in her book, The Birth of Korean Cool.
The wildfire of Korean culture was a surprise to most Koreans but was particularly fascinating to diaspora like myself accustomed to being thought of as Chinese. Growing up in New York in the early 2000s, Koreans were known as the people of…
