Growing up in North Korea, Hyuk’s childhood was about survival. He never listened to banned K-pop music but, after defecting to the South, he’s about to debut as an idol.
Hyuk is one of two young North Koreans in a new K-pop band called 1Verse — the first time that performers originally from the nuclear-armed North have been trained up for stardom in South Korea’s global K-pop industry.
Before he was 10, Hyuk — who like many K-pop idols now goes by one name — was skipping school to work on the streets in his native North Hamgyong province and admits he “had to steal quite a bit just to survive.”
Photo: AFP
“I had never really listened to K-pop music”, he said, explaining that “watching music videos felt like a luxury to me. My life was all about survival,” he said, adding that he did everything from farm work to hauling shipments of cement to earn money to buy food for his family.
But when he was 13, his mother, who had escaped North Korea and made it to the South, urged him to join her.
He realized this could be his chance to escape starvation and hardship, but said he knew nothing about the other half of the Korean peninsula.
Photo: AFP
“To me, the world was just North Korea — nothing beyond that,” he said.
His bandmate, Seok, also grew up in the North — but in contrast to Hyuk’s hardscrabble upbringing, he was raised in a relatively affluent family, living close to the border.
As a result, even though K-pop and other South Korean content like K-dramas are banned in the North with harsh penalties for violators, Seok said “it was possible to buy and sell songs illegally through smugglers.”
Thanks to his older sister, Seok was listening to K-pop and even watching rare videos of South Korean artists from a young age, he said.
“I remember wanting to imitate those cool expressions and styles — things like hairstyles and outfits,” Seok said.
Eventually, when he was 19, Seok defected to the South. Six years later, he is a spitting image of a K-Pop idol.
STAR QUALITY
Hyuk and Seok were recruited for 1Verse, a new boy band and the first signed to smaller Seoul-based label Singing Beetle by the company’s CEO Michelle Cho.
Cho was introduced to both of the young defectors through friends.
Hyuk was working at a factory when she met him, but when she heard raps he had written she said that she “knew straight away that his was a natural talent.”
Initially, he “professed a complete lack of confidence in his ability to rap,” Cho said, but she offered him free lessons and then invited him to the studio, which got him hooked.
Eventually, “he decided to give music a chance,” she said, and became the agency’s first trainee.
In contrast, Seok “had that self-belief and confidence from the very beginning,” she said, and lobbied hard to be taken on.
When Seok learned that he would be training alongside another North Korean defector, he said it “gave me the courage to believe that maybe I could do it.”
‘WE’RE ALMOST THERE’
The other members of 1Verse include a Chinese-American, a Lao-Thai American and a Japanese dancer. The five men in their 20s barely speak each other’s languages.
But Hyuk, who has been studying English, says it doesn’t matter.
“We’re also learning about each other’s cultures, trying to bridge the gaps and get closer little by little,” he said.
“Surprisingly, we communicate really well. Our languages aren’t perfectly fluent, but we still understand each other. Sometimes, that feels almost unbelievable.”
Aito, the Japanese trainee who is the main dancer in the group, said he was “fascinated” to meet his North Korean bandmates.
“In Japan, when I watched the news, I often saw a lot of international issues about defectors, so the overall image isn’t very positive,” he said.
But Aito said his worries “all disappeared” when he met Hyuk and Seok. And now, the five performers are on the brink of their debut.
It’s been a long road from North Korea to the cusp of K-pop stardom in the South for Hyuk and Seok — but they say they are determined to make 1Verse a success.
“I really want to move someone with my voice. That feeling grows stronger every day,” Seok said.
Hyuk said being part of a real band was a moving experience for him.
“It really hit me, like wow, we’re almost there.”
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Legislative Caucus First Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that
Institutions signalling a fresh beginning and new spirit often adopt new slogans, symbols and marketing materials, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no exception. Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), soon after taking office as KMT chair, released a new slogan that plays on the party’s acronym: “Kind Mindfulness Team.” The party recently released a graphic prominently featuring the red, white and blue of the flag with a Chinese slogan “establishing peace, blessings and fortune marching forth” (締造和平,幸福前行). One part of the graphic also features two hands in blue and white grasping olive branches in a stylized shape of Taiwan. Bonus points for
March 9 to March 15 “This land produced no horses,” Qing Dynasty envoy Yu Yung-ho (郁永河) observed when he visited Taiwan in 1697. He didn’t mean that there were no horses at all; it was just difficult to transport them across the sea and raise them in the hot and humid climate. “Although 10,000 soldiers were stationed here, the camps had fewer than 1,000 horses,” Yu added. Starting from the Dutch in the 1600s, each foreign regime brought horses to Taiwan. But they remained rare animals, typically only owned by the government or
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
RSS