Round 4: Iron Girl
Title: Iron Girl
Team: Canon/AR
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 5701
Fandom: Wonder Girls; Yeeun-centric
Pairing: None
Summary: “Our plight seemed pitiful to others. A lot of people were worried about what would happen if we failed.” Yeeun, and chasing after the American Dream.
Author's Note: Many thanks to my very dear friend Moonstone, to Biscuit 007 for listening to me whine a lot and encouraging me to keep writing, to J.D Vector Slice for setting up several important group chats and encouraging me as well, and also to Agent Yuna, agent porcupine, and Agent A for reading my fic or being around for pep talks and etc.! And the rest of the team as well!
Prompt Used: Yoon JungShin - Exhausted and supplementary prompt #2 (http://41.media.tumblr.com/ac9f9a93cc6b888d51edbe290bf933cc/tumblr_ncctelJOBC1tajh7zo1_500.png)
The world sees what it wants to see
But I’m more than just what you see
What you see is just the half of me
Iron girl, is what’s inside here
- “Iron Girl,” Ha:tfelt ft. Hyerim
“What were those years really like?”
The interviewer’s lips quirk just a little at the corners, like she’s expecting something specific, a good quote her magazine can paste up in different colored letters and run the whole story around. Yeeun blinks, sliding her expression into a blank, pleasant mask she spent years perfecting as an idol.
“I loved my life in New York,” she says. It’s honest. What you learn as a pop star is that the truth is multi-faceted, and your job is only to show the face of the truth that maintains the story of whoever you pretend to be on screen.
If Yeeun wanted to tell the truth-the whole truth-she’d say more than just that.
In truth she too often felt like the tiny ballerina figurine in a music box. Toted from place to place, set out in front of an audience, she would dance when someone wound the gears and repeat the same dance to one thin and unchanging tune.
This wasn’t the whole truth either, though. Which is why she never tries to tell the truth in interviews. Complexity never goes over well in this business.
The interviewer watches her with a slight gleam in her eyes, and Yeeun steels herself for the next question.
The interviewer smiles. “Would you do it all again?”
Yeeun opens her mouth. She hesitates.
“Wonder Girls is a group that came together because of fate.”
-Yeeun
2008 - MKMF Awards
Every so often, a song sinks its teeth into a nation. The tune is inescapable, blasting from the speakers of every store and taxi radio, mimicked by both young and old, seeping out from the nation into the rest of the world. Fast-forward four years from that night and the song would be “Gangnam Style.” But that year, it was five girls in matching dresses, looking into the cameras and promising, “I want nobody but you.”
The awards ceremony quivered with all the hopes and dreams of so many pop artists stuck in one building. Five girls sat in a back row, purple dresses, eyelids heavy with makeup, listening to the presenter read from the teleprompter. The screams of the audience rang in their ears.
“It will be Big Bang,” Sunmi whispered to herself, like a mantra, her knuckles white as she gripped tightly to Yeeun’s hand. “We already won too much, it’s fate, or something-”
“Don’t worry,” Sunye said automatically. Her eyes were closed, the picture of serenity. Yeeun chewed at her lip, then remembered her make-up, and stopped. It was no use worrying.
They all already knew the balance between wanting something, and wanting it too badly, and how the latter always seemed to lead to disappointment. The crowd roared behind them. Yubin squeezed her eyes shut tight and Sohee kept her expression cold, impassive, a practiced mask. Yeeun watched the presenter, not quite able to follow the words coming out of his mouth as her mind buzzed with nervous energy. Winning or losing, it didn’t matter-
But then the name “Wonder Girls!” reverberated through the building and all five girls slipped into that space of silent shock. They were The Nation’s Little Sisters and they stood up from their seats in rehearsed unison, but the surprise on their faces was genuine. Tears came naturally as they walked onto the stage, none of them quite aware of the floor beneath their feet or the crowd roaring with delight, as though it were all happening in a dream.
They took the stage, took their award. Yeeun pushed Sunye up to the microphone and watched as their leader stood there, listening to the crowd cheering, trying to compose herself.
“We won the best newcomer award last year,” Sunye began. The crowd went on cheering. Strains of nobody, nobody but you played through Yeeun’s head.
Sunye paused so as not to cry and then continued. “And we are so, so thankful to receive such a big award this year. Everyone who has loved our music-we promise to be here again next year, with a better song. Thank you to our JYP staff, Park Jinyoung who wrote us a beautiful song, and our fans-you’ve been with us all this time. We will work even harder. Thank you!”
The crowd roared. Their song blasted through the speakers. The five of them looked at each other.
After the ceremony was over, when songs started playing and the other artists started getting up to leave-then the tears came and they helped each other wipe the tears away so their makeup wouldn’t smear. They turned and waved to the crowd in the stadium seats. Finally they left, bowing their way out.
They didn’t know it yet. But they were standing at the summit of their career.
Not even a week later, Park Jinyoung was calling Yeeun into his office so he could ask the question she knew was coming:
“Do you want to stay here and fail, or go to America and see what happens?”
“A lot of people think we were just dressed up in JYP clothes, with nothing inside.”
-Yeeun
2009 - Jonas Brothers Tour
Their fan sign table was set up underneath a white tent, but it did nothing to keep out the heat. The American crew set up large fans around them, smiling helpfully as the blades spun to life, but Yeeun could already feel her makeup congealing. Every time she blinked, her eyelashes felt heavier, and the sequins on her dress itched worse. She could see the faint line of sweat starting to stain the arm of Sunmi’s dress, beads of sweat collecting just at the top of Sunye’s eyebrows. Yeeun felt sweat on the back of her own neck collect and slide down her back. It had been twenty minutes, and no one had appeared at their table yet.
“This is humiliating,” Yeeun hissed at Sunye, saying it under her breath, so that their manager behind them wouldn’t hear. She always felt like she needed to protect the managers, somehow, to be the smiling face of the whole show for them as much as for the fans.
Sunye shrugged. “Be patient.” She glanced over at Yeeun, her movements sluggish, as though she were set into slow motion by the heat. “Did you think we were going to become famous overnight?”
Yeeun arched an eyebrow and picked up one of the pictures of The Wonder Girls that sat, unsigned, on the table in front of her. “We are famous.”
On the other side of Sunye, Sohee snorted. “Not here.”
Sunmi put her head down onto the table and sighed, lifting up her arms and fanning at her armpits. Yubin seemed to have actually fallen asleep sitting up. Yeeun wondered what would happen if she grabbed their photos off the table and went out into the crowd of teenage American girls drifting out there in the beating sunlight, and started handing them out. She could imagine their confused smiles, their derisive laughs. But at least she would be doing something.
They’d already had several concert stops, and it was the same charade every time. Fan sign table. Some Asian-American fans would show up, maybe the occasional non-Asian, but mostly their table was like something out of an old American Western film, the ones with the tumbleweeds rolling across a silent, deserted street. Then, later, they would go into an arena filled with the same teenage girls who had ignored them, the teenage girls who were there wanting to see three marginally attractive American boys play halfway decent pop songs, and they pasted on smiles and launched into “Tell Me” and “Nobody.” But the atmosphere was not good.
Yeeun was sick of singing the same songs she’d been singing for so long, but she was business savvy. She knew what Park Jin-young’s reasoning was. You sing the songs that made you famous in the first place, because they obviously had some kind of magic to them. If you think you’re going to stab your eyes out if you have to sing “I want nobody, nobody but you!” one more time, you get over it. You do your job. But still, it was disheartening to perform for a crowd that didn’t want you, with no resolution in sight. And they only had thirteen tour stops to prove themselves.
Yeeun stood up and grabbed the pictures off the table. She straightened out her shoulders, holding the glossy pages to her body, and gained her footing on her thin high heels in the dirt. The other four looked up at her, their eyebrows creased, but no one said anything. Yeeun looked at Sunye.
Sunye stared back at her for a moment. “I don’t think it will make a difference,” she said, each word measured, like she thought Yeeun was losing it.
“I don’t care,” Yeeun said. “I have to do-I just have to do, okay, and not just sit anymore. Are you coming with me or not?”
Sunye glanced at Yubin. Sunmi’s head was still down on the table. She could have heatstroke, or something like that. Sohee was just watching Yeeun, not looking her quite in the eyes, like a cat.
“Yeah, okay,” Sunye said finally, and stood, gathering the pictures into a careful stack. She lifted the stack into her arms and straightened up, giving Yeeun a steady gaze. “Don’t let it hurt too much though, okay?”
Yeeun didn’t respond, but turned and marched out into the sunlight and the English-only crowds. She knew what waited for her out here. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
Of the whole tour, they were the last on the list-of the least importance, below even the crew. They sang two songs to the other opening artists’ five each. After concerts, The Jonas Brothers went off in their fancy jet. The Wonder Girls took a tour bus.
Yeeun could not get used to sleeping on a bus rattling its way down an American highway. Most nights she lay awake, listening to Park Jin-young snoring from one of the bunks, the soft sounds of Sunmi crying in her bunk, the whispering English drifting up from the front of the bus. She got used to repeating Park Jin-young’s words in her head because it was something, at least. If you’re at the top you will inevitably fall. If you don’t try for a new goal you will never know if you could have succeeded. We are nobody here. We work our way up from the bottom rungs.
Yeeun groaned and flopped over onto her side. Tomorrow was another performance, another American city full of English-only teenagers filled with pubescent lust for three boys marketed to perfection. The idea of them stopping to pay attention to a group of dressed-alike Koreans was becoming more laughable every day. And Yeeun was exhausted.
She climbed out from her bunk and found some slippers. The bus was full of only road noise; Sunmi had likely cried herself to sleep by now. They all did what they could for her, but at some point there wasn’t anything left to do. After all, they were all here, on this same bus, trapped on an American highway.
Yeeun found Sunye sitting on one of the couches, frowning at her cell phone. She looked up at Yeeun, smiled a little, and moved over.
“My dad messaged me,” she said. She didn’t continue, though. Not that she needed to-that statement alone could mean a world of things.
“He’s okay?” Yeeun asked. Sunye just shrugged. Yeeun tried to remember when she’d last spoken to her own family, but already the days ran together. She counted them up in her head and realized they’d only been touring for a week. Thirteen performances to prove themselves. Climb up the ladder from the very bottom rungs. Meanwhile Girls’ Generation was snagging all their old endorsements and-
“What’s wrong?” Sunye asked. Yeeun shook herself. Rolled her eyes because that was better than crying.
“We need to fix our performances,” she said. “We can make them better. We can make this work.”
“I think so, too.”
They looked up and saw that Yubin had gotten up, too, nursing a water bottle in her hands and smiling, though the shadows underneath her eyes were dark. They were busy now, but for the first few months in America they’d had nothing to do, and spent too many nights staying up late to be on Korean time so they could talk to people back home. It was taking a toll, now.
Yubin sat down next to them and held her hands out, like she expected a solution to fall into them. “We are damn good performers,” she said.
Sunye laughed. Genuine smile. It gave Yeeun a little bit of hope.
“When all five of us are on stage, it works,” Yeeun agreed. Yubin nudged her with a goofy smile, urging her to continue.
“Nobody is catchy,” Sunye said. “If we were in Korea, everyone would be dancing along-” She stopped and looked at the other two, an idea forming in her eyes.
Yeeun lifted an eyebrow. “So we teach the dance,” she said.
“We teach the dance.” Yubin clapped her hands together like it had been decided. Yeeun grinned at the other two, even though doubts lingered. Too much was still up to other people. How many connections could they get-how much would Park Jin-young manage before he wore himself out trying to sell the concept to Americans? And what difference would it make, really-thirteen tour stops and then they were back to anonymity in a country where they knew nothing.
But it was something to do. It was better than watching their performances fall flat every night.
The concert’s management team did not think that teaching the Nobody dance would be a good idea.
The girls resumed handing out their own flyers.
Yeeun wished that in high school she’d had at least one English lesson on “rude things said by American girls if you walk up to them before a Jonas Brothers concert” but, on second thought, it was probably better not to know. She just kept her smile in place, repeated the words “thank you” as much as necessary, and kept going. Whenever someone did approach them, wanting a photograph, it was hard to hold back tears of gratitude. Maybe it was better this way-if they’d stayed in Korea, Sohee might have turned into a total bitch.
When Yeeun told her as much on the bus one night, Sohee just stared at her. “Me?” she said, deadpan. “What about you?”
And then they started laughing hysterically, falling over into the bunk, snorting with laughter. It felt good to laugh, and that was probably why it was so hard to stop.
“PD-nim!” Yeeun called out, looking for Park Jin-young, who was eating potato chips on the couch. “Who would have had worse celebrity-disease, me or Sohee?”
He just laughed at them, while the other three girls called out from their bunks, “Park Yeeun!” Yeeun rolled her eyes.
“I’m not the nation’s little sister though, am I?” she said prodding Sohee’s cheek. That earned her a truly frightening glare.
“Yeah, well,” Sohee shrugged. “Here that’s Hannah Montana, isn’t it?”
Something about the way Sohee formed the syllables of “Hannah Montana” made Yeeun burst into giggles again. But eventually the laughter died off, and Yeeun returned to her own bunk, lying awake listening to the sound of America rolling by outside.
The concert was running behind. When a concert of that size ran late, it meant that everyone was pushed back. All the opening artists had one song cut, which for the others meant singing four instead of five. For the Wonder Girls, it meant singing only one.
Yeeun kicked the toe of her high heel against the wall next to her as their manager related the news. Disappointment rattled through her bones. She couldn’t look at the others, but she could picture Sunye’s resolute calm and Sohee’s blank expression and Sunmi turning away so she wouldn’t cry. When Yeeun did look up, Yubin shrugged her shoulders, the slightest smile playing on her lips.
“It is what it is,” Yubin said. Sometimes Yeeun wasn’t sure when Yubin meant what she said, and when she said things just because she thought the rest of them needed to hear it. Maybe it didn’t matter.
After a long period of waiting in near silence, practicing English introductions under their breath, it was their turn to the stage. They walked out into the arena, listening to the roar of the crowd. Yeeun remembered walking into arenas screaming only for them. What would it take to have this arena, too?
She adjusted her mic pack as she walked on stage, so she didn’t see the problem until the last second-their mic stands, the five props they danced with, were missing. Yeeun’s mind whirred. She looked at the others, glancing between each of them, and then she turned to the crowd.
“We’re going to sing a song called Nobody,” she said, her voice echoing through the arena. She could hear her heart pounding. “This song has very catchy dance moves we would like to teach you!” She smiled and listened to her voice reverberate.
Suddenly Sohee shouted out, “Everybody stand up!”
The arena rose to its feet.
They taught them to point and clap in rhythm, and the arena followed. The music of their song started and Yubin took her place in the center and told the crowd, “You know I still love you, baby.” The crowd stayed on their feet. Yeeun felt a smile spread on her face.
It was a very long war they were waging.
But, finally, they’d won a battle.
“We will probably never enjoy the same level of success as back then, but I do not believe we lost anything, and I don’t regret moving to the U.S.”
- Yeeun
2010 - Wonder Girls US Tour
They should have expected Sunmi to leave.
All of the signs were there. It wasn’t only how depressed she seemed, but how in all that time spent in the country Sunmi never seemed to hear America’s siren song that lured Park Jinyoung to drag the five of them across the Pacific. Yeeun heard it, sometimes, as she wandered around New York City at night. It wasn’t only the money they could get a share of, or the prestige of being the first Koreans to make a dent in whatever market they could. It was something indefinable. Yeeun heard it sometimes humming from the city streets, a tune just out of reach. But Sunmi never heard it.
A four-membered group was, as far as the Asian market was concerned, an entirely different product than a five-membered group. Maybe they could have carried on with just the four of them, but the gaps left in the choreography seemed glaring, and Yeeun knew that a pop group was rarely more than its concept, whether she liked it or not. So she wasn’t surprised when Park Jinyoung plucked from the trainees the only one who could speak English-and Mandarin, and Cantonese-and dropped a wide-eyed Hyerim into Sunmi’s slot.
This was how they started their own US tour: a group trying to stand up again after taking a hit. Moving on and pretending nothing was wrong. When Hyuna left them all those years ago, they were all too young and dazed by the next round of promotions to really understand what was happening to them. And Yubin was older than them. And “Tell Me” was a runaway hit. A US Tour was a bad place to bring a new member with shaky confidence, even though Yeeun understood. She understood-and it made it more painful to watch, seeing her own deeply internalized fears reflected in Hyerim’s expression every time they did an interview.
But even so, the first time Yeeun stepped into that small, empty theater in Washington, D.C., and looked around at the seats, it took the breath out of her. Park Jinyoung had been peddling the American Dream to them since Yeeun was eighteen. And now she was here, standing in the spotlight.
“Excuse me, World Star,” Junho said cheekily as he pushed past her backstage, heading up to his own rehearsals. He winked and Yeeun rolled her eyes.
“Are you making fun of me?” she asked.
Because she wondered, a tingling fear in the back of her mind, how many fans were showing up for 2PM’s opening act, buying Wonder Girls’ tickets just to watch the guys tear off their shirts. She wondered if, after everything, she was still fighting for the spotlight with her male counterparts.
Junho stopped and looked at her. “No,” he said, looking confused. “I just thought maybe you’d want a new title, seeing as you’re starting your own world tour. I’m just the opening act.” He shrugged his shoulders and grinned, then disappeared down the hall.
“Yeah,” Yeeun scoffed under her breath. “And you get to go home.”
But when the music started and the spotlight flared behind her, Yeeun felt her stage-self take over.
Going home didn’t matter. Perfect English didn’t matter. Breaking even on their concert tour didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was the roar of the crowd, and her voice rising above it.
Their schedule during those weeks was nearly impossible to follow. They spent more time on airplanes than on solid ground, Yeeun was quite sure, criss-crossing the country so many times Yeeun was tempted to write the name of the city she was in on her hand so she didn’t say the wrong thing on stage. But of course, the cameras would capture it, so she didn’t.
After San Francisco they went to Singapore. Yeeun couldn’t sleep on the flight so she started tallying up the miles she had flown just to see how many times she had circumnavigated the globe. Yubin watched over her shoulder as Yeeun added the numbers up on a corner of the in-flight magazine, flipping to the back to see the distance between places.
“You missed one,” Yubin said. “We flew back and forth between Seoul between these performances.”
“Why did we do that?” Yeeun asked, trying to remember that flight. “Why didn’t we just fly directly between the stops?”
Yubin shrugged and Yeeun added in the numbers. She looked back up, and realized she’d added some of them wrong, and gave up. Maybe her residency wasn’t on land anymore, but in airplanes-the life of the modern pop star. It was thrilling. But sometimes she just wanted to go home.
The chance to go home came too soon.
They flew to Seoul to attend Sunye’s father’s funeral.
Four days after the funeral, The Wonder Girls held a concert in Vancouver. Yeeun kept an eye on Sunye backstage, and the other girls and the staff did the same, but she never faltered once. Not until the end of the night, when she staggered into the hotel room and went to sleep immediately.
The next day they flew to their concert stop in Seattle. After soundcheck, Yeeun found Sunye sitting on a bench in a back hallway of the theater, staring absently at the wall. The last time Yeeun saw her she was talking with Jo Kwon, leaning on the support of her best friend. It worried Yeeun to see her alone.
She sat down next to Sunye on the bench. For a long moment they were quiet, only the sounds from the stage and 2AM’s rehearsal to dull the silence.
“I’m okay,” Sunye said finally. “Really.”
Yeeun picked at the fraying hem of her jean shorts. She didn’t think Sunye was “okay” unless “okay” was relative. Sunye lost her mother when she was four years old and barely had a relationship with her father, who spent too much time drunk and, later, severely ill. She’d lost her grandfather as well, and spent so much time away from the family members she had left. Barely three days after the funeral and she’d gotten on a plane again.
“You didn’t have to come back,” Yeeun said. She knew it was a lie but she wanted to say it anyway.
Sunye laughed. Of course she had to come back. They both knew that far too many people’s paychecks relied on the five of them showing up to their performance, and they’d already postponed one show. They both knew that the concert tour was losing money, whether or not Park Jinyoung admitted as much to them. They’d spent too many years in this industry not to know these things. Sunye had grown up being fed the JYP dream.
“It’s just sometimes,” Sunye said, her voice soft like she wasn’t sure she wanted to voice her thoughts, “I start to wonder what I’m doing here. I mean-” She paused, trying not to cry. “If I hadn’t been-if I had been home all this time-and I know it’s not worth imagining what things might have been like. I’m here and I’m grateful to be here and I wouldn’t undo it but if I hadn’t been flying all over the world then maybe-” She stopped again. 2AM’s distant voices rang in the quiet.
“You’re a good daughter,” Yeeun said firmly.
Sunye wiped a tear off of her cheek and blinked back the rest.
“What happens if we fail?” she asked. She looked over at Yeeun and smiled in a sad way. “If we fail at this-will we be okay?”
“You will be,” Yeeun said.
“What about you?” Sunye asked. When Yeeun didn’t respond, Sunye shook her head, her lips pressed together as she held her emotions at bay. “I should have fought harder. I should have refused, before we jumped into all this. We knew what we were getting ourselves into. We still said yes.”
“And?” Yeeun asked. “Would you give it up?”
Sunye went on staring at the cracked paint of the wall opposite them. Yeeun pondered the question herself-would she give up the weeks spent in New York City? Would she give up the hundreds of cities she’d seen? Would she give up the chance to learn another language, to hear her voice in a thousand different venues, all across the world? Would she even give up the weeks they’d struggled, performers less than nothing, attempting the impossible-an American breakthrough?
“No,” Sunye said, laughing lightly. She glanced over at Yeeun. “I don’t even know who I’d be right now, if we’d stayed.” She gripped Yeeun’s hand firmly and rested her head back against the wall. “At least I got to see him before he died.”
They sat there for a while longer, not speaking, until Sohee appeared around the corner. “They’re ready to do your makeup,” she said to Sunye, her impassive face drawn with the slightest concern. Sunye nodded and stood to follow her, and Sohee-who so rarely showed affection these days, reminding Yeeun that their maknae was growing up-looped her arm through Sunye’s as they returned to the dressing rooms.
Yeeun sat and looked at the chipped paint. Back hallway of some theater in America. On a concert tour that might not break even. And yet. She wouldn’t give it up. She had to see what lay down this road, even if it led nowhere at all.
“Our plight seemed pitiful to others. A lot of people were worried about what would happen if we failed. But we’re still young, so even if we fail now we have nothing much to lose. Many people were worried about whether ‘we lost everything.’ Even if we did not achieve success in the U.S., we have learnt many things.”
- Yeeun
2012 - Christmas Party, Seoul
In the end they watched their career slip slowly from their hands.
They watched Park Jinyoung chase after streams of money that inevitably dried up. They threw themselves into projects that were too often just broken promises-a movie shorter than what they’d filmed, and barely promoted. A series of investors who liked the pitch but couldn’t really see a niche to be filled by five “identical” Asian girls. A network of business partners that never really followed through when it came down to the almighty dollar. Whenever they returned to Korea, they walked into their home country less like queens returned to their rightful throne and more like war-hardened soldiers who knew their battles lay elsewhere. They could be jealous of the too-numerous girl groups that rose up in their absence, but jealousy took energy they didn’t have. Yeeun felt its sting only occasionally, when the articles she read made it sound like the five of them hadn’t worked hard enough.
Park Jinyoung-whom she respected and understood all too well-always had his way to put a spin on it. He would say, “we have climbed the first step in this journey,” except he never mentioned that the step was so tall it lifted high into the sky, and that it was made of ice, so as they climbed it they were always sliding backwards and their hands were numb and he was pulling them up behind him by the wrist. And he never mentioned that after each step lay another one, bigger and more difficult. Eventually, the five of them just wanted to go home. And when the money dried up-what else was he supposed to ask of them?
Yeeun got an apartment with Hyerim and Yubin and Sunmi, who was slated for a solo debut. Sohee started making plans for herself, plans she had been putting off for years so she could honor her commitments to The Wonder Girls. Yeeun wondered, sometimes, what made Sohee stick it out all those years. Every criticism any of them received was like an invisible scar dug into their skin, and if those scars could be made visible, Yeeun knew Sohee’s would look the worst of them all. But every time Yeeun asked, all Sohee would say was “I couldn’t quit.” And somehow, Yeeun understood.
And Sunye, by some stroke of luck that had so rarely befallen her before, fell in love and got engaged.
It was like this, looking forward to an uncertain future, that the six of them gathered together for a Christmas party that year, cooking food together and telling old stories about odd fans and on-stage mishaps, stories they’d told over and over again, but no one understood quite as well as each other.
Yeeun looked around at them as they sat down to eat. Six girls who had wanted only to be famous, not knowing what that meant until they were looking back on it.
“What happens now?” she asked.
They looked around at each other, and Yeeun marveled that the six of them were all here together. But then again, no one but the six of them had gone through what they did, the rise to fame and then chipping away at the American dream, and coming home both less and more than what they were when they left. They came home wise.
“I don’t know,” Yubin said. She grinned. “I do know that we had some kickass songs.”
“Toast to that,” Yeeun agreed, and they all lifted their glasses and laughed.
“We saw the whole world,” Sohee said. “The whole world, I’m pretty sure.”
“I can still introduce myself in fifteen languages,” Hyerim agreed. “And I think I forgot a few.”
“Sunye found true love,” Yubin cooed, reaching over to pat Sunye on the head. Sunye scrunched up her nose, but she laughed, then straightened back up and tilted her wine glass back and forth, getting the contemplative look they all knew so well.
“Think about all the people we met,” Sunye said, “Not just my fiance, but all the staff who went with us, all the friends we made, all the things we learned-none of that would have happened if we’d stayed here.”
“I don’t want to measure success by how well our career went,” Sohee said.
“It’s not over yet, anyhow,” Sunmi echoed. “Not really. Not if it’s up to us and what we want.”
Hyerim gave Yeeun a look. “Unnie,” she said, “What is it that you want?”
Yeeun chewed her lip and stared at her glass. Sometimes when she thought about the future, she felt her options narrowing-and sometimes she felt like the whole world lay open in front of her.
“I want to make music,” she said, a smile growing on her lips. “I want to see what I’m really capable of.”
Sunmi sat up and held up her glass. “To the future CEO of JYP Entertainment, Park Yeeun!” she announced, then burst into giggles. They all laughed, but Yeeun could feel them watching her, and she knew what they were all thinking. Sunmi was right-it wasn’t over yet.
For a long time Yeeun had been the tiny ballerina in a music box, dancing on cue, singing only one song. But now, no matter how much it hurt, she was going to come to life.
Someone told me that it’s over for me
But now you see me standing on the ash
- “Iron Girl,” Ha:tfelt ft. Hyerim
“Would you do it all again?”
Yeeun smiles. “If you’d told me when I was twenty years old what would happen, I don’t think I would have agreed.” As she waits for the interviewer to scribble down her words, an inexplicable calm comes over her. Her life isn’t perfect, isn’t what she expected. And somehow, that’s what makes it worth it.
“But I think,” Yeeun continues, “From where I’m standing now-well, I’d have to do it all again, the good and the bad. Or else I wouldn’t be who I am.”
Poll
Team: Canon/AR
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 5701
Fandom: Wonder Girls; Yeeun-centric
Pairing: None
Summary: “Our plight seemed pitiful to others. A lot of people were worried about what would happen if we failed.” Yeeun, and chasing after the American Dream.
Author's Note: Many thanks to my very dear friend Moonstone, to Biscuit 007 for listening to me whine a lot and encouraging me to keep writing, to J.D Vector Slice for setting up several important group chats and encouraging me as well, and also to Agent Yuna, agent porcupine, and Agent A for reading my fic or being around for pep talks and etc.! And the rest of the team as well!
Prompt Used: Yoon JungShin - Exhausted and supplementary prompt #2 (http://41.media.tumblr.com/ac9f9a93cc6b888d51edbe290bf933cc/tumblr_ncctelJOBC1tajh7zo1_500.png)
The world sees what it wants to see
But I’m more than just what you see
What you see is just the half of me
Iron girl, is what’s inside here
- “Iron Girl,” Ha:tfelt ft. Hyerim
“What were those years really like?”
The interviewer’s lips quirk just a little at the corners, like she’s expecting something specific, a good quote her magazine can paste up in different colored letters and run the whole story around. Yeeun blinks, sliding her expression into a blank, pleasant mask she spent years perfecting as an idol.
“I loved my life in New York,” she says. It’s honest. What you learn as a pop star is that the truth is multi-faceted, and your job is only to show the face of the truth that maintains the story of whoever you pretend to be on screen.
If Yeeun wanted to tell the truth-the whole truth-she’d say more than just that.
In truth she too often felt like the tiny ballerina figurine in a music box. Toted from place to place, set out in front of an audience, she would dance when someone wound the gears and repeat the same dance to one thin and unchanging tune.
This wasn’t the whole truth either, though. Which is why she never tries to tell the truth in interviews. Complexity never goes over well in this business.
The interviewer watches her with a slight gleam in her eyes, and Yeeun steels herself for the next question.
The interviewer smiles. “Would you do it all again?”
Yeeun opens her mouth. She hesitates.
“Wonder Girls is a group that came together because of fate.”
-Yeeun
2008 - MKMF Awards
Every so often, a song sinks its teeth into a nation. The tune is inescapable, blasting from the speakers of every store and taxi radio, mimicked by both young and old, seeping out from the nation into the rest of the world. Fast-forward four years from that night and the song would be “Gangnam Style.” But that year, it was five girls in matching dresses, looking into the cameras and promising, “I want nobody but you.”
The awards ceremony quivered with all the hopes and dreams of so many pop artists stuck in one building. Five girls sat in a back row, purple dresses, eyelids heavy with makeup, listening to the presenter read from the teleprompter. The screams of the audience rang in their ears.
“It will be Big Bang,” Sunmi whispered to herself, like a mantra, her knuckles white as she gripped tightly to Yeeun’s hand. “We already won too much, it’s fate, or something-”
“Don’t worry,” Sunye said automatically. Her eyes were closed, the picture of serenity. Yeeun chewed at her lip, then remembered her make-up, and stopped. It was no use worrying.
They all already knew the balance between wanting something, and wanting it too badly, and how the latter always seemed to lead to disappointment. The crowd roared behind them. Yubin squeezed her eyes shut tight and Sohee kept her expression cold, impassive, a practiced mask. Yeeun watched the presenter, not quite able to follow the words coming out of his mouth as her mind buzzed with nervous energy. Winning or losing, it didn’t matter-
But then the name “Wonder Girls!” reverberated through the building and all five girls slipped into that space of silent shock. They were The Nation’s Little Sisters and they stood up from their seats in rehearsed unison, but the surprise on their faces was genuine. Tears came naturally as they walked onto the stage, none of them quite aware of the floor beneath their feet or the crowd roaring with delight, as though it were all happening in a dream.
They took the stage, took their award. Yeeun pushed Sunye up to the microphone and watched as their leader stood there, listening to the crowd cheering, trying to compose herself.
“We won the best newcomer award last year,” Sunye began. The crowd went on cheering. Strains of nobody, nobody but you played through Yeeun’s head.
Sunye paused so as not to cry and then continued. “And we are so, so thankful to receive such a big award this year. Everyone who has loved our music-we promise to be here again next year, with a better song. Thank you to our JYP staff, Park Jinyoung who wrote us a beautiful song, and our fans-you’ve been with us all this time. We will work even harder. Thank you!”
The crowd roared. Their song blasted through the speakers. The five of them looked at each other.
After the ceremony was over, when songs started playing and the other artists started getting up to leave-then the tears came and they helped each other wipe the tears away so their makeup wouldn’t smear. They turned and waved to the crowd in the stadium seats. Finally they left, bowing their way out.
They didn’t know it yet. But they were standing at the summit of their career.
Not even a week later, Park Jinyoung was calling Yeeun into his office so he could ask the question she knew was coming:
“Do you want to stay here and fail, or go to America and see what happens?”
“A lot of people think we were just dressed up in JYP clothes, with nothing inside.”
-Yeeun
2009 - Jonas Brothers Tour
Their fan sign table was set up underneath a white tent, but it did nothing to keep out the heat. The American crew set up large fans around them, smiling helpfully as the blades spun to life, but Yeeun could already feel her makeup congealing. Every time she blinked, her eyelashes felt heavier, and the sequins on her dress itched worse. She could see the faint line of sweat starting to stain the arm of Sunmi’s dress, beads of sweat collecting just at the top of Sunye’s eyebrows. Yeeun felt sweat on the back of her own neck collect and slide down her back. It had been twenty minutes, and no one had appeared at their table yet.
“This is humiliating,” Yeeun hissed at Sunye, saying it under her breath, so that their manager behind them wouldn’t hear. She always felt like she needed to protect the managers, somehow, to be the smiling face of the whole show for them as much as for the fans.
Sunye shrugged. “Be patient.” She glanced over at Yeeun, her movements sluggish, as though she were set into slow motion by the heat. “Did you think we were going to become famous overnight?”
Yeeun arched an eyebrow and picked up one of the pictures of The Wonder Girls that sat, unsigned, on the table in front of her. “We are famous.”
On the other side of Sunye, Sohee snorted. “Not here.”
Sunmi put her head down onto the table and sighed, lifting up her arms and fanning at her armpits. Yubin seemed to have actually fallen asleep sitting up. Yeeun wondered what would happen if she grabbed their photos off the table and went out into the crowd of teenage American girls drifting out there in the beating sunlight, and started handing them out. She could imagine their confused smiles, their derisive laughs. But at least she would be doing something.
They’d already had several concert stops, and it was the same charade every time. Fan sign table. Some Asian-American fans would show up, maybe the occasional non-Asian, but mostly their table was like something out of an old American Western film, the ones with the tumbleweeds rolling across a silent, deserted street. Then, later, they would go into an arena filled with the same teenage girls who had ignored them, the teenage girls who were there wanting to see three marginally attractive American boys play halfway decent pop songs, and they pasted on smiles and launched into “Tell Me” and “Nobody.” But the atmosphere was not good.
Yeeun was sick of singing the same songs she’d been singing for so long, but she was business savvy. She knew what Park Jin-young’s reasoning was. You sing the songs that made you famous in the first place, because they obviously had some kind of magic to them. If you think you’re going to stab your eyes out if you have to sing “I want nobody, nobody but you!” one more time, you get over it. You do your job. But still, it was disheartening to perform for a crowd that didn’t want you, with no resolution in sight. And they only had thirteen tour stops to prove themselves.
Yeeun stood up and grabbed the pictures off the table. She straightened out her shoulders, holding the glossy pages to her body, and gained her footing on her thin high heels in the dirt. The other four looked up at her, their eyebrows creased, but no one said anything. Yeeun looked at Sunye.
Sunye stared back at her for a moment. “I don’t think it will make a difference,” she said, each word measured, like she thought Yeeun was losing it.
“I don’t care,” Yeeun said. “I have to do-I just have to do, okay, and not just sit anymore. Are you coming with me or not?”
Sunye glanced at Yubin. Sunmi’s head was still down on the table. She could have heatstroke, or something like that. Sohee was just watching Yeeun, not looking her quite in the eyes, like a cat.
“Yeah, okay,” Sunye said finally, and stood, gathering the pictures into a careful stack. She lifted the stack into her arms and straightened up, giving Yeeun a steady gaze. “Don’t let it hurt too much though, okay?”
Yeeun didn’t respond, but turned and marched out into the sunlight and the English-only crowds. She knew what waited for her out here. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
Of the whole tour, they were the last on the list-of the least importance, below even the crew. They sang two songs to the other opening artists’ five each. After concerts, The Jonas Brothers went off in their fancy jet. The Wonder Girls took a tour bus.
Yeeun could not get used to sleeping on a bus rattling its way down an American highway. Most nights she lay awake, listening to Park Jin-young snoring from one of the bunks, the soft sounds of Sunmi crying in her bunk, the whispering English drifting up from the front of the bus. She got used to repeating Park Jin-young’s words in her head because it was something, at least. If you’re at the top you will inevitably fall. If you don’t try for a new goal you will never know if you could have succeeded. We are nobody here. We work our way up from the bottom rungs.
Yeeun groaned and flopped over onto her side. Tomorrow was another performance, another American city full of English-only teenagers filled with pubescent lust for three boys marketed to perfection. The idea of them stopping to pay attention to a group of dressed-alike Koreans was becoming more laughable every day. And Yeeun was exhausted.
She climbed out from her bunk and found some slippers. The bus was full of only road noise; Sunmi had likely cried herself to sleep by now. They all did what they could for her, but at some point there wasn’t anything left to do. After all, they were all here, on this same bus, trapped on an American highway.
Yeeun found Sunye sitting on one of the couches, frowning at her cell phone. She looked up at Yeeun, smiled a little, and moved over.
“My dad messaged me,” she said. She didn’t continue, though. Not that she needed to-that statement alone could mean a world of things.
“He’s okay?” Yeeun asked. Sunye just shrugged. Yeeun tried to remember when she’d last spoken to her own family, but already the days ran together. She counted them up in her head and realized they’d only been touring for a week. Thirteen performances to prove themselves. Climb up the ladder from the very bottom rungs. Meanwhile Girls’ Generation was snagging all their old endorsements and-
“What’s wrong?” Sunye asked. Yeeun shook herself. Rolled her eyes because that was better than crying.
“We need to fix our performances,” she said. “We can make them better. We can make this work.”
“I think so, too.”
They looked up and saw that Yubin had gotten up, too, nursing a water bottle in her hands and smiling, though the shadows underneath her eyes were dark. They were busy now, but for the first few months in America they’d had nothing to do, and spent too many nights staying up late to be on Korean time so they could talk to people back home. It was taking a toll, now.
Yubin sat down next to them and held her hands out, like she expected a solution to fall into them. “We are damn good performers,” she said.
Sunye laughed. Genuine smile. It gave Yeeun a little bit of hope.
“When all five of us are on stage, it works,” Yeeun agreed. Yubin nudged her with a goofy smile, urging her to continue.
“Nobody is catchy,” Sunye said. “If we were in Korea, everyone would be dancing along-” She stopped and looked at the other two, an idea forming in her eyes.
Yeeun lifted an eyebrow. “So we teach the dance,” she said.
“We teach the dance.” Yubin clapped her hands together like it had been decided. Yeeun grinned at the other two, even though doubts lingered. Too much was still up to other people. How many connections could they get-how much would Park Jin-young manage before he wore himself out trying to sell the concept to Americans? And what difference would it make, really-thirteen tour stops and then they were back to anonymity in a country where they knew nothing.
But it was something to do. It was better than watching their performances fall flat every night.
The concert’s management team did not think that teaching the Nobody dance would be a good idea.
The girls resumed handing out their own flyers.
Yeeun wished that in high school she’d had at least one English lesson on “rude things said by American girls if you walk up to them before a Jonas Brothers concert” but, on second thought, it was probably better not to know. She just kept her smile in place, repeated the words “thank you” as much as necessary, and kept going. Whenever someone did approach them, wanting a photograph, it was hard to hold back tears of gratitude. Maybe it was better this way-if they’d stayed in Korea, Sohee might have turned into a total bitch.
When Yeeun told her as much on the bus one night, Sohee just stared at her. “Me?” she said, deadpan. “What about you?”
And then they started laughing hysterically, falling over into the bunk, snorting with laughter. It felt good to laugh, and that was probably why it was so hard to stop.
“PD-nim!” Yeeun called out, looking for Park Jin-young, who was eating potato chips on the couch. “Who would have had worse celebrity-disease, me or Sohee?”
He just laughed at them, while the other three girls called out from their bunks, “Park Yeeun!” Yeeun rolled her eyes.
“I’m not the nation’s little sister though, am I?” she said prodding Sohee’s cheek. That earned her a truly frightening glare.
“Yeah, well,” Sohee shrugged. “Here that’s Hannah Montana, isn’t it?”
Something about the way Sohee formed the syllables of “Hannah Montana” made Yeeun burst into giggles again. But eventually the laughter died off, and Yeeun returned to her own bunk, lying awake listening to the sound of America rolling by outside.
The concert was running behind. When a concert of that size ran late, it meant that everyone was pushed back. All the opening artists had one song cut, which for the others meant singing four instead of five. For the Wonder Girls, it meant singing only one.
Yeeun kicked the toe of her high heel against the wall next to her as their manager related the news. Disappointment rattled through her bones. She couldn’t look at the others, but she could picture Sunye’s resolute calm and Sohee’s blank expression and Sunmi turning away so she wouldn’t cry. When Yeeun did look up, Yubin shrugged her shoulders, the slightest smile playing on her lips.
“It is what it is,” Yubin said. Sometimes Yeeun wasn’t sure when Yubin meant what she said, and when she said things just because she thought the rest of them needed to hear it. Maybe it didn’t matter.
After a long period of waiting in near silence, practicing English introductions under their breath, it was their turn to the stage. They walked out into the arena, listening to the roar of the crowd. Yeeun remembered walking into arenas screaming only for them. What would it take to have this arena, too?
She adjusted her mic pack as she walked on stage, so she didn’t see the problem until the last second-their mic stands, the five props they danced with, were missing. Yeeun’s mind whirred. She looked at the others, glancing between each of them, and then she turned to the crowd.
“We’re going to sing a song called Nobody,” she said, her voice echoing through the arena. She could hear her heart pounding. “This song has very catchy dance moves we would like to teach you!” She smiled and listened to her voice reverberate.
Suddenly Sohee shouted out, “Everybody stand up!”
The arena rose to its feet.
They taught them to point and clap in rhythm, and the arena followed. The music of their song started and Yubin took her place in the center and told the crowd, “You know I still love you, baby.” The crowd stayed on their feet. Yeeun felt a smile spread on her face.
It was a very long war they were waging.
But, finally, they’d won a battle.
“We will probably never enjoy the same level of success as back then, but I do not believe we lost anything, and I don’t regret moving to the U.S.”
- Yeeun
2010 - Wonder Girls US Tour
They should have expected Sunmi to leave.
All of the signs were there. It wasn’t only how depressed she seemed, but how in all that time spent in the country Sunmi never seemed to hear America’s siren song that lured Park Jinyoung to drag the five of them across the Pacific. Yeeun heard it, sometimes, as she wandered around New York City at night. It wasn’t only the money they could get a share of, or the prestige of being the first Koreans to make a dent in whatever market they could. It was something indefinable. Yeeun heard it sometimes humming from the city streets, a tune just out of reach. But Sunmi never heard it.
A four-membered group was, as far as the Asian market was concerned, an entirely different product than a five-membered group. Maybe they could have carried on with just the four of them, but the gaps left in the choreography seemed glaring, and Yeeun knew that a pop group was rarely more than its concept, whether she liked it or not. So she wasn’t surprised when Park Jinyoung plucked from the trainees the only one who could speak English-and Mandarin, and Cantonese-and dropped a wide-eyed Hyerim into Sunmi’s slot.
This was how they started their own US tour: a group trying to stand up again after taking a hit. Moving on and pretending nothing was wrong. When Hyuna left them all those years ago, they were all too young and dazed by the next round of promotions to really understand what was happening to them. And Yubin was older than them. And “Tell Me” was a runaway hit. A US Tour was a bad place to bring a new member with shaky confidence, even though Yeeun understood. She understood-and it made it more painful to watch, seeing her own deeply internalized fears reflected in Hyerim’s expression every time they did an interview.
But even so, the first time Yeeun stepped into that small, empty theater in Washington, D.C., and looked around at the seats, it took the breath out of her. Park Jinyoung had been peddling the American Dream to them since Yeeun was eighteen. And now she was here, standing in the spotlight.
“Excuse me, World Star,” Junho said cheekily as he pushed past her backstage, heading up to his own rehearsals. He winked and Yeeun rolled her eyes.
“Are you making fun of me?” she asked.
Because she wondered, a tingling fear in the back of her mind, how many fans were showing up for 2PM’s opening act, buying Wonder Girls’ tickets just to watch the guys tear off their shirts. She wondered if, after everything, she was still fighting for the spotlight with her male counterparts.
Junho stopped and looked at her. “No,” he said, looking confused. “I just thought maybe you’d want a new title, seeing as you’re starting your own world tour. I’m just the opening act.” He shrugged his shoulders and grinned, then disappeared down the hall.
“Yeah,” Yeeun scoffed under her breath. “And you get to go home.”
But when the music started and the spotlight flared behind her, Yeeun felt her stage-self take over.
Going home didn’t matter. Perfect English didn’t matter. Breaking even on their concert tour didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was the roar of the crowd, and her voice rising above it.
Their schedule during those weeks was nearly impossible to follow. They spent more time on airplanes than on solid ground, Yeeun was quite sure, criss-crossing the country so many times Yeeun was tempted to write the name of the city she was in on her hand so she didn’t say the wrong thing on stage. But of course, the cameras would capture it, so she didn’t.
After San Francisco they went to Singapore. Yeeun couldn’t sleep on the flight so she started tallying up the miles she had flown just to see how many times she had circumnavigated the globe. Yubin watched over her shoulder as Yeeun added the numbers up on a corner of the in-flight magazine, flipping to the back to see the distance between places.
“You missed one,” Yubin said. “We flew back and forth between Seoul between these performances.”
“Why did we do that?” Yeeun asked, trying to remember that flight. “Why didn’t we just fly directly between the stops?”
Yubin shrugged and Yeeun added in the numbers. She looked back up, and realized she’d added some of them wrong, and gave up. Maybe her residency wasn’t on land anymore, but in airplanes-the life of the modern pop star. It was thrilling. But sometimes she just wanted to go home.
The chance to go home came too soon.
They flew to Seoul to attend Sunye’s father’s funeral.
Four days after the funeral, The Wonder Girls held a concert in Vancouver. Yeeun kept an eye on Sunye backstage, and the other girls and the staff did the same, but she never faltered once. Not until the end of the night, when she staggered into the hotel room and went to sleep immediately.
The next day they flew to their concert stop in Seattle. After soundcheck, Yeeun found Sunye sitting on a bench in a back hallway of the theater, staring absently at the wall. The last time Yeeun saw her she was talking with Jo Kwon, leaning on the support of her best friend. It worried Yeeun to see her alone.
She sat down next to Sunye on the bench. For a long moment they were quiet, only the sounds from the stage and 2AM’s rehearsal to dull the silence.
“I’m okay,” Sunye said finally. “Really.”
Yeeun picked at the fraying hem of her jean shorts. She didn’t think Sunye was “okay” unless “okay” was relative. Sunye lost her mother when she was four years old and barely had a relationship with her father, who spent too much time drunk and, later, severely ill. She’d lost her grandfather as well, and spent so much time away from the family members she had left. Barely three days after the funeral and she’d gotten on a plane again.
“You didn’t have to come back,” Yeeun said. She knew it was a lie but she wanted to say it anyway.
Sunye laughed. Of course she had to come back. They both knew that far too many people’s paychecks relied on the five of them showing up to their performance, and they’d already postponed one show. They both knew that the concert tour was losing money, whether or not Park Jinyoung admitted as much to them. They’d spent too many years in this industry not to know these things. Sunye had grown up being fed the JYP dream.
“It’s just sometimes,” Sunye said, her voice soft like she wasn’t sure she wanted to voice her thoughts, “I start to wonder what I’m doing here. I mean-” She paused, trying not to cry. “If I hadn’t been-if I had been home all this time-and I know it’s not worth imagining what things might have been like. I’m here and I’m grateful to be here and I wouldn’t undo it but if I hadn’t been flying all over the world then maybe-” She stopped again. 2AM’s distant voices rang in the quiet.
“You’re a good daughter,” Yeeun said firmly.
Sunye wiped a tear off of her cheek and blinked back the rest.
“What happens if we fail?” she asked. She looked over at Yeeun and smiled in a sad way. “If we fail at this-will we be okay?”
“You will be,” Yeeun said.
“What about you?” Sunye asked. When Yeeun didn’t respond, Sunye shook her head, her lips pressed together as she held her emotions at bay. “I should have fought harder. I should have refused, before we jumped into all this. We knew what we were getting ourselves into. We still said yes.”
“And?” Yeeun asked. “Would you give it up?”
Sunye went on staring at the cracked paint of the wall opposite them. Yeeun pondered the question herself-would she give up the weeks spent in New York City? Would she give up the hundreds of cities she’d seen? Would she give up the chance to learn another language, to hear her voice in a thousand different venues, all across the world? Would she even give up the weeks they’d struggled, performers less than nothing, attempting the impossible-an American breakthrough?
“No,” Sunye said, laughing lightly. She glanced over at Yeeun. “I don’t even know who I’d be right now, if we’d stayed.” She gripped Yeeun’s hand firmly and rested her head back against the wall. “At least I got to see him before he died.”
They sat there for a while longer, not speaking, until Sohee appeared around the corner. “They’re ready to do your makeup,” she said to Sunye, her impassive face drawn with the slightest concern. Sunye nodded and stood to follow her, and Sohee-who so rarely showed affection these days, reminding Yeeun that their maknae was growing up-looped her arm through Sunye’s as they returned to the dressing rooms.
Yeeun sat and looked at the chipped paint. Back hallway of some theater in America. On a concert tour that might not break even. And yet. She wouldn’t give it up. She had to see what lay down this road, even if it led nowhere at all.
“Our plight seemed pitiful to others. A lot of people were worried about what would happen if we failed. But we’re still young, so even if we fail now we have nothing much to lose. Many people were worried about whether ‘we lost everything.’ Even if we did not achieve success in the U.S., we have learnt many things.”
- Yeeun
2012 - Christmas Party, Seoul
In the end they watched their career slip slowly from their hands.
They watched Park Jinyoung chase after streams of money that inevitably dried up. They threw themselves into projects that were too often just broken promises-a movie shorter than what they’d filmed, and barely promoted. A series of investors who liked the pitch but couldn’t really see a niche to be filled by five “identical” Asian girls. A network of business partners that never really followed through when it came down to the almighty dollar. Whenever they returned to Korea, they walked into their home country less like queens returned to their rightful throne and more like war-hardened soldiers who knew their battles lay elsewhere. They could be jealous of the too-numerous girl groups that rose up in their absence, but jealousy took energy they didn’t have. Yeeun felt its sting only occasionally, when the articles she read made it sound like the five of them hadn’t worked hard enough.
Park Jinyoung-whom she respected and understood all too well-always had his way to put a spin on it. He would say, “we have climbed the first step in this journey,” except he never mentioned that the step was so tall it lifted high into the sky, and that it was made of ice, so as they climbed it they were always sliding backwards and their hands were numb and he was pulling them up behind him by the wrist. And he never mentioned that after each step lay another one, bigger and more difficult. Eventually, the five of them just wanted to go home. And when the money dried up-what else was he supposed to ask of them?
Yeeun got an apartment with Hyerim and Yubin and Sunmi, who was slated for a solo debut. Sohee started making plans for herself, plans she had been putting off for years so she could honor her commitments to The Wonder Girls. Yeeun wondered, sometimes, what made Sohee stick it out all those years. Every criticism any of them received was like an invisible scar dug into their skin, and if those scars could be made visible, Yeeun knew Sohee’s would look the worst of them all. But every time Yeeun asked, all Sohee would say was “I couldn’t quit.” And somehow, Yeeun understood.
And Sunye, by some stroke of luck that had so rarely befallen her before, fell in love and got engaged.
It was like this, looking forward to an uncertain future, that the six of them gathered together for a Christmas party that year, cooking food together and telling old stories about odd fans and on-stage mishaps, stories they’d told over and over again, but no one understood quite as well as each other.
Yeeun looked around at them as they sat down to eat. Six girls who had wanted only to be famous, not knowing what that meant until they were looking back on it.
“What happens now?” she asked.
They looked around at each other, and Yeeun marveled that the six of them were all here together. But then again, no one but the six of them had gone through what they did, the rise to fame and then chipping away at the American dream, and coming home both less and more than what they were when they left. They came home wise.
“I don’t know,” Yubin said. She grinned. “I do know that we had some kickass songs.”
“Toast to that,” Yeeun agreed, and they all lifted their glasses and laughed.
“We saw the whole world,” Sohee said. “The whole world, I’m pretty sure.”
“I can still introduce myself in fifteen languages,” Hyerim agreed. “And I think I forgot a few.”
“Sunye found true love,” Yubin cooed, reaching over to pat Sunye on the head. Sunye scrunched up her nose, but she laughed, then straightened back up and tilted her wine glass back and forth, getting the contemplative look they all knew so well.
“Think about all the people we met,” Sunye said, “Not just my fiance, but all the staff who went with us, all the friends we made, all the things we learned-none of that would have happened if we’d stayed here.”
“I don’t want to measure success by how well our career went,” Sohee said.
“It’s not over yet, anyhow,” Sunmi echoed. “Not really. Not if it’s up to us and what we want.”
Hyerim gave Yeeun a look. “Unnie,” she said, “What is it that you want?”
Yeeun chewed her lip and stared at her glass. Sometimes when she thought about the future, she felt her options narrowing-and sometimes she felt like the whole world lay open in front of her.
“I want to make music,” she said, a smile growing on her lips. “I want to see what I’m really capable of.”
Sunmi sat up and held up her glass. “To the future CEO of JYP Entertainment, Park Yeeun!” she announced, then burst into giggles. They all laughed, but Yeeun could feel them watching her, and she knew what they were all thinking. Sunmi was right-it wasn’t over yet.
For a long time Yeeun had been the tiny ballerina in a music box, dancing on cue, singing only one song. But now, no matter how much it hurt, she was going to come to life.
Someone told me that it’s over for me
But now you see me standing on the ash
- “Iron Girl,” Ha:tfelt ft. Hyerim
“Would you do it all again?”
Yeeun smiles. “If you’d told me when I was twenty years old what would happen, I don’t think I would have agreed.” As she waits for the interviewer to scribble down her words, an inexplicable calm comes over her. Her life isn’t perfect, isn’t what she expected. And somehow, that’s what makes it worth it.
“But I think,” Yeeun continues, “From where I’m standing now-well, I’d have to do it all again, the good and the bad. Or else I wouldn’t be who I am.”
Poll