Back to Site Table of Contents
(Written on March 24, 2024)
He spent his life standing with one foot in science, one foot in dreams, and his eyes on the whole world. He began crawling, then walking, then running on a path that would lead him everywhere.
His parental influences pulled him in two different directions. Mom was an artist who majored in Western painting. Dad was a scientist working in the biotech industry. He looked up to his father, and math and science were his favorite subjects in school, so he thought he would be a scientist like his dad. He even dissected a rat in his father’s laboratory. But that wasn’t truly who he was. He was curious about something else, also inspired by his father’s interests: music.
He would wake up
in the mornings to hear jazz or classical music coming from his father’s
surround sound stereo system. One of the
first songs he learned the words to was Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful
World.”
Dad’s work required travel, which meant that he would not be in his home country for long. He lived in Israel for four years, where he once got lost at three years old, toddling around, carrying a Slushee. He also lived in Boston for three years, where he was called by the English translation of his Korean name. Later, when he became a K-pop trainee, he would go by another translation of his surname.
When his family made it back to Korea and settled in Gwangju, his mind was now opened to other cultures, and he felt more a part of the world than a part of one country. He could see many points of view. The one thing he knew for certain is that he wanted to be a singer. He auditioned for an entertainment company called Special K and was accepted.
His parents were
understandably worried. They wanted him
to go to college. He knew they would
need something tangible to hold onto, some kind of proof that he was doing the
right thing, so he made them a promise.
Give him a couple of years to prove that he could do this. If he wanted to chase the same dream that
thousands of other Korean teenagers were chasing at the same time, struggling
for years to debut, with a very small chance of getting that far, he had to be
able to show them some success after a couple of years.
He did come close. He was supposed to debut in February 2014 with a band called Nu’Bility. It was doomed almost from the start. After a couple of live performances, four of the five members left, and the group fell apart in July.
He was eighteen years old and had lost one of the precious few chances a trainee gets. After getting so close, he still had nothing tangible to show his parents. No scientific evidence that his artistic choice was the right path.
Just a few months later, he was given another chance. An entertainment company called Starship was running a survival reality show called No Mercy. The goal was to put together a new boy band, debut them, and aggressively promote them. They reached out to him because they needed another rapper.
This was a huge opportunity. That tangible piece of evidence to show his parents that he was still going in the right direction.
But there was a
catch.
The show was already in progress. The trainees on the show had already bonded and seen three of their friends eliminated. The most recent cut was particularly devastating, leaving them openly crying onstage on national television. It also left them more determined to pull together and make it to the end. They had struggled and sweated and danced and sang and rapped their way through three missions, and they had made a New Year’s pact to debut together.
They would not be
at all happy to see him.
No comments:
Post a Comment