There comes a time in every teenager’s life where they seemingly go through a phase. Of course at that age of rapid development, physicialites and growth spurts casted aside, teenagers are more likely to surround themselves with various sorts of hobbies and cultivated interests as they try to cement their identity as individuals. For me, rather than bonding over minecraft and vines with my middle school friends as any other 6th grader would, I was left alone as the outcast with my affinity for all things kpop. As aforementioned, because K-pop was not as prominent as it is now, I was left to find my own group of people through the digital realm. The most common social media platforms that serve as archives for K-pop related topics are Tumblr, Amino, V-live, Instagram and Facebook.  It was only through these sites that I felt grounded amongst a community of people that share the same passion as mine for K-pop, whether it was because of the uniqueness that follows the genre in stylistic production or because in one way or another, we all understood what it meant to be prejudiced against our fondness for K-pop. After years of partaking in online forums and discussions, I eventually outgrew the online K-pop community as I begun to center my life with priorities and responsibilities that took place in the moment rather than those that were static. However, through a friend, I was led to the FSU’s very own Hallyu Wave club, a recreational student organization that revolves around learning and delving into Korean pop culture. This objective is achieved through participation in events such as dance showcases, auditions, club meetings, dance workshops, all of which work to also facilitate a thriving and meaningful fan-culture environment and experience beyond the campus club. It is through evaluation of existing on-the-ground research of these events as well as conducted personal interview with one of the club members, that my paper offers insight on how FSU’s Hallyu Wave helps students develop a more positive and accepting relationship with liking K-pop, additionally, ways that the club allows its members to grow through gained friendships and activities that encourage them to step out of their comfort zone. 

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As of November 15th of 2019, Hallyu Wave have been active at FSU for three years. It was first founded in 2016 by Monica Hasan, Jennie Lipscomb, Norma Ortiz, Chelsea Perez, & Madison Woodward. Thus far, Hallyu Wave is the first and only K-pop focused club here at FSU. It is an open group for individuals that either have had an interest in Kpop for an extensive amount of time or just now have begun to learn about it and want to continue pursuing that interest. The club is oriented towards creating a safe and positive space for its members to learn about Korean pop culture in an effort to spread diversity amongst the student organizations offered at FSU. In its relationship to larger society, the club examines aspects of K-pop as a global phenomenon and how particular cultural values contribute to its status as a widely-recognized genre. For instance, Korean beauty has become hugely popularized because of K-pop, as style is taken into heavy consideration for each performance. For stage production, the clothes and makeup themselves play as huge factors for effective conveyance of a particular story or theme that the song follows. This was what was learned through one general body meeting about Korean beauty and its standards as we observed Korea’s intricate skin care regimes and its most popular makeup looks through the instructional power-point. Afterwards, the meeting and presentation incited conversations about how drastically different Korean beauty is from standards found here in America. As evident, the club spends time on delving into multiple aspects of Korean pop culture and how these aspects have become global influences to how K-pop is being perceived. In doing so, the members also gain a better understanding of Korea and its culture as a whole since K-pop would first impact the society and its conventions  there. Furthermore, one of its additional purposes is to bring students with a common passion for K-pop together, naturally helping to form meaningful friendships outside of the club.  This is due to the nature of the club and the way it is heavily organized, as Hallyu Wave allows for multiple in-face and personal interactions to occur with each and every one of its meetings. At weekly-held meetings where you are more likely than not to see the same people and are required to participate in activities with high levels of engagement, it is hard to not have friends within the club. Whereas in middle school where k-pop was viewed as a factor that made me different from my peers and therefore inhibited me to form connections with them, the general purpose of creation of the Hallyu Wave club was to normalize liking K-pop. Though the club is for those with a vested interest in K-pop, it is not exclusive to long-time fans, since newer fans have a chance to participate and offer their input in certain areas. For example, the regular dance workshops revolve around the members and their suggestions on a song of their choosing, to learn from. From there, the members can choose to come to the dance workshops where there is a personal dancing instructor to simplify the choreography to smaller steps. Common elements that characterizes the workshops, would be that there would always be one requested song, open space that served as a practice area for dancing, and a handful amount of people from the club.

Since K-pop is a music and performance-centered genre, the club is unique in that it allows its members to directly interact with K-pop through the dance workshops, rather than passively so. In dancing, the individual gets to interpret the song in more intimate ways than just listening alone, since one would have to get a feel for the rhythm and follow the beats accordingly. Just as in any artistic production , where a performance can act out a central story and the musicians are responsible as storytellers, these devices are brought together to ultimately invoke emotion in its audiences. This is also one reason why K-pop and music in general, serves as healing factors for many people, since the general upbeatness and fast-paced tempo nature of K-pop can generate happy emotion from its listeners. From my previous experience in a few of the dance workshops, I unknowingly became more cheerful as I tried to intimate the instructed dance. As I turned around to observe my peers, I also noticed key aspects of laughter as people bonded over letting loose and released tension in appearing silly as they followed the dance. 

 With that, I eventually learned that the more immersed I am in the song and its main mood conveyance reflecting the theme, the more successful I would be in completing the routine. In fact, effective communication of the storyline through body movements is not only impertinent to dancing, but communication between the team members as well. Commonly, in the dance workshops, you are placed in a limited space with at least a classroom sized handful of people.  If allowed, these elements can constrain one to not learn the dance as effectively well. However, one could choose to see the potential in these limitations to become tools in order to successfully build meaningful relationships in the club. For instance, because of my status as a new dancer, I was able to encounter more opportunities to personally ask for help for steps that were not my strong suit. These actions aided me to become closer to people as I expanded my methods of communication beyond from what I was comfortable with. There were also many occurences of me bonding with another person over what we both found to be likeable qualities of the song or group. This interaction then progressed to us exchanging information about other groups that shared a similar concept and those that we think would suit the other person’s preferences. No longer was I self-conscious about my wide array of knowledge of K-pop, instead, finding a mutual friend through our shared love for similar bands and music.  This is one of the many ways FSU’s Hallyu Wave enable friendships to take place as well to spread a positive and comfortable environment for its members.

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 This encouragement for high levels of involvement in K-pop and dancing is further focused by the club’s annual showcase event, where a culmination of dance performances occur simultaneously in one evening. The performances range in number of people and concept, as it is fully up to the participant to choose whether to form a group or dance solo. Thus, people can take what they gained from the dance workshops in order to pull off a completely separate performance of their own. These factors could include newly founded ways to better cooperate with a number of people under limited conditions such as time and space. This is because the key to getting through any dance, particularly challenging ones, is persistence combined with teamwork. From the dance workshops, effective communication amongst a team-like setting was once again presented through the repetition of certain steps, each time a member struggled. This was so that everyone moved forward as a group, leaving no one behind. An individual forming a dance group of their own, could thereby learn to look for signs of affirmation from their teammates in an effort to ensure that everyone is on the same page, pacing-wise. My own experience being a part of the workshop helped me confirm these signs to be observing fixed  facial expressions by whether or not the displayed reactions of the members appear to be confused as I would be at times. This would be evident in my haphazard manner of looking around the other member’s body coordination whenever I forgot a certain step. Therefore, body language and stiffness could also contribute as indicative factors. Overall, it was a positive learning experience for me because I also learned how to ask for help when necessary. Normally, I am reserved and cautious as to not draw attention to myself but because I was surrounded by encouraging and like-minded individuals that genuinely wanted to make K-pop enjoyable, I was not afraid of being judged, regardless of being a weak dancer. Therefore, because of the dance workshops, I gained new friends and found better strategies on how to work alongside everyone else. The same could be applied to any other individual that participates in the annual fall concert since the showcase achieves the same effect in uniting a common group of people together from the workshop itself. The group would then have to navigate through similar struggles of relying on each other for assistance as well as foster a positive and encouraging group-environment, and make sure everyone is involved in order to pull off a successful performance. For that reason, it could be affirmed that Hallyu Wave is effective in utilizing aspects of the club such as the dance workshops and the showcase, to promote a community where the members are encouraged to be themselves and connect with friends as well to tear down the stigma that comes with liking K-pop.

 

Phuong Nguyen, a current freshmen and active club member of the Hallyu Wave club, agrees with my standing that the Hallyu Wave has been a positive experience and influential factor in the lives of its members thus far. Coming from a background where her high school was demographically Caucasian, she too felt misplaced as many of her own friends did not have the common interest of liking K-pop as she did. Throughout her years of being a K-pop fan, never once did she encounter a thriving K-pop club at her highschool. Like me, a majority of her experiences of being in a K-pop community was through the digital access of apps such as Amino, where members of different fangroups are encouraged to participate in forum  discussions over a newly released song, give group and music recommendations for newcomers to the group, or even curate and disperse creative content such as fanfiction and fanart. For her, FSU’s Hallyu Wave was her first encounter with a student organization that was solely focused on K-pop. Least to say, it was a haven. Phuong also expressed her passion in K-pop being mainly rooted around the dances, as they were what intrigued her the most, from their intricacies and level of extreme synchronization. As so, she instantly became fixated over the dance workshops and music performances offered through the club. Phuong continues expressing her overjoyment in discovery of Hallyu Wave by reminiscing one of her earliest interactions with the club members at involvement fair, “I was so fortunate to catch up to the club before they had to clean up their station. I remember being so overly ecstatic in meeting them that I had told them that I had watched all of their uploaded dance performances and wanted to find a way to join!”. She recalled the equally excited reactions of the Hallyu Wave members when they had found a new member to be recruited, stating that they were enthusiastic in sharing information about their club activities. When asked about the usual disposition of the executive club members and how helpful they were in guiding their new members to become acclimated, Phuong said that while some e-board members were more outgoing than others, all of them spread positive energy. Hallyu Wave was Phuong’s introductory club to all of the student organizations here, and because of their general helpful and inclusive nature, Phuong stated that she was overwhelmed by how “welcoming” FSU is.  She also mentioned that beyond the general body meetings, the members also go out of their way to set up meetings for newer K-pop fans to learn more about certain popular groups and their music as to not feel left out when the same group is brought up into conversation during other group meetings. To this, Phuong said “It was clear that the members put effort into the slides”. Once again, learning about this information from Phuong, it was clear that Hallyu Wave stressed the importance of inclusivity amongst all of its members, new or old, regardless of background. A reason for this being that a K-pop club is almost unheard of and is very rarely found anywhere else, making the club the only chance for FSU students to be locally involved with K-pop. If Hallyu Wave was to be the only K-pop student organization at FSU, they wanted to make sure that Hallyu Wave becomes “a second home to its members, with friends who truly care about and support each other like family”. Phuong noted that while K-pop fans still have somewhat of a bad reputation for being weird or over-obsessed, the club was further beneficial because everyone understood that struggle altogether and would have a group to fall back on for support in spite of what everyone thinks of them. From Phuong’s first impression of the club, she mentioned that the members were really passionate about K-pop, specifically that “they love it enough to want to fit it into their lives somehow” , which inspired her to get more involved as well. When asked about what she mostly gained from her involvement with the dance workshops, Phuong said that it allowed her to learn more about herself as well as to find ways to de-stress and cope with the burdens of school and life-responsibilities. Specifically, she learned that she needs more confidence when dancing as she feels that her self-consciousness of being judged inhibits her to become fully comfortable when practicing. However, she mentioned that in the first dance workshop, when she was with her brother, it made her a lot less anxious. In fact, it was a really stressful time for her in school, but because she was able to switch her mind’s focus to the dance instead of her classes, she said, “I became a lot happier and even called my mom afterwards to tell her all about the club and how much I wanted to keep doing it”. In regards to the first dance workshop, Phuong said she realized that liking k-pop could be “cool,'' now as she saw more people across diverse backgrounds get into K-pop through Hallyu Wave. The club and its members not only communicate through the workshops and meetings like these, but as Phuong discloses, there is also a central group chat where the club communicates externally beyond the club’s on-campus sites. From the group chat, Phuong tells me that she is able to learn more about K-pop as the more experienced members share links to new music and interesting findings that they think everyone would enjoy watching together.

 

From what I have researched and experienced in person, I also found myself relating to what Phuong experienced in regards to finally feeling accepted for who I am and having my interests finally noticed. At first, I found the club to be outside of what I was comfortable with but because I was forced to be in a shared space at close proximity with the same people for a number of hours, I quickly learned how to navigate my way around overcoming my reservations about meeting new people. And thus, the club and its set of various interactive activities has managed to impact me in a positive way. In turn, the members of Hallyu Wave fuel the club's growth and thrivance by taking what they have gained from the club, whether it be friendships or new dance moves, into creating new meaningful experiences of their own. For instance, the dance workshops promote people to join the showcase while the regular meetings encourage bonding outside of the club, via through the group chat. Because of that, the club has successfully achieved its central purpose. Overall, despite my brief experience in Hallyu Wave thus far, the club has already had positive impacts on my life, making it a community I wish I had exposure to earlier on.