The Birth of Korean Cool (12 page)

Wi Tack-whan, head of the Korean Culture and Tourism Institute, recalled, “You couldn’t have English words on your clothes or you’d get arrested. Even if you carried a guitar
around, they would take it away. Songs were a way of protest.”

I have to say, there are times when I feel I wouldn’t object to an ordinance against excessive public guitar-playing. If you’d ever been to a Korean picnic, you’d understand.
In the hands of an annoying person with no sense of self-awareness, a guitar is like a gun. At the school or multifamily picnics of my youth, someone—often, several people—would bring
guitars. For some reason, Korea’s favorite place to hold a picnic is on top of some mountain. I hate climbing and I hate the outdoors. So I would already be in a resentful mood, which would
only worsen when these guys would whip out their guitars and make everyone sing Korean folk songs that I didn’t know—and Koreans know lots and lots of songs. A guitar at a picnic
signals you will not be going home for a very long time.

That’s the basis of my guitar phobia. The late president Park Chung-hee’s guitar phobia must have been even more extreme, since he banned the songs of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and John
Lennon’s solo work, notably “Imagine.”

A tragic victim of the bans was Korean psychedelic rocker Shin Joong-hyun, sometimes called the “Godfather of Korean Rock.” Like pretty much every major Korean pop singer from the
1950s to the 1980s, Shin learned to love rock by listening to the American Forces Korea Network (AFKN) radio broadcasts. Shin’s career began as a performer for the Eighth U.S. Army—the
battalion that fought in the Korean War and remains stationed in Korea to this day, though in diminished numbers. Shin performed his first-ever concert at age nineteen at the Seoul army base in
1957.

Shin was probably the last experimental Korean pop musician to be known outside his home country. His 1970 cover of Iron Butterfly’s “In A Gadda Da Vida,” a live performance
that can be seen on YouTube, is a revelation, sung with more vibrancy than the original.

In 1972, Shin was asked to write a song celebrating President Park’s government. Shin, who opposed Park’s dictatorship, refused. But that refusal cost him dearly. The government
started to censor his songs, and in 1975 he was imprisoned on charges of marijuana possession. Shin said he was tortured and put into a psychiatric hospital. His works continued to be banned in
Korea until Park’s assassination in 1979.

But even when political oppression ceased to be an issue, Shin faced another obstacle altogether: in the absence of real rock influences, Korean pop music tastes had deteriorated. Journalist
Mark Russell wrote about Shin for his book,
Pop Goes Korea
:

“The rock trend passed by in the late 1970s to be replaced by a curious blend of disco, modern synthesizers, and a return to the old trot tunes that Park Chung-hee had enjoyed—it was
the start of the bubblegum pop and syrupy ballads that have ruled Korea ever since. [Shin said,] “It was completely physical, with no spirit, no mentality, no humanity. That trend has carried
over all the way to today, so people are deaf to real music. They don’t know because they are never exposed to it.”
¹

I feel for Shin. When my family moved to Korea in the mid-1980s, the music was of a type I have rarely heard before or since. It was nothing like current K-pop, and it wasn’t like American
pop either. The closest comparison would be to the French
chanson
, heartfelt songs of loss.

Musically, the songs were mostly in the minor key, which got to be depressing. And the singers had a habit of pseudo-operatic trilling in a way that you might hear from your untalented weirdo
aunt when she’s attempting to upstage everyone in an unnecessarily dramatic rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

To be fair, there’s a very good reason it took so long for Korea to find its musical niche, and it predates President Park Chung-hee’s cultural crackdown. Korea had very little
musical identity for much of the twentieth century. During the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, the use of the Korean language was banned, and by default Koreans adopted Japanese cultural
trends.

Following liberation from Japan, Korea had to build a nation anew. It needed a national anthem. President Syngman Rhee’s regime chose a turn-of-the-century poem for the song’s
lyrics. As for the melody
?
“Auld Lang Syne
,”
which must have made Korean New Year’s Eve parties very confusing. Only later, in 1948, was the anthem set to
original, Korean-composed music.

During the Korean War, musicians had only one audience wealthy enough to keep them from starving: “From the 1950s to the 1980s, most Korean pop singers started out as entertainers for the
U.S. Army,” said Wi Tack-whan. “The pay was really good. And until 1972, there were sixty thousand soldiers—that’s a huge military presence, and a lot of
opportunity.”

The USO took entertainment very seriously, featuring Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe. According to Wi, “The

U.S. military hired Hollywood professionals to audition Korean musicians, so it was very competitive.”

One act that got its start at the U.S. Army bases in Seoul was the Kim Sisters—Aija, Mia, and Sue. Most people have not heard of this singing trio, but at their height in the 1950s and
1960s, they were almost as big a Vegas act as the Rat Pack. They appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
twenty-five times, ranking them among the top ten most frequent acts in the history of the
show, which aired from 1948 to 1971.
²
They appeared more often than Louis Armstrong or Patti Page. In fact, they appeared on the
Sullivan
show as
often as the very act on which they modeled themselves: the McGuire Sisters.

Imagine what Asian Americans must have felt in 1959, the first time the Kim Sisters appeared on the
Sullivan Show
. I was incredulous even in 2013, watching their old clips on variety
shows, being introduced by the likes of Dean Martin. In one clip, the Kim Sisters appear on a 1960s-era Saturday night variety show,
The Hollywood Palace
. The host opened with: “We
have three sisters from Korea who rate among the most versatile entertainers in the business. They play about twenty instruments: saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, drums, and several others. They would
have played more, but you know how kids are: they hated to practice!” Wow, what a knee-slapper. But how could the writers get away with a punch line containing no mention of race?

Then the three beaming, fair-complexioned, long-legged girls sang, “I Think I’m Going Out of My Head,” a doo-wop hit originally performed by Little Anthony and the Imperials in
1964. They looked largely indistinguishable from any other girl group one might see on the show. Long, slinky, glittery dresses with a slit up the side, false eyelashes, and shiny, gigantic
bouffant hairdos. It was the first time I’d ever seen Korean women dressed like that, and it was as jarring as a 1920s photo of a Korean flapper.

For their next number, they sang in Korean. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kim Sisters were the last musical group before Psy to sing a song entirely in Korean on American national
television. The only bit of orientalism in that number was that they all whipped out fans and started flapping them daintily because . . . they were warm, I suppose.

Many African Americans speak about their shock the first time they saw Nichelle Nichols playing Uhura on the original
Star Trek
series. Actress Whoopi Goldberg recalled telling her
family, “I just saw a black woman on television, and she ain’t no maid.”
³
That’s how a generation of Korean Americans must have
felt about the Kim Sisters.

I had the privilege of speaking with Sue (born Sook-ja), the eldest of the group, from her home in Las Vegas.

Perhaps no other pop cultural entity is a better symbol of South Korea’s twentieth-century rags-to-riches story than the Kim Sisters. They are South Korea. Their mother started the band
during the Korean War out of sheer survival mode: the family had lost their father and their home. Like almost every major Korean pop act through the 1980s, they got their start performing for
American GIs stationed in Korea.

Before the war, the Kim parents were famous staples of the Korean entertainment world. At the beginning of the war in 1950, the North Koreans commandeered the family’s house in Seoul and
arrested their father. Sue witnessed it all. She was nine years old.

The reasons for the father’s arrest are unclear. Sue recalls one of her mother’s theories: “He was genius talented. They wanted to brainwash him and use him. And he
wouldn’t go for it.”

During his lifetime, however, the girls’ father inadvertently gave them a means of survival after he was gone. He taught them how to sing together in harmony by hitting them. “I
can’t believe he did that,” recalled Sue. “Anyone who made a mistake would get smacked until we got red cheeks. He would not stop until we got it right.”

Like Korea as a whole during and after the war, Sue’s mother had to improvise, and fast. She pulled together two of her seven children—daughters Sook-ja (to whom she gave the stage
name Sue) and Aija. Then she recruited her niece Mia (née Minja.)

The sister act would later prove to be not just a show biz gimmick but a necessity: in order to get passports to go to the United States for their first performance, Mia could only accompany
them if she was really their sister. So the mother legally adopted her and fudged Mia’s birth date. “All the birth certificates had burned [in the war],” explained Sue.

Mrs. Kim started booking gigs for the Kim sisters to perform for the U.S. troops stationed throughout Korea. She decided on an American repertoire and “bought records on the black
market,” Sue recalled. The first song Mrs. Kim taught them was “Ole Buttermilk Sky,” originally sung by Hoagy Carmichael in 1946.

The GIs loved the girls, dubbing them “the Korean Mc-Guire Sisters.” Sue said, “I think the soldiers were homesick. They appreciated three little Korean girls trying to
entertain them. They would say, ‘You should go to America, you’d make a lot of money.’ ”

Upon hearing that, the gears in Mrs. Kim’s head started turning. “She didn’t take it lightly,” said Sue. And in fact, it turned out that the GI promises were not just hot
air. In 1955, she said, “we got a call from one of the GIs saying he would go back to the United States and sign up the Kim Sisters and take them to America.”

The girls’ mother wasted no time in getting them ready for this possibility, even if it never materialized—a precursor to the modern-day K-pop training phenomenon, you might say.
“She was playing a long shot,” said Sue. “My mother knew that if we went to America, just singing was not enough to compete with other groups. Number one, the language barrier. So
she said, you have to be different. You have to play a lot of instruments.” Mrs. Kim also started the girls on ballet and tap-dancing lessons.

Mrs. Kim’s long shot paid off. The GI grapevine reached entertainment producer Tom Ball, who flew to Korea in 1958 to check out the Kim Sisters. “The rest is history,” said
Sue. “He saw us, he liked us, we signed a contract.”

But nothing in South Korea was easy in those years following the Korean War, when chaos and lost paperwork made departing the nation very complicated. The 1950 disappearance of Sue’s
father turned out to be an endless punishment: as if it weren’t bad enough that he was gone, the Korean government cited the vagueness of his fate as a reason for denying them passports.
According to Sue, “They said, ‘We don’t know if your father’s alive; we can’t give you a passport.’

“The South Korean government said that if the three girls go to America, they might go to North Korea”—the reasoning here being that the girls, if given the opportunity to
leave the country, would try to find their father in the north. But after a year of Mrs. Kim “torturing herself” and relentlessly leveraging her celebrity to pursue every contact she
had, the visa came through.

The girls were to be the closing act for a Vegas spectacular, Tom Ball’s China Doll Revue, performed in the Thunderbird Hotel in 1959. A poster advertising the show promised “the
most beautiful Oriental Show Girls in the World.” After four weeks at the Thunderbird, they signed on to perform at the nearby Stardust Hotel for eight months. Ed Sullivan spotted them there
and booked them for his show.

I asked Sue whether she experienced jeering or racist remarks from the audience. “You know, I’m glad you brought that up,” she said. “My mother told me before we left,
‘You might get some loud person in the audience, prejudiced. Or discrimination. Because in the Korean War, [Americans] lost their sons. They will blame you for it. This might happen.’
But honestly, that never ever happened. When I hear about these black singers—Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, what they went through is amazing. How did they do it? But we never had
that.”

Sue’s cousin Mia is now living in Hungary with her husband; Aija died of lung cancer in 1987. Sue retired from show biz in 1993 and lives in Las Vegas with her husband, John Bonifazio. The
couple met in 1965 when the Kim Sisters were performing in a New York hotel. Bonifazio asked her out after attending their show seven nights in a row. The couple married in 1968; they have two
children and five grandchildren. During my phone interview with Sue, John piped in with occasional background remarks to his wife, including, “You still have great legs.”

Sue’s journey from war-torn Korea to the Rat Pack–era Vegas Strip seems worlds away from Psy’s career trajectory. But Sue, who loves Psy, sees a continuum between herself and
him: “I told my son, now that Psy is this big, people are going to ask me, who were the first Koreans to come to America and make a name for themselves? Obviously [the Kim Sisters] name is
going to come out.”

THE K-POP STAR-MAKING PROCESS HAS SUFFERED
many slings and arrows from the western press, including allegations that it is modern-day slavery. Yes,
it’s true that K-pop labels recruit budding child stars and bind them to ironclad contracts that can last as long as thirteen years. What you have to understand, though, is that Korea had no
other way of building a pop industry.