When my video call with Jungkook begins, he has the look of someone roused too early from a good sleep. On camera, the youngest member of the South Korean pop group BTS is wearing a black zip-up, hood pulled over his head in a way that suggests he’d enjoy a nap—a little surprising, given his reputation among fans as an indefatigable “energizer bunny.
In early May, rumors swirled on social media about a mysterious book. Its title wouldn’t be announced until June 13, but it was slated for worldwide publication on July 9, with an initial print run of 1 million copies. Media coverage focused on fan speculation that the author was Taylor Swift, a theory that drove a wave of preorders of the still-unnamed project. However, some of us immediately deduced that the book was actually about the South Korean pop group BTS.
One year ago today, the leader of the world’s biggest pop group stood beneath bright lights and told more than 50,000 fans about his fears. Kim Namjoon, better known by his stage name RM, had guided his fellow BTS members through the vagaries of early-pandemic life—a canceled world tour, delayed music releases and life plans, illness.
Writing about the dead is difficult business. Whenever I write about my mother, I spend a lot of time struggling to recall: How did she take her coffee? What music made her dance? When she laughed, did she throw her head back, like I do? My ability to answer these questions—to try to create an honest portrait of her on the page—is constrained by the five and a half years we spent together before she died.
The White House briefing room hadn’t been packed like this in ages. That’s what journalists kept saying last Tuesday, as more than a hundred of them squeezed into the room, cradling their cameras and murmuring sorrys every time they bumped into one another. South Korean media outlets jockeyed for space alongside the usual American networks. A few people joked that the huge crowd was there for Brian Deese, the National Economic Council director, who was also scheduled to speak.
For 20 months, I was haunted by two fears: that some things (the pandemic, isolation, anxiety) would last forever, and that others (dreams, loved ones, entire years) would be lost forever. Time warped around me, as it did for so many people. Some days, it moved like molasses. On others, like when I saw family and friends, it seemed to flow like a river that I couldn’t stop or outrun.Then, for two weeks at the end of 2021, I tried to control time for myself.
The pink notebook my mother kept when she was sick contains 18 entries, most of them shorter than a haiku. The pages list medications and surgeries, the names of family members who sent money, and which body parts hurt and how badly. One entry, from October 1995, reads: “Neck (severe pain) Coming out of the mall to cold air.” I was 5 that day; my sister was 3.
BTS has spent enough time in the pop-music stratosphere that it can be easy to forget, or surprising to learn, about the years they spent at the basement level. Back in 2014, for the first anniversary of their debut, the group’s seven members celebrated by cleaning the tiny dorm they shared and cooking a nice meal. They recorded a video of themselves for fans, soaking seaweed for a traditional Korean birthday soup, blowing up balloons, vacuuming the living room, and decorating a cake.
Maybe it’s because the pandemic has warped my sense of time, but it feels like just yesterday that BTS got their first No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. The South Korean pop septet’s first all-English single, “Dynamite,” was everywhere—in commercials, at the MTV Video Music Awards, on the radio. In September, the song made them the first all–South Korean group to top the chart.