Riding the Korean Wave

Oliver Wang interviews Euny Hong about her expanded edition of “The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture.”

By Oliver WangMay 5, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Cultural Studies

PRIOR TO THE SUMMER of 2012, few people outside South Korea had heard of PSY, the rapper and singer born Park Jae-sang. He didn’t have the movie-star looks of Rain, a double threat in films and music, nor the fan base of the pioneering K-pop group Girls’ Generation. Yet when PSY released “Gangnam Style,” it became the year’s viral sensation, ending 2012 as the first YouTube video to hit one billion views (now over 5.5 billion). While interest in Hallyu—the Korean Wave of pop culture—began years earlier, PSY’s hit dramatically accelerated the wave’s global spread.

One person taking notice was journalist Euny Hong. “South Korea had been trying for something like this to happen for years,” she told me, “but they thought it was going to be Girls’ Generation or another slick, young, attractive band. PSY doesn’t fit the K-pop model, but I don’t think we would see the Korean culture explosion to this degree if it weren’t for him.”

A Korean American raised in the United States until age 12, Hong spent her teen years in Seoul’s wealthy Gangnam District, the same neighborhood PSY lampooned. Her bicultural background shaped a view that Hallyu’s many forms—from music to makeup, dramas to mukbang (eating) videos—were poised to reshape global culture. In the original edition of Hong’s The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture (2014), she emphasized that Hallyu’s rise was not just cultural but also deeply political, chronicling how the 1997 Asian financial crisis pushed a desperate South Korean government to gamble on pop culture for low-infrastructure economic development and soft power expansion. Hallyu, in her estimation, was a delivery system to boost “Korea the Brand,” but back then, Hong thought the wave would fade once the country achieved its strategic goals.

It’s been over 10 years since the book’s publication, and Hallyu has only grown in dominance, with BTS becoming the biggest band in the world, Squid Game (2021– ) turning into a streaming sensation, and Parasite making history as the first non–English language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars. These milestones, among others, led Hong to write four new chapters for an expanded edition of The Birth of Korean Cool. Today, she believes, “South Korea has entered the Permacool firmament,” once reserved for countries like France or the United States. We spoke recently about Hallyu’s astounding rise and where the wave may sweep next.

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OLIVER WANG: I wanted to start with your original edition from 2014. While the Korean Wave was already in motion, it wasn’t the juggernaut it is now. How receptive were publishers to your pitch back then?

EUNY HONG: People thought that I was making this up, that I was completely fabricating that the Korean government was financing things and had been planning this for 20 years. People didn’t understand how Korea worked, which is not that weird, because it’s not normal for countries to invest government resources—billions of billions of dollars—in, instead of making NASA, making this pop culture product. Other publishers said the book wouldn’t come out for another 18 months, and they didn’t think this “will still be a thing” by then. Even I didn’t think the Korean Wave would last more than five years, and I’m completely shocked that I was wrong.

Why were you skeptical of Hallyu’s long-term prospects?

I had this very stoic attitude about how trends come and go, that “you can’t step in the same river twice.” I thought Hallyu was supposed to be a Trojan horse for heavy industry. The goal is the phones and the ships and the construction in the Middle East. When it had served its function, you dismantled the horse. I assumed that people have a short attention span, and they’re not going to care about Korean pop after five years. And I was wrong.

What were the points at which you not only realized “I was wrong” but also “I need to expand/update my book?”

It seemed obvious that BTS was a watershed moment because you can’t fake virality, you can’t fake what kids are listening to. But also, I wanted people to be reminded that the triad of Parasite, Squid Game, and BTS was not a coincidence. South Korea is building an entire consumer ecosystem, where dramas will make cosmetics popular and cosmetics will make the dramas popular, or the dramas will make a Samsung phone model popular. It’s all considered a benevolent circle. Because most of my readers are American, or at least Western, I wanted to show that there is an alternative to late-stage capitalism. South Korea is super capitalist but it’s also a place where they take leaps of faith with their government, and their government takes leaps of faith with the industry. That was the message I was hoping to get across. It’s not a very Western attitude, thinking of the collective good. The United States is so individualistic and shortsighted. It’s not habituated into thinking about five-year plans, 10-year plans.

I agree that the US doesn’t have the same kind of “collective good” ethos as other societies do, but I also think that the model you’re describing, entrusting the government to play an outsize role in the culture industry, feels especially fraught right now. Maybe this is low-hanging fruit to point out, but we’re watching, in real time, how a revanchist executive branch is actively defunding and trying to destroy cultural organizations and institutions. I’m not sure I’d want to see our government being more proactive in managing the future of pop culture in the United States.

You’re right, it can’t be applied to just the US. South Korea has a recent history of being a developing nation, and this is still in the national memory. After the Korean War, the government secured capital for Korean companies to build up manufacturing (Samsung, Hyundai, etc.), so private industry in turn is happy to pay it back or forward, knowing that it will pay off for them. That relationship is based on trust built over decades, and it’s symbiotic. Targeted government intervention only works if there is an actual rule of law and if you have a generally civic-minded populace. The United States is highly individualistic, so while it can import certain aspects of the Korean model (they’re currently interested in the Korean “fandustry”), that’s on a commercial level and not a governmental one.

Do you feel like where Korean pop culture is now in 2025 compared to 2014 is more a difference in degree or do you think something has fundamentally changed in those intervening 10 years?

I think it’s the latter, that somehow the Korean Wave passed a certain tipping point. It’s become absorbed into mainstream culture; it’s integrated. If you look, there are a lot of Western restaurants that have Korean-inspired dishes, and it’s not considered weird. It doesn’t matter if labels on Korean face masks say they’re Korean or not; people buy them regardless. In the US, I think it changed the DNA here oh-so-slightly, and not just people appreciating Korean culture. It’s now normal to watch movies that are not in English, whether they’re Korean or not. I like to think that the Korean Wave has had something to do with that.

The fan base for Korean pop culture, in the United States and around the world, looks incredibly multicultural. I’m not used to seeing this with other examples of pop culture created by or performed by Asians or Asian Americans, let alone in a non-English language.

One of the first things I noticed when I went to my first KCON—it’s like Comic Con, but for Korean pop—is that there were 50,000 people in the audience, even 10 years ago. Most of the people who showed up were not Korean, but they were disproportionately people of color. Talking to them, I found that there’s something familiar that speaks to them. So, for example, Korean dramas are very similar to telenovelas. People outside the US who love Korean dramas tell me, “This is how families are in my culture too.” I think people found it really refreshing that there was a non-Hollywood alternative to portraying family structures that they’re much more familiar with.

It’s not just about familiarity though, right? In the new edition of the book, you interview a BTS fan, Nina Perez, who told you, “I’m shocked how [BTS is comprised of] heterosexual men and they’re affectionate. They feed each other. Boys are not allowed to be emotional in [American] culture; they don’t hug and give each other piggyback rides.”

People are shocked by Korean male relationships, like how close BTS seem to be. They’re very tactile with each other. They can get away with a certain amount of androgyny without feeling that it threatens their masculinity. I don’t think that they have that in in the West. The United States is very progressive and egalitarian in some ways, but the gender nonconformity is really shocking here still. People aren’t used to seeing alternatives.

To the extent that Hallyu is part of a soft power strategy by South Korea—one that seems to be working very well!—what’s the long-term goal here? Is South Korea vying for cultural influence on the same level that the US has enjoyed since the Cold War? I don’t think South Korea really cares about knocking the US off its throne. South Korea didn’t want the whole pie; it wanted a bigger pie. Their early export strategy was to target developing nations, going after the “scraps” that the US ignored. South Korea went through a very long aspirational phase where everything seemed like a pipe dream, and they understood what the first things were that people would do if they had money. For this reason, K-culture mania took over Latin America before it was prominent in the United States. Dramas were translated not just into Spanish but also into regional dialects like Guarani, spoken only in Paraguay. By hooking them on K-dramas and K-pop—basically free or nearly free products—they are creating brand loyalty for the time, maybe two decades from now, when these countries have a more sizable middle-class market that associates luxury with Samsung phones instead of iPhones.

I have to imagine that there are other countries seeking to emulate the soft power success of South Korea, not least China. It has a massive internal culture industry, but there are no cultural exports that are remotely comparable to Hallyu. Could China pull off anything close to what South Korea has done?

China has been trying to have their own equivalent of the Korean Wave for years, and I think there are a couple of reasons it hasn’t worked. One is that Korea is a small country that’s very centralized. If they need to do something, they can be nimble, they can make changes. China is enormous: multiple ethnicities, religions, and languages. The centralized, organizing aspect is more difficult. The second and bigger reason is that, in order to have a pop culture explosion like Korea has, you have to have freedom of expression and of the press—you have to have people who aren’t worried about censors or being put in jail for something they create. Unless there are significant changes in the way the Chinese government runs itself, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Looking long-term, it’s no secret that South Korea has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, and while it’s going to be decades until the demographic consequences of this trend are really felt, the outlook is potentially dire. I see terms like “societal collapse” being thrown around. Even if the worst-case scenarios don’t come to pass, there are going to be fewer young people in South Korea for the foreseeable future, and I’m wondering how these changes might impact the future of Hallyu, at least in Korea itself.

If there are no more young people, South Korea has to make a decision about resources, whether they’re going to focus on hard industry or soft industry. If a country is underpopulated, labor becomes scarce and wages become high, making manufacturing really expensive. The first things that are going to go are not going to be K-pop or K-cinema; it’s going to be cars, construction, and so on. Either that or they will have this horribly bifurcated population, where they import cheap overseas labor, which is already happening in Seoul. And those people do the unpleasant jobs, and the young, shiny Korean people do the soft power, like ambassadorial stuff, and you have a completely divided society. I can see something like that happening, unfortunately.

Last question. What do you think it would take for you to consider a third edition of The Birth of Korean Cool?

That’s a good question. There are all these non-Korean bands that are supposedly K-pop bands. It’s just a novelty now, but there are all-white bands that sing mostly in English, and their aesthetic is like half Harajuku, half K-pop, and they call themselves K-pop bands. It raises this philosophical question: What is the quiddity of a K-pop band? Is it really just about race? Because maybe it shouldn’t be. And similarly, there’s a big genre on Kindle Direct Publishing of novels about life in Korea that are written by young white women. I guess you would call it K-pop fan fiction. People do entire series of these. So if that starts to become a thing and Hallyu is no longer about race or being Korean, that would be very interesting. I think if it were suddenly about a genre and not about the people, then I would probably do a third edition.

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Euny Hong, a Paris-based journalist, is the author, most recently, of The Power of Nunchi: The Korean Secret to Happiness and Success (2019), which has sold translation rights in 20 regions. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and Allure, among others. She has appeared on numerous TV programs, such as Picture This on BBC Two, Ronan Farrow Daily on MSNBC, and Bloomberg TV. Previously, she was with the France 24 TV news network in Paris, and she started her journalism career as a TV columnist at the Financial Times. She graduated from Yale University with a BA in philosophy and is a former Fulbright Scholar. She is fluent in English, French, German, and Korean.

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Featured image: Photo of Euny Hong by Justin T. Stockely.