A mere Boy that went from Begging to K-pop!
Making his Debut as an Idol in 1VERSE
As per a top news source, Yu Hyuk was just nine years old when he started begging on the streets of North Hamgyong, one of the poorest provinces in North Korea, nestled along the northern border with China and Russia.
Besides begging, he ran errands for soldiers and sold foraged mushrooms. Sometimes he stole food out of sheer hunger: once he snatched a lunchbox that sat unattended at an underground station. Inside was a scoop of spoiled rice.
But dream he did. Later on, this year, the 25-year-old will debut in the US as a member of a K-pop boy band.
1Verse (pronounced “Universe”) is made up of five members: Hyuk, Seok who is also from North Korea, Aito from Japan, and Asian Americans Kenny and Nathan – all prefer to go by their first names.
They are set to make history as the first K-pop boy band to debut with North Korean defectors.
Hyuk was born in a seaside village in Kyong song county and raised by his father and grandmother, after his parents broke up when he was just four.
Later, his mother fled the North to settle in the South and reached out to him in an attempt to get him to join her. But he refused as he was close to his father and did not want to leave him.
Hyuk says his family was “not extremely poor” to begin with, but the situation quickly deteriorated after his parents separated. His father didn’t want to work and his grandmother was too old, so Hyuk was left to his own devices to survive.
Eventually, his father persuaded him to join his mother, and in 2013 Hyuk escaped from North Korea. It took months for him to arrive in the South, after going through several countries. He has chosen not to reveal specifics of the route, as he fears putting other future defectors at risk.
Once in the South, he lived with his mother for just a year, before moving to a boarding school with his mum’s financial support. However, he struggled to cope with South Korea’s fiercely competitive education system, as Hyuk had barely finished primary school before his defection.
He started with short poems alluding to his past life in North Korea. “I couldn’t openly share what I’d been through, but I still wanted to make a record of it.”
But now, he channeled his thoughts of feeling lonely and of missing his father into music, referring to himself as “the loneliest of the loners” – a line in Ordinary Person, a rap song he composed as a part of a pre-debut project.
Hyuk graduated from high school aged 20. Afterwards, he worked part-time at restaurants and factories to support himself.
His unique background and rapping talent caught the eye of music producer Michelle Cho, who was formerly from SM Entertainment, the agency behind some of K-pop’s biggest acts. She offered him a spot in her agency, Singing Beetle.
But gradually he realized that Ms Cho was “investing way too much time and money” for it to be anything but genuine.
‘I thought North Koreans might be scary’. Kim Seok, 24, also defected and arrived in the South in 2019, though his experience was vastly different to that of Seok’s.
Coming from a relatively better-off family, Seok lived close to the border with China and had access to K-pop and K-drama through smuggled USBs and SD cards.
Due to safety reasons, we are unable to reveal much more about his life in the North and how he came to the South. “They had absolutely no grasp of pop culture,” she said. But their ability to “endure physical challenges” astonished Ms Cho.
Apart from music and dance lessons, their training also covered etiquette and engaging in discussions, to prepare them for media interviews. “At first, when a trainer asked the reasoning behind their thoughts, the only response was, ‘Because you said so last time’.”
But after more than three years, Hyuk has made remarkable progress, she says. “Now, Hyuk questions many things. For example, if I ask him to do something, he’ll reply ‘Why? Why is it necessary?’ Sometimes, I regret what I’ve done,” says Ms Cho chuckling.
But what do the other two boys think of their bandmates?
“I was kind of afraid at first because North Korea has a hostile relationship with Japan. I thought North Koreans would be scary, but that turned out not to be true,” says Aito, who at 20 is the youngest of the four. Kenny, who spent much of his life in the US, adds that there were also small cultural differences that have taken him time to get used to.
“Korean culture is very communal in that you eat together… that was a culture shock to me”, he said. “I usually don’t like eating with people, I prefer Netflix in my ear. But their joy comes from being collective.”
Late last year, the band added a fifth member, Nathan, an American of mixed Laotian and Thai heritage to the group. They aim to debut in the US later this year – a decision that the label hopes could attract more American fans.
Dozens of K-pop groups make their debut each year and only a few, typically those managed by major labels, become popular.
So, it’s still too early to say if ‘1Verse’ will go on to resonate with audiences. But Hyuk has big dreams, hoping that it might be possible one day for his fellow North Koreans to listen to his songs.
With human rights activists often sending leaflets and USBs containing K-culture content via balloons and bottles towards the North, this may prove to be less of a pipe dream than it sounds, though Hyuk also has his worries.
Kim has in recent years been intensifying up his crackdown on the inflow of K-culture. Since 2020, the consumption and distribution of such content has become a crime punishable by death.
A rare video obtained by BBC Korean last year, believed to be filmed in 2022, shows two teenage boys publicly sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for watching and distributing K-dramas.
One academic says it would cause a “stir” in North Korea should 1Verse’s music become a hit. “If a North Korean defector openly embraced their identity and went on to become a world-class activist, I think that would cause a stir in the North,” said Ha Seung-hee, an academic specializing in music and media at Dongguk University’s Institute of North Korean Studies.
But his main motivation, Hyuk says, is to prove that defectors can be a success. “Many defectors see an insurmountable gap between themselves and K-pop idols.
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Commencing teaching in his early twenties, Prof Aggarwal has diverse experience of great tenure in the top institutions not only as an educationist, administrator, editor, author but also promoting youth and its achievements through the nicest possible content framing. A revolutionary to the core, he is also keen to address the society around him for its betterment and growth on positive notes while imbibing the true team spirit the work force along with.
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