The hallway is full of random toys and props used by the best of the best stars in worldwide concerts. Half of the paraphernalia has the insignias of Electric Flower and Kang Jina (a gold-plaque legend and the leader of the biggest and best girl group in K-pop for the last few years). They debuted at the top spot and never left it. When I joined DB, I worshipped those girls—Jina especially. I admire them even more now, knowing what they had to go through to get to where they are. But part of me wonders about the girls they left behind. The ones that didn’t make it in the group.
Will I be the one on top or the one left in the shadows?
Bass reverberates into the hallway as I peek inside one room and see a second-year trainee practicing Blue Pearl’s iconic “Don’t Give Up on Love” dance. She flubs the side-to-side arm movements and wilts, dragging herself over to the speaker panel to start the song from the beginning. My whole body aches just watching her. From the sweat dripping off her forehead to her bright-red cheeks, I can tell she’s been in there for hours—a typical day for a young trainee. At the end of the hall, I run my finger over the electronic sign-up screen that dictates practice room availability. It’s still pretty early on a Saturday, so I’m hoping for some afternoon times to work on my dance moves, but . . . Ugh. Unbelievable. Every single slot is filled.
My hands clench as I feel my body temperature skyrocket. Lizzie wasn’t wrong—I’m not like the other trainees who are here 24/7, singing and dancing in practice rooms until 4:00 a.m., sleeping at the nearby trainee house, and waking up and doing it all over again, every single day. Back when I first got recruited to DB, my mom almost didn’t let me come. It meant uprooting
our family from New York City to Seoul, my sister giving up her school and her friends, both of my parents giving up their jobs. But more than that, she couldn’t understand why K-pop meant so much to me, and she definitely didn’t understand the trainee lifestyle—the intense pressure, the years of training, the plastic surgery scandals. Then, about three weeks into begging my mom to change her mind, my halmoni died. I remember how sad I felt, how I cried with my mom and Leah for hours, how when she was alive, Halmoni would sit me down every morning during our visits and braid my hair, whispering old folktales into my ear, telling me in her soothing voice how I would grow up to be beautiful, wise, and very wealthy. My mom wouldn’t let us miss school for the funeral, and when she got back from Korea I had practically decided to let go of the whole trainee thing, but to my surprise, Umma made me a deal: We would move to Seoul and I would go to school during the week, get an education, keep my prospects for college open, and every weekend (starting Friday night), I would train. (Once, a few years ago, I asked her why she changed her mind after Halmoni died, but all I got a blank stare followed by a quick smack on the back of my head).
The DB execs didn’t really go for Umma’s arrangement at first, but for some reason, Mr. Noh decided to bend the rules for me. Umma thinks it was because of her “American female empowerment” (as she calls it), but I know I’m just one of the lucky few Mr. Noh favors—one of the lucky few he has decided to pluck from trainee obscurity and pay extra attention to. (Although in the trainee program, extra attention really just means extra pressure.) Still, the situation was pretty unheard of, and it wasn’t long before I was known as “Princess Rachel,” the most pampered trainee at DB; the full-blooded Korean whose American passport (and American attitude and American dislike of Spam . . .) put more distance between me and the other trainees than the entire Pacific Ocean had. Now, six years later, even though I’ve been here longer than almost all the other trainees, the nickname still lives on.
You’d think they’d judge me based on how hard I train. How I work my body to the bone at DB headquarters on the weekends. How I sleep four hours a night during the week because of the hours of practice I put in after finishing my homework. How I begged my school to give me an independent study in music so I can have fifty minutes alone every day in the music room, practicing scales to keep me sharp. But instead, they judge my clean clothes, my neatly brushed hair, and the fact that I get to sleep in my own bed at night.
And the worst part is? They’re right. Every single one of them puts in twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Most of them live at the trainee house and go home once a month (if that). They eat, sleep, and breathe K-pop. No matter how you look at it, I can’t compete with that. But that’s exactly what I have to do.