KUCI News - Korean drama news site creator Sarah Chung speaks to Asian Am. Studies 164 on Hallyu's transnational internet fandoms
Department: Asian American Studies
Post Date: December 17, 2018News Details
KUCI News - Interview with Sarah Chung, Guest Speaker at Asian American Studies 164, on the transnational culture phenomenon of Korean dramas and global audiences. You can listen to her interview here.
Date: November 24, 2018
Program: Ring Road Tripping on Campus Skinny
Student Reporter: Joon Park
The event was open to the public, and two student organizations, KONNECT (Korean Cultural Awareness Group) and KKAP (Konnect
K-POP Aspiring Performers), were also invited.
Quote:
“I have had Korean American friends in my life, but by the time the Hallyu ("Korean Wave" starting in the late 1990s) really came, I felt like it was a different thing entirely, it wasn't the people around me who were enjoying it, it was people across the world, and that’s when I went to the internet.” -- Sarah Chung, who writes under the handle "Javabeans"
Background:
In 2007, Sarah Chung, a second generation Korean American from California, started an English-language website to find others to share her passion for Korean dramas. Her WordPress blog expanded to become the recap site Dramabeans.com, which presents multiple simultaneous recaps by several recappers, translated interviews, a glossary, and in-depth entries on the meanings of language and behaviors in the stories. The site hosted 15 million visitors in 2015, with English-language readers checking in from around the world, such as Singapore, India, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. The site has published over 5,000 recaps covering hundreds of titles.
On Transpacific Fan Cultures:
In 2011, Professor Regina Yung Lee (University of Washington, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Department) visited UCI as a speaker in the Korean Pop Culture Conference hosted by the Department of East Asian Studies, and presented her paper on the Dramabeans site. Her chapter "As Seen On The Internet: The Recap as Translation in English-Language K-drama Fandoms," describes this ecology of transpacific fan cultures: "K-drama audiences include flourishing viewerships within a technologically mediated diaspora: often decoupled from primary experiences of Korean language and culture, they nonetheless participate at several levels of remove, from within communities of enthusiasm and critical response, the "participatory culture[s]" which media scholar Henry Jenkins has called fandom." This chapter appears in the volume The Korean Popular Culture Reader, co-edited by UCI Professor Kyung Hyun Kim. (Duke University Press, 2014)
Our Fall 2018 Class Speaker:
On November 20, 2018, Sarah Chung visited the Korea-U.S. Transnational Popular Cultures class (Asian American Studies 164) to share her talk "Spilling the Beans: How Dramabeans.com makes space for one big (Korean) fan-mily."
One student attendee shared that as the youngest child in her Filipino family, she could sit together with her parents and siblings to watch South Korean dramas since the stories had an innocent appeal, and were translated into Tagalog. Another student asked if U.S. fans could make an impact to K-drama producers? Chung responded with the example of a TV series called Healer (2014-2015). Though the drama received modest ratings in its home country, it gained a fanbase overseas. This happened through a chain of successive translations. Because English-language audiences are typically shut out of Korean-language drama fan sites in Korea, some bi-lingual Korean fans translated the Dramabeans English-reading fans' comments back into Korean to send to the show's producers so they could recognize a cult-following around the world.
Sarah Chung also works at Netflix, where she uses the skills built up from years of passionately writing on television narratives.