The drama is paused at a quarter past midnight. Sixteen episodes in, I already know how it ends, and I am watching anyway, the subtitles frozen on a line I want to keep.
For most of my adult life, a pleasure like this arrived with a receipt I felt I had to justify. The concert ticket bought on impulse. The afternoon given to a show that inconveniences everyone in the house and delights no one but me. I put the question into an essay once, asking what joy is allowed to look like on a grown woman with a family and a full calendar. Preserving Individual Joy made me feel less alone.
This is a hub for the writing that comes out of pure delight. For now that means Korean and Chinese drama, and K-pop, because that is where my attention has gone these past few years. The collection is built to hold more. Whatever I fall for next gets a room here too.
The Dramas That Kept Me Up
I fell in headlong, one July, the year I needed somewhere to be that was not the news. Because This Is My First Life was the one that stayed with me for weeks after the credits. It is a show about marriage arranged between near-strangers, and about the small private space each of us needs, a place to exist without explanation.
When people began asking what to watch, I wrote them a list of ten. My Top Ten Kdrama Recommendations holds the dramas that surfaced first. Romance Is A Bonus Book earned its spot for the writing, and for a sentence I have carried since: the moon is beautiful, isn’t it, which is how you say I love you in Japanese before you can say it plainly. Twenty-Five Twenty-One is there for how hard it presses on nostalgia, on a girl learning to fence and a friendship running out of time.
Melo Movie is the one I return to most. Ten episodes about grief, built around a camera that holds still when you expect it to cut away. A daughter without her father. A boy without his hyung. The show leaves you in the pause it refuses to edit out, and the questions about love and loss arrive on their own.
One Country Over
Korean drama pulled me one country over. A lull between seasons and some aimless scrolling turned up Hidden Love, a Chinese show I began with no expectations and finished certain it ranked among my favorites. What started as a stopgap turned into a year of them.
Top 10 Cdrama Recommendations gathers the best of it. The deepest, Love Story in the 1970s, runs twenty-nine episodes across two years of narrative time, a sweeping read of life in Communist China. I hand out a perfect score rarely. It earned mine.
Loud in the Kitchen
Through the pandemic years I chanted Vishnu Sahasranamam at the kitchen island every morning. Now it is JHope and Jungkook, at a volume that makes Amma look up from across the counter and remember when I used to chant. Jungkook Over Jagannatha is about that swap, and about why it requires no defense. The need underneath has not changed. The music is still a place to go.
Some of it has spilled past the front door. I have stood in stadium crowds I never pictured myself joining. A Stray Kids show in New York, my teenagers in the outfits they had planned for weeks and me in a red sequin blouse, the scream that left me when Felix walked onstage. Breaching New Frontiers caught that night, and the new footing it gave me with my kids.
The fandom has pulled me into work I would not have found otherwise. I helped curate the first issue of Literary Namjooning, close to a hundred pieces on the practice ARMY calls namjooning, the slow Kim Namjoon habit of paying attention to the world. Embracing Namjooning follows it from the submissions inbox to the morning it went live. When K-Pop Demon Hunters arrived, I was the last in the house to watch it, then could not stop turning over what the film understands about collective energy, about what a divided public leaves unspent. Crossovers I Didn’t Expect holds that thought.
All of it became a novel. A Star Keeps Its Distance follows Amaya Stein, a culture journalist sent to cover a K-pop group she means to observe and not join. She fails and falls headfirst into the fandom. If you have loved a band this much, you already know the place the book comes from.