For Ejae, the last 10 months have felt like a lifetime’s worth of success — and sickness.
Since the animated film “KPop Demon Hunters” became a global sensation last June, its hit song “Golden,” — which Ejae co-wrote and sang — has won a Golden Globe, a Grammy and an Oscar. Throughout it all, she had gotten sick eight times, including with Covid, the flu and bronchitis, twice. At some of the live performances of the track she had barely been holding it together with a fever and rattling lungs.
“Maybe it’s muscle memory,” she said. “Once the lights shine I just lock in.”
She was recently back in Seoul — where those instincts had been honed over the decade she had spent training to be a K-pop star — musing about what the future after her unexpected and precipitous rise might look like. The streets along her mother’s neighborhood, where she was staying, were awash with cherry blossoms, announcing the arrival of spring. Visible at a distance was N Seoul Tower, the landmark featured prominently in the film.
In South Korea, “Demon Hunters” has been celebrated as a lesson in how to market “Koreanness” to a Western audience without compromising on authenticity. Critics admired its deep cultural references and granular attention to details like the texture of the pavement on the streets of Seoul. At a news conference earlier that April afternoon, reporters confessed feeling a swell of national pride watching Ejae and the two other singers on “Golden” — Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami — perform at the Oscars, in a show that featured elements of traditional Korean music.
Yet these accolades have also revealed tensions. That the film — the deliverer of K-pop’s first Grammy — was ultimately an American production, created by Sony and Netflix, has prompted concerns that cultural exports like K-pop might no longer belong to South Korea in the way that Champagne does to France or bourbon to the United States.
Ejae, 34, whose birth name is Kim Eun-jae, was familiar with these debates. She recalled with exasperation how, growing up in South Korea, she was sometimes called “black hair,” a pejorative term for diaspora Koreans deemed to be Korean in race only, as Ejae, a U.S. citizen, spent some of her childhood in the United States. Now, some had questioned whether the song “Golden” — despite having been written by a team of K-pop songwriters — was even real K-pop at all.
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