den lille havfrue (the little mermaid)

Ar out at the shores, where the water is as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very shallow; so shallow, indeed, that the land meets the sea: white beach embracing pale waves, limpid waters crashing against the sand, where dozens splash in it day after day.

We must imagine a young girl and four other humans. Think of the awkwardly long limbs of a pubescent girl, attempting to make a foray into the ocean. Think of a girl crying out in delight as the waves hug her frame. Think of a girl trying to forget the enormity of what the family’s just been told. Think of a girl already dreaming of being somewhere else.

*

There is a girl who grew up in the county of the angels, in the land of the free. She is the youngest of three siblings. The oldest girl is known for her brains and her boundless curiosity of the knowledge. The middle child is known for his shy smiles and his endless pursuit of the arcane and all things new. The youngest girl is by far the prettiest and the most favoured. A veritable little princess, she is.

All three share the same set of smiles and crescent eyes, the same long nose, and the same dark hair. The littlest one always had her hair braided by her mother. Now that her mother is gone, she braids her hair by herself. Her oldest sister tries to do it, from time to time, but she is often too consumed by her own work, of floating thoughts of conquering law school with a scholarship under her belt.     

The young girl has spent two entire years without her mother.

Admittedly, two years is not a huge number, but for a girl of fourteen, two years is a seventh of her life. Her mother had perished in the night, a flatline that the girl had watched appear on the monitor. For days afterwards, she wept, and railed against the world and cried at church. She spent days questioning her God and his cruelty. She found that she hated God just as Job hated God, and wondered if she was fated to be just as Job was.

Then she remembers her dreams.

And the short terror becomes a long wait. A long wait for something she cannot name, some path she thinks that her God has cast her onto. A path she’s confident that she can tread, with her mother watching her from above.

*

The day she turns fifteen, her father lets her fly to Korea.

She spends a week there. It is customary for the Hwangs to spend some time in Korea every so often. Koreans, you understand, are proud of their culture. Korea is an important land to them.

She tags along when her grandparents head out to the city. They bring her around Seoul, speaking to vendors in Korean, buying Korean street food and chatting to her in Korean. She does her best to return her grandparents’ questions in her shabbier version of the tongue. She listens to Korean songs and watches music videos of TVXQ and BoA on television there, just as she does on her computer back home.

She makes a decision.

She doesn’t tell her father why she begs for longer show choir practices. She closes the door when she dances to BoA. She flicks the tap up and lets shower water cascade around her as she sings Moon and Sunrise.

She certainly doesn’t tell her father that she’s competing in Mnet’s talent show. Something tells her to. She doesn’t know what it is, but she has a feeling that she has to go, and that it’ll change her life.

She’s right, of course.

First place goes to a Stephanie Young Hwang with thick and long black hair and eyeliner-lined crescent eyes. First place goes to a girl who receives a slew of business cards from company representatives with smiles that are too wide. First place goes to a girl who picks out the pink SM name card to call the number listed on it, knowing that her absolute favourite artists were all based in this company. And hey, it’s pink!

*

Her father is the first to accuse her of having no integrity.

Granted, that was not what he intended to say when he first started the conversation, but it is what he says to her before she storms off to her room to slam the door.

From that day onwards, she doesn’t speak to him.

November approaches, and she sweeps everything she deems important in her life into her luggage. Her sister wastes an hour to drive back to Diamond Bar to dissuade the younger girl from acting rashly and stupidly and you’ll hurt daddy’s heart, but she’s stubborn and she does not listen.

She can’t shake the words that he flings at her though. There is an element of truth to them. But does she care? Does she care that all the k-pop idols that she already loves are simply marketing something? Marketing something a little more insidious than mere voice and natural inclinations to dance?

She dreams of surfacing above this sea to reach for the skies.

She dreams of another world.

She dreams.

*

In Korea, they shape and twist her.

She learns very quickly that her voice is useless against the will of a larger company, with far more clout and power than she will ever have. Her bones scream at her for succumbing to a stronger entity without a fight, and she hopes that one day she will get to turn the tables around, but for now, debuting is an alluring bribe and she will bide her time to an eventuality that may never materialise.

She learns a great many things.

Firstly, it’s that she’s far inferior to the girls who are there in the practice rooms.

Stephanie Hwang cannot hope to be as pretty as someone like Im Yoona. Even at 14, with her darkened eye bags and her elongated jawline, Im Yoona is the essence of luck with the genetic lottery. Her face is tiny and she eats heaps upon heaps of rice and not a single kilogram is added to the scale. In fact, there are days that they tell her to eat more because the company doesn’t want her father to accuse them of not feeding the doe-eyed girl properly.

Stephanie Hwang cannot be as good as Jessica Jung. Jessica Jung, who has trained since she was 11, reaches high notes effortlessly and has superior vocal technique. Stephanie cannot tell what she’s doing wrong when the vocal instructors sigh and tell her that if she belts like the way she is doing now, she will ruin her voice. She doesn’t know what to do with that information and the implications of her poor technique will come back to her after she debuts. But for now, she watches Jessica Jung execute dance moves with flawless precision and calculated grace.

Stephanie Hwang can also never be as good as Kim Taeyeon. Kim Taeyeon, someone that arrives just a few months before she does. Taeyeon whom she rooms with and shares every little space together. Taeyeon, who looks at people with some measure of guarded wariness, who doesn’t want to do anything but sing. And oh, sing she does, a voice clear and strong, filled with emotions no 15-year-old should be able to convey.

Secondly, it’s that all the girls in the practice rooms aren’t the best in the world. That there is something more that will make them better than the rest. Every one of them weren’t chosen for their raw talent.

If SM casted on the simple criteria of talent, they’d pluck chubby pig-nosed children with gargantuan lungs and endlessly flexible neck muscles off the streets and stick them in vocal classes. Or they’d do the same with stick thin dancers that danced till their toe nails fell off wore their heels down to such great extents that their callouses grew thicker than actual shoe padding.

No, the nine of them that are eventually unveiled by SM are more than mere talent. They have trained for years, honing everything. Dancing and singing were almost secondary to being able to look at the camera just right, to angle your head in the right angle, to wink at the right moment, to smile with the right amount of sincerity.

In this game, it is all about the right amount of calculation.

Images are carefully calibrated, be it the group image or the solo one. Both involve adoring fans and working the gossip mill. And a casual observer never buys mere talent. A casual observer leeches onto your face. Your body. Something more before they bother to look at what your lungs can offer.

Taeyeon is not the first to protest when she realises exactly what she signed on for. But she’s the one that makes Stephanie feel terrible about it all. By the time Taeyeon flees the dorm in favour of the cold winter night to scream her lungs out on an empty bridge, she finds that she loves her best friend. They’ve already made a pact to stick with each other no matter what they do. When Taeyeon leaves, she wonders, fleetingly, if she should leave too.

When Taeyeon leaves, she convinces her to return. It eats something inside her. She’s willing to sell her best friend an artificially crafted image of a perfect dream that goes against what Taeyeon intended when she put her name down on the contract. She’s willing to sell her friend out for her own sake. She knows she cannot do this without Taeyeon.

Taeyeon, she says, you can’t leave. Everything you’ve worked hard for will be gone. SM is the best, they will help you sing. To help you sing to everyone you want to reach. Look at BoA sunbaenim. Look at TVXQ sunbaenims. They are conquering Japan! Not just Korea, but Japan!

What she does not say is that without SM, Taeyeon would not have succeeded. No, not on the scale that she will come to accomplish. (The perfect route SM pushes onto them will yield Taeyeon millions of adoring fans, not just a pocketful of music lovers who have convinced themselves that Taeyeon’s musicality yielded the ideal imperfection to them.)

*

The years flit by them.

It’s a blur of laughter, of smiles they’ve learned to force onto their faces, of polite nods and carefully angled bows. Sometimes, Tiffany doesn’t know if her smiles are genuine anymore. She’s certainly flattered that she can please her fans, but is she truly happy? Or does she reflect the glee of her fans on her face? Humans are social creatures and they subconsciously imitate those around them.

She gets surgery for her vocal nodules. Her voice lowers a little bit. It gains a foreign quality to it. Her fans tell her that they like her husky tone.

Really? She asks.

Really, they say.

Some days, she forgets what English sounds like. English becomes a foreign voice in her head. Valley girl accents ring in her head, and a voice somewhere tells her that all valley girls are just bimbos. Another voice angrily retorts that that’s generalisation. Regardless, some part of her longs to hear her friends speak again. Not just through the static noises that are emitted from the phone.

Other days, she tries to shape a sentence in English. The words begin to elude her. She begins to pause a little, wondering which word her tongue remembers but her head cannot.

The years flit by them.

Friendship becomes a tool. The company says this, this and that, that. She hugs her members more tightly in public when the lights shine on them. She motions for Sunny to wrap her arms around her waist when the cameras come on. At the Tokyo Dome, she cries. When she thinks about it, she’s unsure whether she needed to show her upset, or if she was genuinely upset.

It’s not as if Jessica died in the ditch when she was unceremoniously expelled. The case only affected their public lives. But oh, what’s shown to the cameras are so intrinsically entwined with their private lives, and if Jessica didn’t want to talk to any of them after that September, she’d understand. So… Tiffany’s head hurts just thinking about detangling these strands.

Friendship becomes a tool. They cannot leave their dorms sometimes. They’re too tired. They’re going to have a schedule again in less than four hours. The press has decided to camp outside. Some crazy sasaeng is out there. In the first couple of years, the nine of them plonk in the living room together and wait it out. Initially, they are terrified. What if they’re dangerous? What if someone tries to hurt them? When the five of them move out and Hyoyeon is out at another party, the three of them sip drinks together and talk about what that sasaeng tried to do. Oh, another one. Tried breaking in. Nothing new. Invasion becomes a banality.

Friendship becomes a tool. There are nights that she cannot sleep. There are nights where there is a cold ache in her chest. On cold winter nights, she draws her hands together and stuffs a million hand warming packets into her pockets. She wraps her hands in her gloves and stuffs her hands into her clothing. The chill never leaves her bones. It’s usually Taeyeon who notices that Tiffany is trembling and it’s Taeyeon who grabs her hands and hums a song and reminds her that this is Korea and Korea’s winters are frigid. But with her friends, she’s safe from that cold. For the most part, she won’t admit that she needs her friends. They keep her warm when she cannot keep herself warm.

The years flit by them.

At some point, they press it and they mould her into something else. The nine of them learn to brush the pain of the knife away, even as it carves into them and shapes another image of them entirely.

It’s okay, they tell themselves. It’s only the outside that they’re changing.

By then, they’ve already come to accept, with varying degrees of emotions behind this acceptance, that it was an image that they were selling. They were selling themselves, but merely extensions of themselves. And that this extension wasn’t something they really had control over.

It’s like growing an extra limb, cutting it off, and passing it around on a silver platter. Too salty. Too sweet. Too bitter. Too much of the skin exposed just here, why didn’t they cover that up? Ah, I don’t like this. Who made this? I demand to see the chef right now! Chef! Your creation is terrible! I want to burn this!

In the beginning, she looks at all of these comments online. Pours over them on Naver and Nate and Daum and tries to shrug them off. She tries to watch a little when she goes on broadcast, but the brighter than mushrooms thing has been imbued into the very extension of herself. When the cameras are on, what she determines in the nights where she is away from the cameras is forgotten, and she goes into autopilot. Bright grins, wide smiles, overzealous joy.

Later, she stops looking at these comments. They’re pointless.

They’re So Nyuh Shi Dae. They sweep award shows and shatter records no girl group have dared to aspire to. They perform to thousands, or was it millions, of adoring fans.

They’re So Nyuh Shi Dae. People start to say, “wow, as expected of So Nyuh Shi Dae!” People start to call them by their names in different languages. “哇，真的是少女时代！” Their fans in Japan scream and promise forever in Korean – 영원히소녀 시대!”. Regardless of whether it’s 소녀 시대 or if it’s Shōjo jidai, she basks in the exhilaration.

They’re So Nyuh Shi Dae. She tells herself to not get drunk on this fame. To stay humble. To remember that she started off as a girl who only wanted to sing. That she started off as a girl whose skin was tanned and golden on a beach, who prayed to God for another future where she wouldn’t be upset that her mom was going to leave her.

She’s here.

She should be happy.

*

They have warned her: fame is a construction.

One day you’re at the pinnacle. The next day, they’ll knock you down.

*

The day it happens, she wants to scream.

She wants to say that it’s just a small mistake, that yes, okay, sorry, I made a mistake, but did you really have to turn me into the public’s Undesirable Number 1? Did you vultures have to throw me under a steamroller and pick at my innards? Did you have to hold my guts up for the world to see? Did you have to do it again and again and again? What did I do, did I steal your fire and give it to the enemy? Did I do that? I made a small mistake!

Then oh, SM, SM. I let you take me. I let you press me into something I’m not. I traded my voice in for something impermanent, no, I handed you my voice on that silver platter. I trusted you with it and you let everyone butcher me. I gave you my dreams, but you crushed the silver threads into grey bone. I entered your doors whole, but you have crushed my entire frame.

Am I not worth anything? Am I not worth anything as a human being? Oh, that’s right. We’re a business. I understand that. Perfectly well. I signed a few pieces of paper signifying that yes, I fully consent to the terms and conditions, the endless clauses that indemnified you from any fault. Now that I’m not seen as a viable investment anymore, I’m not worth any money. Every blade is meant for me to bear. Why bother maintaining a doll when it’s worthless?

She flings that knife away and presses it into herself.

She falls.

Falling from the top is long and it goes on for forever. And ever.

*

She looked at the sky on which the rosy dawn grew brighter and brighter; then she glanced at the sharp knife, and again fixed her eyes on the world she once existed in, who whispered the bitterness in themselves into her name. She was in their thoughts, and the knife trembled in the hand of the little mermaid: then she flung it far away from her into the waves; the water turned red where it fell, and the drops that spurted up looked like blood. She cast one more lingering, half-fainting glance at her world, and then threw herself from the ship into the sea, and thought her body was dissolving into foam.

*

The light begins to fade.

*

Ar out in the ocean, where the water is as black as the starless night, and as opaque as darkness itself, it was very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no one can see what lies beneath the surface: for twenty thousand leagues around there is nothingness, no curious watcher, no angry pitchfork, where not a single soul dwells.

Save one, but she’s not there, not really.

We just need to picture that it is in this darkness does she open her eyes.

Tremulously, her eyes are bright against the darkness of the ocean floor. This surprises her. There is no one around. This is someone with driftwood bones and a smashed-up heart.

She kicks her flippers experimentally and finds that some part of her remembers what she once was. She rubs against the wounds that have been inflicted upon her and knows that they will never be mended fully.

But she can try.

From there, she learns how to swim again.

She treads waters that are away from the prying eyes of millions.

Out there, she is untouched by the hands of other humans, with only the dark waves meant to keep her in a suspended embrace of serenity, with only the crash of the midnight waves as her company.

Out there, she will learn how to listen again.

She will learn how to speak again.

She will find her ears. She will find her voice.

Perhaps one day, she will surface again.

For now, she lets her scintillating tail flash on the rare occasion above the surface before she returns to patching her own skin together again.

Against the darkness of the ocean sea, the white foam glints like a starry night.

A/N: Ironically, I am writing a story about someone worrying about their images and what it entails to the authentic self, based off what I perceive from said person’s image. Building fiction upon fiction but casting it as authenticity… there’s something weird to unpick from this, don’t you think?

The few lines I used from the Little Mermaid are taken from here, but this edition seems to be… very Christian-y hopeful, unlike a previous edition I’ve read. That one was literally “oh she fell into the sea. She became foam. The end.”  Child me felt very cheated by Disney when Ariel didn’t turn into foam lmao.