“Why would they choose someone like you?”

15-years-old Jang Yunhee looks up behind the glasses she is wearing, seeing a group of trainees in the room talking about an audition for a new drama that the agency has been talking about. Sign up for it and you are taken to the audition, been given the chance to let your unknown face get seen. Yunhee can see one of the older girls, all cocky and confident she will get the part, have her eyes focused on one of the newer trainees, and right away you can know it is all about who has the confidence from being within these walls the longest – the one who is in charge.

“I … I didn’t think of it like that… It was more … like a fun thing to try,” the junior stutters out to not get on the bad side of the other trainees.

Yunhee looks back down on her sneakers to finish tying the shoelaces tight and hard for them to not get loose during today’s practice. She likes that no one here cares about her. Having a pretty face is everything, but to have the baby-face that Yunhee has and too ignorant personality, she is no threat to the other trainees therefore they leave her alone. She loves it. She isn’t here to make friends and she is definitely not here to let others make fun of her; instead she leans back against the wall and waits for the teacher to arrive for today’s first lesson to begin.

Jang Yunhee has been a trainee under SM Entertainment since 2010. She has learned everything there is to know; how to sing and dance, how to act and how to behave. These are things she only uses when necessary, so around other trainees she just sits back and decides to wait for the right opportunity to speak, move and get seen. For being only fifteen she has a very grown-up mindset at times. She is tiny, her body is slim and tiny no matter whom she stands next to and she could easily be said to be the cutest trainee at the moment if it wasn’t for the personality she shows to the trainees.

The dance teacher arrives; entering the room with fast steps and within a minute has the girls in the room go through the steps they were taught last week. Yunhee is quietly doing as she is told. Her memory is good when it comes to music, she is great and she knows that, but when it comes to dancing… Her body moves, but she messes up a lot. She can learn a dance for weeks before doing it as the teacher wants, though each time she dances it looks like she is doing nothing wrong. Her body moves perfectly to the music, it moves perfectly every time but just not the same way the teacher shows or the same way as the other trainees. It frustrates her even after three years dancing because it doesn’t get better. The teacher tells her this many times; “Your body knows how to dance, it just doesn’t like to follow others”. Yunhee gets praise, not as a great dancer or for being a great student, but because she is the one who never complains.

“Can’t we learn something easy?” one of the trainees sighs, covered in sweat after an hour dancing.

“Yeah, I would love that,” another agrees while gulping down a bottle of water.

Yunhee is breathing heavily, standing with her hands on her skinny hip and looking at the mirror-reflection of everyone in the room. The class is divided from 20 to 30 trainees into two teams; one for girls and one for boys. The two teams rarely train together and are separated, meaning they practice in two completely different rooms. Yunhee only has dance practice with most of the girls in this class, there are a few she has vocal lessons with though and she has acting lessons with some of the boys in the other room. Most of them are between 14 and 18 years old. Among the girls, Yunhee is the third youngest. It’s good to not be the youngest or oldest, whether it is age or how long you have trained; teachers and other trainees take notice of those trainees.

Why train to be an idol if you don’t want to be seen?

Yunhee’s strategy is different. She doesn’t want to be seen among the trainees, but she makes herself seen in other ways. You don’t have to be the loudest or the best one to debut, to be put in a group that has a small possibility to debut; Yunhee has an advantage with her looks. To be pretty and cute is pretty much everything needed to be able to debut these days, and that was why Yunhee was put in different groups during her first two years at the agency. She has been in a trio of vocals, she has been in a big co-ed group for pop/hip hop, also a girl-group first of 12 members and then 6 members. None of the groups got anywhere, so Yunhee is back practicing with everyone else. Her strategy is to be noticed quietly by the teachers, for them to notice how she gets better and how much time she gives to this to let them know she is serious about debuting one day. She does not want to be bullied, like most of the trainees are. She is keeping a low profile for that reason.

The teacher is loud. His voice echoes in a low bass voice when telling the girls to stop behaving like babies and get their feet moving.

“You think you will get anywhere unless you test yourselves all the time? The harder the routine is, the better you get,” he tells them and Yunhee nods quietly for herself in agreement. “Now start moving.”

Yunhee is fast to move her feet and body according to his counting, focusing on their reflections in the mirror to keep up with the other girls.

Dancing is fun; it is super hard but yet it is fun. Yunhee is sweating from top to toe with the routine but she loves it. She loves to sweat, finding it as proof that she is working hard, and dancing is the best way to sweat during practice. Yunhee feel she is made for being an idol in so many ways, she just need to find an open spot to let everyone realise that.

After dinner the trainees are gathered for this week’s challenge. Every month the trainees get into teams or solos depending on the challenge to perform a song for what is called Monthly Evaluation – in a simple sentence it is a competition between trainees to perform and be filmed to be judged by teachers for what they have to improve. Some times they have a dancing challenge, other times they can have a song-writing challenge, even being challenged to put on a play together and they have to practice lines and characters together. This time it is a singing competition. Yunhee is put in a girl-group of four.

Five-six hours a week is given for the challenge and the fourth week they have the trainees show these things up in front of cameras in the practice room on Saturday. This is a challenge in many ways, and Yunhee knows many of the secret challenges in it.

The first thing she knows when she is told which group she is with today is that their whole challenge will collapse. Two of the girls in her team are the two “bossy” ones from her dancing class and the third is the newest trainee who just follows and is too shy to say a full sentence without stuttering. As soon as they get this one hour today to talk through about what song to do together, Yunhee doesn’t get to say a single word. The oldest girl among them who also is the one who has been training the longest, is fast to go through some of her favourite songs before deciding on Adele’s [Rolling in the deep]. Yunhee has never really liked that song, maybe because it is the worst song to sing in a competition unless you have a voice like Adele – and even then it is a painful song to sing.

The secret challenge the teachers always look forward to see is how the trainees divide the practices for these weeks; they need to put it in on their schedules to fit their group-members, and within minutes the two bosses of Yunhee’s team has decided a schedule fitting theirs. Yunhee won’t be able to attend half of the practices, but no one listens to her saying that.

It’s not the first time this happens; this is an everyday life as an SM Trainee, so Yunhee knows as long as she has her parts for the song she can practice them on her own. What is important when being in a group is to know of everyone’s positions: Yunhee has heard two of them sing, and she knows one has a darker voice while the other can’t really hit the tones, and she herself has a voice that can go both deep and light, which gives her an advantage the others doesn’t think of.

Compared to anything else in life, Yunhee knows her voice better than anything. She loves to sing and has loved to sing since she was a child; she has had her grandmother help her out and she has always dreamt to be a singer. Compared to the trainee with them now who has been there the longest, the one who has the looks but not the voice, Yunhee can sing almost any kind of song if she gets the time to practice it.

Yunhee knows her strategy; be invisible for these weeks, then shine at the audition. That’s how it works for her. There is no need for her to fight with the others of which parts she wants (she barely knows the song so she wouldn’t be able to decide either) and before they can even start dividing the parts, their one hour has ended and they have to go to the next practice.

As soon as her practices ends for the day in the late evening, Yunhee finds a computer at the agency and starts looking up Adele. Her music: pretty much only that. She listens through some songs, repeats [Rolling in the deep] a few times on YouTube with the lyrics. She writes it down in her noting pad, studies the lyrics from beginning to end, singing along to certain parts without knowing which ones she will have. Without loosing sight of the time, she sits there for an hour, going through the same song over and over again before she is in a hurry to leave.

It’s midnight and the sky is black outside. The streets are light from all kind of lights and the chilly air makes her fast steps feel relaxed. Yunhee keeps thinking of the song when walking alone down the street. At this hour there aren’t many people outside at all, it is in the middle of the night and people got work in the morning. It’s comfortable to walk like this.

Jang Yunhee has no family she lives with. Her grandmother is old and sick, staying at a home for elderly, and though Yunhee takes every chance she can to visit her grandmother, they can not live together. Yunhee is renting a room at a family living on top of a pizzeria not far from the SM Entertainment building. The family is nice, letting her rent the room even if she has early and late days, and she has lived there for almost two years now. It’s a place to sleep at