The Korean Wave 2006 - Korean Cultural Service

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He went on to be rejected – he kept count – 18 times
by artistic management companies. Again and again, he
was told that he would never be “hot,” that he was too
tall and “too ugly,” primarily because he lacked a “double
eyelid.” Without cosmetic surgery to create a fold above
his eyes – a relatively common procedure, though one often
decried as a capitulation to Western beauty standards
– he could forget about a show business career in Korea,
he was told.
By the time he presented himself for an audition at Mr.
Park’s performing arts academy, Rain was in a state of
desperation. His mother was quite ill, and he himself had
not been eating regularly.
Rain, then 19, gave the longest and most passionate audition
he could muster, nearly four hours of singing and
dancing. Mr. Park (who goes by the initials J.Y. or J.Y.P.)
accepted him into the JYP Academy. “He had this hunger,”
Mr. Park said.
“That is true,” Rain said. “I was literally hungry.”
Mr. Park himself had made his debut in 1994 as a
“crazy, lunatic hip-hop artist from the Ivy League” of
South Korea. He was a bad-boy performer who wore
see-through vinyl costumes, but he got away with being
outlandish because he had graduated from a prestigious
university, he said.
After finding high-powered backers for an entertainment
management and production company, Mr. Park opened
the academy in 1998. He aimed to discover and make
stars, and Rain clearly had potential as well as need.
“As soon as I signed Rain, he asked me to help his mother
and explained the situation,” Mr. Park said. “I was like,
‘Yo, get in the car.’ We went to his house, and I saw his
mom lying there on this cold floor. We got a big surgery
done on her. But then she insisted on no more treatment.
She wanted me to spend my money on her son. He would
tell her, ‘Yo, Mom, J.Y.P. has enough money to support
both of us.’ She passed away a year before he debuted.”
After three years of training, Rain’s first stage experience
came as a backup dancer for Mr. Park. Mr. Park, who still
writes all his songs, created Rain’s first album, “Bad Guy,”
in 2002. With the second album, “Running Away From
the Sun,” Rain said that he began asserting himself in
the realm of choreography. “By the time his third album
came out in 2004, they stopped calling him little J.Y. and
started calling me Rain’s producer,” Mr. Park said.
Soap operas are the engine of celebrity in Asia for
Koreans, and so Rain’s move into television was a calculated
one. “We saw Korean drama flowing all over Asia,”
Mr. Park said. “I said to Rain, ‘Since you know how to
act, we should use this to make you go overseas.’ As soon
as his second TV drama, ‘Full House,’ exploded all over
Asia, we went over to hit them with concerts.”
In Rain’s most recent soap opera, “A Love to Kill,” he plays
a martial arts fighter. To alter his physique for the role, he
told Korean journalists, he was jumping rope 2,000 times
a day and eating only chicken breast and mackerel.
This kind of discipline defines him. In addition to his
acting, recording and some modeling, he is finishing a
university degree in postmodern music. Although unable
to attend many classes, he does all the homework,
he said, plus studies not only English but Chinese and
Japanese, too.
MN Chan/Getty Images
Mr. Park said that Rain was motivated by a sense of obligation
to his late mother.
“He promised his mom that he was going to be the No. 1
singer in the whole world,” he said. “That’s why he never
parties, never drinks, never goes out and practices hours
every day.”
It was Mr. Park who, with 20 CD’s in his backpack, set
their global journey into motion. He took off for Los
Angeles and went door to door “being nobody.” After
a year, he got his first call, from Bad Boy, P. Diddy’s entertainment
company, expressing interest in one of his
songs for the rapper Mase. After that, the collaboration
with Americans began.
Mr. Park said he believed that other Asian pop stars have
failed in the United States by trying “to impersonate what
was going on here.” He said that he and Rain wanted to
avoid “being another couple of Asian dudes trying to do
black music,” by embracing their inner delicacy and letting
their Asian-ness show.
The moment is ripe, Mr. Park said. “Every market has
been tapped except for the Asian market, and that’s 5
percent of America,” he said. “That’s our base. But I believe
that we can move beyond that, and I believe that
the American music industry needs to partner with us to
make inroads into Asia, too.”
Mr. Park said that it has been easier for him, working as
a songwriter in the United States, than it will be for Rain
since “songs don’t have color.” But Rain is convinced that
he has crossover appeal based on his own informal market
research: he had women – “real American women”
– climbing all over him at a bar in Los Angeles last year.
At the end of the interview, Rain was asked if he took
some pride in defying those naysayers who once thought
he would never be “hot.”
“Yeah, sure!” Rain answered in English, and then switched to
Korean, leaving his female interpreter in a sputter of giggles.
“Um,” she said. “He say, um: ‘You have to come see me
in my concert, and you have to be attracted to me!’”
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The Korean pop star and actor Rain, left at an October concert in
Hong Kong, is looking to make a name for himself in the United
States. He will perform two shows this week at Madison Square
Garden. “It is an incredible honor to perform there,” he said.
Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.