I’ll be the one

FAT GIRLS CAN’T DANCE.

It’s something my mom said after one of my ballet recitals when I was a little kid. I’d already felt out of place. Even though we were all five, the other girls had somehow already lost their baby fat and had slender, angelic legs and arms while I had a jiggling cherub belly that could be seen from the balcony seats.

I guess a normal kid would have cried. Or gotten discouraged. Or maybe even quit ballet there and then. But instead, I stomped my foot on the ground with as much force as my five-year-old self could muster and yelled at my mom’s face, “OH YEAH? THEN I’LL PROVE YOU WRONG!” and stuck with ballet for several years before the snobby prima-donna types irked me enough to switch to hip-hop and modern dance.

I suppose the whole dance thing is pretty good representation of the relationship I have with my Mom. Which is why, instead of telling her about You’re My Shining Star, the new K-pop competition survival show in LA, I skipped school and rode the train to the audition. Sorry not sorry.

Thankfully, Dad came with me to the preliminary auditions when he was in town last week. he waited in line with me and signed all the parental permission forms, something Mom would never do.

While the open-call preliminary auditions were casual and quick, today’s audition line is moving at a snail’s pace-probably because everyone is being recorded with the potential of appearing on TV. It’s my least favorite time of the year-late August, when LA is humid and hot, like the fiery pits of hell. After standing for several hours in the soul-crushing long line that snakes down Wilshire Boulevard, I’m a panting, sweaty mess by the time I enter the fancy office building where auditions are being held.

“Hi,” I said to the lady at the front desk as I wipe away the sweat from my brow. “I’m here to audition for You’re My Shining Star. My name is Shin Haneul, but my American name is Skye.”

For my Korean name, I make sure to say my last name first, like my parents taught me to do. I’ve always loved both my names, since haneul literally means “sky” in Korean. Skye was just a cool variant of Sky that Dad chose for me when I said I wanted an American name for school. And the name stuck.

The lady at the desk, a fortysomething middle-aged Korean woman who looks as if she could be one of my mom’s friends “really, she’s dressed exactly like them…the same black blouse and everything) glances up at me…and does a double take. She doesn’t even bother to hid the utter shock-and even disgust-in her eyes as she gapes at me.

“Y-you’re auditioning?” she said in Korean-accented English.

I switch to Korean. “Yes, I already got in at the preliminary auditions. Here are my papers, signed by my dad and fully notarized.”

“Ah…okay.”

Still looking doubtful, the lady takes my papers. As I wait for her to check me in, I take off my white-framed heart-shaped sunglasses so I can see the inside of the building better.

Without the rosy tint of my glasses, everything looks a bit stark. The building itself looks pretty old, like it was built in the 1920’s. but nearly every inch of the lobby is decorated with brightly colored posters of the celebrity judges and Samsung LED HDTVs looping the promo video for You’re My Shining Star. The judges are the usual bunch: Jang Bora, a now-retired member of Lovey Dovey, one of those OG K-pop groups from the nineties; Park Tae-Suk, the creator of You’re My Shining Star and the founder of a top entertainment company in Korea; and Gary Kim, a Korean American rapper who’s big in the LA Koreatown scene.

My skin practically buzzes with excitement over the fact that I’m about to see the three celebrities in person. During my audition in just a few minutes, I’m going to be so close to the judges that I’ll be able to see their pores-if they even have any pores. My mom always says that Korean celebrities pay extra attention to their skin because HD screens show everything. I don’t watch enough Korean TV to know this, but I make a mental note to see if she’s right when I walk into the audition room.

Although You’re My Shining Star definitely isn’t the first K-pop competition to have global auditions, it’s the first to hold auditions exclusively in America. I can never get over how big K-pop is now. Only eight years ago, people only knew about Psy and the memeable moments of humor in “Gangnam Style.” Now, BTS is everywhere, and people from all sorts of different backgrounds are lined up to audition.