How BTS’s Arirang Helped Me Find My Way Home

The Han River slices through the city of Seoul like a crooked east-to-west smile. It’s a popular gathering spot for families, friends, and young couples feasting on fried chicken and tubs of convenience store ramyeon while gazing at the rainbow light show at the Banpo Bridge. But han has another meaning to Koreans. Han describes a feeling of deep ache or sorrow, a primal wound that never fully heals, a psychic scar carried in the heart forever. But han isn’t just about hurt. It’s also a wellspring of strength, courage, and resilience. It’s often said that han is what sustained the Korean people through decades of brutal colonization, foreign occupation, and a war that tore families and the country itself in two. The hidden hand of han lifted up the Korean people as they persevered through grinding poverty. It hardened the collective will as they built South Korea into the economic and cultural powerhouse it is today in just seven decades. Some people say that han is passed down from one generation to the next. It’s bred in the bone, baked into the DNA.

I was born in South Korea in 1960 and sent away to be adopted by a white family in Wisconsin, one of an estimated 200,000 children sent to the U.S. and Europe after the Korean War. I arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in March 1962, red snow-suited, sock-footed, and stunned, blinking into the fluorescent dazzle of my Midwestern glow-up. It didn’t take long for me to get a fix on my position in the new firmament.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have K-dramas, K-food, K-pop music, or K-skin care. We didn’t have Daniel Dae Kim on HBO introducing the world to hallyu, the umbrella term for hot, trending, made-in-Korea culture. That wave wouldn’t crash on Western shores for several more decades.

There wasn’t anything remotely cool about being Korean in rural Wisconsin in the ’60s. The kids I grew up with couldn’t have found the peninsular nation on a map if challenged to do so with a pocketful of Pixy Stix as the prize. I’m not even sure I could have. In the absence of any geographical 411, the nicknames bestowed on me lacked both originality and precision. “Jap!” “Chink!” “Gook” was a latecomer to the arsenal. I wish I had a dime for every time I was told, “Go back where you came from,” wherever that even was. My flat, “pancake face” and “ching-chong” eyes made me an easy target for bullies despite being clad in the latest Wranglers and rocking a follicular fry job intended to zhuzh up my hopeless blanket of straight black hair.

Back then, the whole game was to get through the day without being the target of unwanted attention, the butt of the joke, the low-hanging playground fruit. I didn’t need other people to erase me. I desperately wanted to erase myself.

My parents loved me, but they wouldn’t have had a clue how to help me. The last thing I wanted to do was remind them that I was, you know, different in case they hadn’t noticed yet. I didn’t want to point out any dings or defects that might trigger a return-and-refund-type situation. I think they would have been as surprised as I was that the new Partridge Family lunchbox procured at Kmart over the summer break was not enough camouflage to provide adequate cover. There was nobody who looked like me at home, no one to teach me how to lay down a sick burn that would have shut those white kids up. So I did the only thing that made sense to me then. I hotfooted it out of my small town the minute I could.

I didn’t know it then, but even though I grew up 6,000 miles away from the land of my first mother, it turns out that I, too, carry han. For most of my life, I managed to keep the sorrowful side of han at bay. Instead, I leveraged the persevering side of han to stiff-upper-lip my way through every situation that made me feel alien, worthless, wrong.

The “we can do hard things” version of han helped sharpen my resolve through endless dead-end searches for my birth family and futile attempts to find any fragment of an origin story. It might have been han that kept me from falling into a million pieces when I finally set foot on Korean soil again last year, 63 years after I’d been unceremoniously exported as a so-called “orphan.”

What finally burst the dam of anger, humiliation, and loss I’d kept on lockdown for so long was something I couldn’t have possibly predicted. It had everything to do with South Korea’s most famous cultural export to date—the Bangtan Sonyeondan, a.k.a. the Bulletproof Boy Scouts, a.k.a. the K-pop idol group BTS.

Arirang, the new album from BTS, debuted in March of this year, immediately shattering sales records around the world. The metrics are staggering: 4.17 million copies sold in week one, with one million of those sold in the first 10 minutes, and over 110 million Spotify streams in its first day. It debuted on the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1 and held that spot for three consecutive weeks. It continues to set roaring new records every month.

The group’s first album in four years marked the dramatic reunion of the seven members following their mandatory service in the South Korean military. The release kicked off with a concert broadcast March 21 on Netflix. BTS: The Comeback Live was livestreamed from Seoul’s historic Gwanghwamun Square in real time, 8 P.M. KST. A global audience of over 18.4 million people in 80 countries tuned in.

I hadn’t followed the boy band closely in their early days. I knew the hits and was a fan of the band’s rapline, RM, Suga, and J-Hope. I wasn’t a card-carrying member of ARMY, the name of BTS’s legendary worldwide fan base. But I was BTS-curious enough to set an alarm and get up early on the morning of the livestream. By 6 A.M. CST, I was parked in front of the TV, a steaming mug of green tea in hand. I was fully sat, as they say.

The concert opened with a banger, “Body to Body,” a club-ready three-minute song designed for the dance floor. At about the two-minute mark, though, something unexpected happened. As the song builds toward the bridge, BTS wove in a sample of “Arirang,” a traditional Korean folk tune that dates back some 600 years. It kicked in slowly, then began to swell and bloom. An angelic chorus of voices rose against a backdrop of traditional Korean acoustic instruments (is that a cowbell?) and receded as the song raced to a sweaty close.

The second “Arirang” kicked in, I immediately burst into tears.

It was the sort of full-on overwhelm that’s satisfying and mortifying in equal measure. The choral part was performed in Korean, a language I don’t speak, so it wasn’t about the lyrics. It was a lot to try to work out before breakfast.

I’ve listened to “Body to Body” dozens of times since the livestream, and I’m cooked almost every time the “Arirang” part locks in, which is deeply problematic now that the song is ubiquitous in public places. My response feels visceral, but maybe there’s a logical explanation.

“Arirang” is a song that sustained impoverished Koreans during the years they struggled for survival under Japanese rule, a time when Koreans were forbidden to speak their native language and could only sing the songs of their country in secret. It carries themes of exile, displacement, and a deep longing for home.

I’m not the only one who’s had a powerful reaction to hearing that portion of “Body to Body.” Social media is full of video reels of Korean people weeping openly when they hear the strains of “Arirang,” like a sense memory from the past. Other adoptees I know say it’s helped them feel more Korean and that it’s helped transmute the shame they’ve carried their entire lives into a sense of pride and connection to their heritage.

BTS knew what they were doing. Naming their return album Arirang was a reset of sorts, a statement of intent, purpose, and positioning. Since the band’s debut in 2013, they’ve navigated overt and casual racism from both the U.S. and European press. In July, they announced they’d be sitting out the Grammy Awards rather than being siloed into the newly created “Best Asian Pop Music Performance” category. The “othering” of the album and its creators felt calculated and blatant—a door slammed shut, a slap in the face that felt painfully familiar.

With Arirang—both the album and the folk song of the same name—BTS made an unapologetic statement that they’re first and forever Korean to the core. The entire album is threaded through with cultural and historical references, a series of Easter eggs for the folks back home in Korea and a history lesson for the global community, all dressed up as a party-in-a-box.

In addition to the “Arirang” snippet, “Body to Body” references the 1988 song from Seoul’s Summer Olympics, “Hand in Hand.” The album’s third track, “Aliens,” responds to xenophobia and racism, and demands respect for Korean traditions. (Take your “shoes off at the door,” people!) “Aliens” also name-checks Kim Koo, the revolutionary leader who led the call for independence from Japanese rule. “No. 29,” which marks the album’s tonal midpoint shift, is starkly resonant. It’s simply a one-minute, 40-second field recording of a bell tolling—the Sacred Bell of Great King Seongdeok, known as South Korea’s National Treasure No. 29.

Even while doubling down on the Koreanness of it all with the Arirang album, BTS continues to pitch a big, bobbing light-filled tent where everyone is welcome. A BTS concert is a diversity fever dream—every age, race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality of person is packed in, well, body to body. By writing honestly about their own struggles with identity, mental health, and fear, and expressing defiant joy, BTS provides refuge and safe harbor for any person who’s ever felt alone, displaced, counted out, or adrift.

As an adoptee born but not raised in Korea, I’m not “Korean-Korean,” nor am I fully gyopo, a term used for diasporic Koreans born elsewhere but mostly raised in Korean families. Like other Korean adoptees, I’ve always occupied an interstitial space—neither Korean enough nor American enough to fit in anywhere; a niche within a niche. The rise of hallyu, including K-pop music from artists like BTS, has given me a way to feel more connected to my birthplace, but even this feels complicated.

Witnessing the miracle of modern-day Korea—born out of blood, sweat, and communal sacrifice—fills me with both pride and grief. I share DNA with the people who’ve built South Korea into an international force, but I didn’t share in the toil, so I don’t own any of the triumph. I didn’t get a chance to pull at the common oar. My contribution was to get out of the boat to lighten the load. I helped create the Korea of today by going away.

Yet there’s something in me I believe to be deeply, stubbornly Korean. I see it in the mirror and in the faces of my beautiful children. I feel it when I walk the streets of Seoul and swim into the crowd. I’m moved by the architecture of the Korean faces I see on TV and on concert stages—the rounded contours, the high cheekbones and low noses, the masses of incorrigible hair. Even in the almond-shaped eyes that cursed me as a child, I see something exquisite now, a sleek minimalistic elegance. I feel more at home in my spotted-banana, Korean-born skin as I grow older.

The music of BTS gave me a portal to feeling my way toward my inner Korean; permission to dance with that side of myself. These days I’m greedy for everything Korea has to offer. I’m hungry for its food, books, movies, fashion, and music from trot to underground rap. I’m gaining a rudimentary understanding of the country’s historical timeline. I’m practicing Hangul, the Korean alphabet, and trying to screw up the courage to greet the staff at Korean restaurants without chickening out and defaulting to English. I’ve joined six Facebook groups connecting Korean adoptees from all over the world. Hell, I might even join the group for “Silver ARMY,” BTS’s senior flank of aunties and uncles. Some days I even sing along with “Arirang” instead of reaching for a Kleenex.

I still wrestle with where I belong as a person who’s both Korean and American, and where I fit in the adoptee community itself, more a mosaic than a monolith. Finding a peaceful place to land amidst all the struggle and heartache is the work of a lifetime, and I arrived very late to the starting gate. Through it all, I can feel the twin poles of han working dynamically—present, balanced, and very much alive—and maybe that’s the most Korean thing about me.