You're the only one who saw my yesterday
백예린
Side A: Jeong (정). a kind of social solidarity, a mutual empathy.
The journals, the flowers, the pastels, the floral stationary: made me think of her. “This music video reminds me of you,” I said in our newly ongoing dm thread.
Here I was, some reformed boxer/personal trainer trying to become a writer, sending a k-pop music video (a language I don’t even understand) to a famous award winning novelist who was listed for one of the best writer in a literary magazine that makes that list only once a decade.
I finished the message: “oh by the way, I joined your writing community.”
She was offering a writing program, Her courses consist of scrapbooking, a way that organizing thoughts and ideas visually for essays. She had read one of my essays before and was moved by it, so I was ecstatic to know she’ll be in my writing journey.
This moment, I knew was going to be an everlasting memory. As I reflect back at this moment, I want to start with the woman in the video.
Yerin Baek was the type of talent that had such a fluid voice she can pour her genre bending pipes into any vessel that you call genre. Her vocal range is vast as she has shown off uploading musical covers: her booming voice she covered on Lauryn Hill Ex-Factor, her old soul melding with her voice on Hall & Oats Sara Smile, and her deep catalog knowledge going back to John Lennon’s Imagine. She was a singing phenom starting at the young age of 12.
At 13 she was signed to JYP Entertainment, one of the original "Big 3" South Korean entertainment agencies, who majored in powerhouse K-pop acts including 2PM, miss A, Wonder Girls, GOT7, TWICE, Stray Kids, and ITZY. Though she had a successful career performing in a duo named 15&, Her full potential growth as an artist started when she left JYP to form her independent label Blue Vinyl and released her first studio and double-album Every Letter I Sent You.
Yerin via her label’s Instagram, “This album reflects memories, dilemmas, and thought processes I had from when I was nineteen to twenty three. With no specific address, I’ve been mailing my feelings in form of songs. And I’m really glad that I can finally mail them to you all. This album is my way of thanking everyone who has been loving me and supporting my journey as a musician.”
With her a co-producer, Cloud, Every Letter I Sent You sound was an eclectic mix of genres, tied together with the theme of nostalgia. One of the standout tracks is Popo (how deep is your love) a melting pot of funk, jazz, soul, and you can even hear a little bit of church with the organs blending in with the horns and the flutes. It’s like a melody of vegetables made into warm stew on a rainy day.
In Square (2017), a song that was meant solely for performing at music festivals, would showcase her ability to trance her audience with the way she’s belting notes in this soft rock song. Her first performance of this song, from Have A Nice Day #4 on April 1st, 2017, went viral from a fan upload. In the video, you can hear she’s truly happy: on stage.
Though the English lyrics are a bit broken and fragmented because of Yerin’s first language being Korean, there’s a bit of charm there as the juxtaposition of lines. These lyrics make me think of the poet E. J. Koh and her memoir The Magical Language of Others, which is about four generations of stories from Koh’s family bind together by the letters written by her mother. Koh describes her mother’s Korean to English as, “Her error becomes a delight that cuts tension, stalls grief.”
“You are hurting me, without noticing
I'm so so broke like someone just robbed me
- Square (2017)
The overall project was delicate, held with a certain cherish that nostalgia makes you want to do. That was what the novelist was trying to teach me in her courses.
As I’m learning more about my writing craft, me and the Novelists’ friendship grew. At first she would ask me to help out with a few admin tasks like coming over to her place and helping out with writing greeting cards for our friends, to picking up papers from the post office. Slowly we got to know each other more, over Popeyes in her backyard. We’d started to have our own inside jokes like sending her coquette sneakers, even though she would never wear sneakers in her life. We watch movies together and grab food nearby and gossip about the literary world. There was even a time when I told her I had a crush on a woman who worked at the bookstore, she sent me a voice memo titled “LongPepTalk” trying to hype me up and ask her out. (Spoiler alert: she said no)
A year after Every letter I Sent You, she would release tellusaboutyourself. The album would be about evolution as she pushes herself to new genres of music. Just like the way a 3rd culture kid who had to move around alot and has a melting pot of accents across so many cities, she has gathered so many styles of genres where she’s found her own. In the song Hate You, where she sings raps over a sparse beat with simple chords, she moves with swagger as she sings with staccato and points with her finger at lyrics like:
But I'm tougher and I'm wiser
I'm strong enough to get through you
'Cause a person like me writes better songs
After people like you
Her song 0415 is where she pushes herself the most musically as she goes into deep house. This cool, seductive, bouncy track doesn’t have a melodic chorus like her other songs:
I don’t know if I have to be so good
I don’t know if I have to be like you
I don’t know if I could be your friend, too
I don’t know about you, you don’t know about me
But that doesn’t matter as gives her the chance to dance and groove with the audience while the background vocals carry the melody.
For the photoshoot of the album, Yerin would take the same approach the way the Novelist was teaching me in her courses as she reveals in a Korean interview, “Whenever I have a new album, I often create a PPT and present it to the employees with information on the mood and setting for the photos I want to take for each song of it.” She shares the specific moment that gave her the inspiration for the photography shoot for this album, “just like after drinking, i felt the need to express my emotions, so i searched for many club toilets. i liked it because those areas showed my opinions.” Yerin’s tellusaboutyourself era would be her peak fashion and style evolution as she mixes her feminine look with more tomboy clothing and colors that pop out, lipstick ruby red with always changing hair color, and never misses a chance to show off her tattoos on her arm.
Though I couldn’t convince the Novelist to wear sneakers, her coquette/ jewelry fashion choices would start blending with my fashion. Since I worked at a gym for a living, I was always in a tank top because I am always active and sweating. However My life was evolving quickly as well. I had been working on a reality show, a Food Network Docu-series with an all Asian cast called Chef Dynasty: House of Fang. I was ready to premiere myself on TV with a new look.
I would ask her opinion on new clothes, texting her outfits hoping that she’d approve. The way that she glimmers with her jewelry, My clothing started to accentuate more and have flash, like my iridescent converses and Silver leather jacket. “even your tank tops are getting bougier” someone said to me. I bought tank tops that expressed me like the one I have with fellow beloved reality star/Joshi wrestler Hana Kimura, and my Maya Angelou tank top as a nod to my writing. No one can pull off a tank top, a gold and silver necklaces with a jade emblem, in dress pants like me.
As a joke I sent the Novelist a list of designer water bottles to maybe laugh on how ridiculous it was. Within 10 minutes she bought one of them. I giggled at first because I was finally able to enable her to buy something she doesn’t need fashion wise. When I saw her in person again and saw the bottle in person, I admitted I wanted one too. “Don’t get the same color as mine” she exclaimed.
Interlude
I remember precisely, it was August 2022. Between May to July were grueling hours of filming, while working on an essay that just got picked up for publication via DiaCritics. My schedule was too busy to be talking to any of my friends, including a text here and there to the Novelist.
I was sleeping in the middle of the day until I get an email from the Novelist. She usually doesn’t send me emails, so half asleep I scan the very long written email to see why it was so urgent about it.
What she said blindsighted me: She’s been uncomfortable with the friendship since the beginning and has trust issues with men. She has been working with a therapist but she’ll be walking away from the friendship and cutting all communication from me.
I called a few of my female friends to try to understand what I did wrong. I recall my friendship in detail over and over again over the phone trying to find any mixed flags I have sent as I was pacing the streets of San Francisco with tension. But we concluded I did nothing wrong. I remember hanging up and crying on the curb, so angry at myself and not being given a reason why.
Walking away from the friendship meant erasing her presence from my life. No more strolls in bookstores where I used to love browsing, because her books were there. I went to twitter and IG and muted her profiles, as it was mutual as she stopped commenting on my posts.
I called my niece up, “hey that book you just borrowed, just keep it.”
When my essay published and TV show announcement came out a few months after, I’d get many texts and congratulations that were coming all over the country. The one person missing at my side during these career achievements was the Novelist. I had set a place aside for her for this moment, and she’s wasn’t there.
Side B: Han (한), a feeling of ‘unresolved injustice’, ‘a badge of suffering’ is both collective and individual.
When I first moved to San Francisco, I found my days more alone than with people. I spent a lot of nights alone at the bar so I’d pull out a notebook and jot notes down. It would be the same bars that had the same bathrooms like in Yerin’s pictures. I became good at blending in the background, able to do small talk with others as if I knew them for years and slip out of their lives as a small character.
I was hiding from others that I came to the city just leaving a violent home.
I was always needing to tell my story to explain where and what the trauma has done to me. Readers get to portal into my life reading my essay and empathize, but once readers are done they get to jump back into their able bodies – I have to stay in this painful vessel. Writing with so much clarity requires rehearsing my pain with every detail like when it happened for the first time. What I missed about the Novelist was that she too struggled in her body, her mind, her body of work represented us. With her I didn’t have to rehearse my trauma as she knew who I was. She was the only one who saw my yesterday.
But that’s all gone now.
She didn’t even allow me to say goodbye to her.
In an interview with Beaker, she recounts her time with JYP that even though she was signed to a major label, she felt that she wasn’t given enough chances to sing. She would grab a mic and a guitar and perform out on the streets. She laughed at the irony that people thought she was in need as they dropped off food and money for her because she was a struggling artist. She even admits her days consist more of the sad than happy. In her more somber songs, there's a certain sorrow in the timbre in Yerin’s music that speaks to me, as it echos in the hollow void the Novelist left in me.
When 2023 rolled in, returning to the page was difficult. Only angry sporadic fragments of thoughts were scribbled down before I gave up on the page. I didn't publish any essays that year. Yerin would only release two songs that year in January, one of the songs titled Fuckin’ New Year.
The first line of that song went:
Still don't understand why you wanted to help me
During Yerin’s first musical break, she found solace and friendship by forming a rock band. “There was a period when I was going through a hard time and I had to take a long hiatus from official activity, “as she gives the band’s origin story in an interview, “During then, Jonny and Hyung-seok would help me out on my work, playing instruments and recording without any compensation. Even if we were good friends, it‘s not easy to help without any reward, but they did.” because of this generosity, this would be the reason why she named the group The Volunteers. ”We would just casually grab a drink, chill and make music together. And I got the idea from here. Although we’re not literally doing volunteer works, I thought we could be the people who volunteer to provide music that can do good for others,” Yerin said.
In 2021 Yerin would release a self titled debut album. Following the footsteps of one of the most famous female lead rock bands the Cranberries, the members consisted members Jonny, Kim Chiheon, and Cloud. It must be jarring for Kpop fans to see a former JYP recruit go all the way into forming a rock band, but what is more rebellious than using 90’s indie rock and Grunge music that was meant to break away from corporate metal bands? “The songs are based on the ’80s and ’90s rock band music, mostly the alternative and grunge rock genres,” said Jonny in The Korean Herald.
In the song S.A.D is a fast fun pop punk song where it has the energy of hitting 5th gear out of hitting rock bottom from the gutter, with lyrics like:
If I could breathe so easy
Like others do in this sickening place
If I could stare at people
Like they do, without offending them
Digging deeper into Yerin’s inspiration of writing rock music, “I‘m usually inspired from the negative emotions. I think I mostly write my lines when I’m depressed or going through bad times. The band music especially has aggressive lyrics because I wrote them when I was kind of overwhelmed by rage,” she added. The rebellion and anger that Yerin gets to use through rock music, is the same kind of intensity that I use in my essays. The topics I talk about are heavy, and the way I resolve each essay is with retribution. Because I come to the empty page with that type of conviction, it’s hard for my friends be aside with me in the writing process. I thought the Novelist would be the one that understood why I write the way that I do, she’d be what The Volunteers were for Yerin. Instead maybe this is why she left too.
In February 2024 Cloud had his contract expire and left both the label Blue Vinyl and The Volunteers and on April 9th Blue Vinyl would dissolve. However, as a surprise, the next day The Volunteers announced their American tour. On April 14 the remaining members of The Volunteers would announce their new label peoplelikepeople and EP, titled “L.”
In an interview by EyesMag.com, they ask the origin of the EP title: “The album title comes from the first verse of our title song “L,” “It always starts with an L.” If we were to translate it into Korean, we wanted to convey the larger theme that everything starts with love, just as the word “love” starts with the letter “L.””
To come back in the point of love, I don't do often enough. The only love I knew ends in disruptive heartbreak, so disruptive that you can’t go back. Like when my parents had to leave a country they love Vietnam as refugees because of the war, and the only reward of ever going back is seeing something move beyond you and the country sees you as a stranger. Like when friends leave you because they think they found their life partner and solely dedicate their time to them. Like when a close writer friends whom you used to eat Popeyes Fried chicken with and send Coquette memes with sends you one last goodbye email.
In the same Eyesmag.com interview, they ask a craft question: “They say that creation is a series of sufferings. Are there times when you want to give up everything and run away?” She answers, “Rather than saying that creation is a series of pain, the process of creating with that emotion after a series of experiences and pains sometimes feels burdensome. However, it is also a process of resolving and recording something, so I think it suits me well.”
In my absence of not writing there was guilt that I was letting go of my voice, but maybe I needed to let go of what I thought Love was. Love can come from many forms, some may have to come through pain, time or even fandom. Away from the page I started to open up to people what I enjoyed, rather what hurt me, what needed to be fixed. I started to open up about my fascination with this woman named Yerin Baek in public, slightly embarrassed a grown man adoring a former K-pop idol like that. Yet the response was always welcoming, sometimes inviting and would follow up with questions. Some would even say they listen to her too.
In the slow, droning yet melodic song “L” the lyrics start with:
It always starts with an L
And makes you open your heart
It's very addictive and giving
Even if it lets you down
There was one foolish moment that I almost didn’t go to Yerin’s concert in 2022, because I wanted to erase all memories of the Novelist. The anger and resentment of having no closure almost denied the joyful moments of loving an artist out loud, these moments I’m so fond of now:
This is just a glimpse of the joy I had over the past 3 years listening to Yerin.
What got me to return to the page, as I have been gleefully enjoying The Volunteers in Berkeley, was a question from my friend Otto: “Why do you love her so much?
I pondered that question too many times. I overthought my answer with too much about process, craft, themes, and jargon. After deliberating with a few friends, I reach out to my Online Yerin fan friend Joy about an essay idea about Yerin. When I threw out a few links and ideas, they patiently waited when I finished my ideas and said with the utmost kindness:
“i believe it's only you yourself who could shape that essay just like what yerin did, always write what does your heart indicates.. i wish you'll get more inspired in writing because i can see that you are really determined to do one”
So I just listened to my heart. I came back to love again. Just like the EP suggests. I don’t have writing friends now, but because of Yerin’s work, her band The Volunteers, and her fans, they gave me a reason to write again. The gave me reason to rock the night away.
—
E.J Koh talks about having a space for magnanimity in her poetry in an interview for the Rumpus.net, “Poetry is the tunnel through which I had to pass through to forgive my mother (as well as myself) for the pain of our separation. My poetry teachers taught me how to look closely, and by doing this, how to care and create a space for magnanimity and forgiveness.” Finally letting go of the friendship of The Novelist doesn’t mean it’s gone forever, it’s just shelved away with my other memories that can be easily looked at when I have time. It’s just letting go makes my hands free to create other scrapbooks, because the practice of scrapbooking alone honors our friendship, to which was the whole point of that first lesson I ever took from her. As I look back at these moments, I remember what song I sent The Novelist, It was 그건 아마 우리의 잘못은 아닐 거야. The English title would describe the resolve I need to have about this former friendship and possibly move on and love other things: Maybe It’s Not Our Fault.