It's a novel experience except I'm not very sure which category this should go. You see, it started really innocent. I was in law class and we were discussing 'free speech' and my group decided to be different (everyone else was being terribly srs about the exercise). So we talked about international differences in freedom of speech. We went through the usual (i.e. Australia, Singapore, Russia, Arab/Muslim countries, etc) and I suddenly remembered something. On hindsight IDK if I should have mentioned it, I mean-- I don't want to be stereotyped as a typical Asian girl into Asian music, pop music no less but I said it. The P word (he's become like a forbidden entity in the scene).
Park JaeBum (whom I've had a
rather lengthy entry about already)
I didn't exactly say his name but one of my classmates caught on and it was O_O Here I was thinking that I could get away with being vague and just giving an example (because hey, he was really relevant to discussion. It IS an issue about free speech in S.Korea) but no, somebody had informed him of this issue and he knows about Korean boybands. I'm not ashamed of my fandom, really. I'm just careful with mixing fandom with real life. IDK why it's such a big deal for me (asian music fandom in general which I usually don't mention unless it's an Asian I'm talking to) unlike my animanga fandom which I feel is pretty-- IDK normal? I suspect it's because I can always say
Ghibli is my fave Japanese artist when in actual fact I know less about Ghibli than I do about Konomi or Amano. I guess it's because I'm afraid of being judged which is stupid because I'll like to believe I'm not ashamed of my fandom. I think, in actuality, really--
I'm just ashamed to be myself, a fan, an Asian in a relatively white country.
What made things worse was when I was showing the same classmates my browser, they noticed at the bookmark toolbar I had Super Junior's soompi page and ELF fansite prominently displayed. I then proceeded to engage them in conversation about the largest boyband in the world which was weird-- but kind of cool at the same time. IDK.