By VALERIE WU | Mosaic
For Asian American youth, K-Pop’s global popularity is something we’ve been waiting for.
In the predominantly Asian community of Cupertino where I grew up, second-generation immigrants felt disconnected from our cultures. Asian parents insisted that we should achieve academic excellence before we could examine our heritages. With no representation in American media, we turned to K-Pop — a genre of South Korean music characterized by its use of audiovisual elements — to find people who looked like us: our idols represented us in ways that mainstream American music did not.