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A visionary allegory: cabbage fields, kimchi fermentation, and the KORUS-FTA entwine with the rise of the K-pop system — an insect’s body becomes the map of a new empire.
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The earth, scorched by the sun. Hard furrows, wrinkles. Jets of water shifted its color. Sand. Then dark brown, black. The seeds sown in spring had now sprouted. Green rosettes, bleached day after day by the sun. The head, still clinging to the root, was taking shape. The cabbage was growing.
The first Popillia landed on one of the tenderest leaves, following the pale veins to the outer edge. The scent of sap—sweet at the head, bitter at the tail—flowed through its small, shimmering green body. Quadriguttate.
The first bite. The arrival of the others. Thousands settled, one on top of another. Upon what would become their home and sustenance. Bites multiplying, voracious, one after another. Ragged holes, the imprint of mandibles. From June to September. Leaves disintegrated. The cabbage was dead.
That humble and complex plant. Common, unloved. Resilient. Indigestible to those who cannot listen to the earth. Its bitter, sulfurous taste turning sweet and nutty once cooked.
In 2007, in Korea, per capita cabbage consumption was estimated at nearly fifty-five kilograms a year, twenty of which were kimchi alone. Worldwide, in the same year, each living human potentially consumed almost ten. Cabbage had to be pushed abroad as well. Even where it was not grown.
The goal was set. Cut the cabbage, prepare it, ferment it, add gochujang. Distribute it. The Korean entertainment system in the early 2000s was like cabbage. Future kimchi.
Relentless growth was drawing investors from all over the world. A fast, precise machine. Leaving behind 1996, when the only things arriving at airports were food parcels from NGOs. The Third World.
A bilateral agreement, created to tear down tariff barriers between South Korea and the United States. Trade and investment were expected to rise. “Economic cooperation.” A flood of capital was about to sweep through the Korean entertainment system.
The dusty floors of rehearsal rooms, the rusted metal bunk beds, the crackle of broken microphones. The fractured reverb of mixers with no control. Everything was about to be repaired, polished, staged for an international debut. An Asian woman opened her eyes with blepharoplasty. Only to be loved.
On a conveyor belt, boys and girls rolled past. Assembling missing parts. Opening their chest cavities to give them breath. Cutting their throats. Giving voice as they laughed. Dystopian tickling. Anesthetized mutilation. Stripping fat from their bodies and altering their features. So that they no longer had mother or father.
How much are you willing to lose to have what you want?
In the years to come, Korea would not answer.
They had planned to offer that kimchi with both hands, in a bowl. Instead, they prepared to toss it into a plastic container with a crooked label, the writing incomprehensible. The Popillia quadriguttata, red with sauce, still clung to a strip of cellophane. Dead too, believing it was still a leaf.
Luna was part of this mechanism. The process had begun. She was the most visible gear, the one with the deepest grooves. She had to work.
She sat in her car, outside the agency. In her hand, a transparent container. Kimchi. The beetle’s corpse floated in the red sauce. She looked at it facedown. Thought that out of hunger it had destroyed itself. Perhaps out of love. In its plastic coffin.
She looked up. A middle-school boy was holding his mother’s hand. Too tall. Too thin. Crooked glasses. A bob of hair brushing his shoulders. Black jacket, jeans, white Nikes with untied laces. The mother noticed. She spoke in the silent spectacle of that moment. She knelt to tie his shoes. Then they rose and went inside.
Suddenly Tae and his mother filled her mind. She flinched. The thought that he might ever be drawn to such a career. To lock himself away in an agency for years, to endure the violence of a system that demanded responsibility and allure. Fame in exchange for the soul.