Idol

3. Starting work

I walk to the building. Yesterday I had a doctor's appointment and afterwards I called the number Jin-ah gave me and I told her I am ready to start working. We have agreed to meet at the company today afternoon to fix upon my duties.

A security guard at the door asks me for the ID badge, but I don't have one yet.

"Call whoever you're meeting and ask them to come down here." He advises, but I've come half an hour too early, so I don't want to call Jin-ah yet.

I go to a bench nearby and I take my phone and headphones out. I listen to some of Jin-ah's songs that I downloaded last week, while observing the people walking in or out of the building or passing by it. I expected to see celebrities signed with the company, but I see none of them. Actually, only one person enters the building while I'm here. I guess there is another entrance somewhere.

Twenty minutes later I see Ms. Cha approach. I catch up with her and she leads me in. She and the guard greet each other like good acquaintances and she doesn't even show him her ID badge. She says hi to someone we pass by in the hall and she leads me to an elevator. We go to the second floor and then through a door with Jin-ah's name on it.

It looks like a studio I guess. Jin-ah is not here yet. But she arrives within a minute.

"She calls me when she's almost there, and I live close, so we always arrive at the same time." Ms. Cha explains. "Do you want some coffee?"

Jin-ah nods and Ms. Cha turns to me.

"I should make it. I'm the assistant." I say.

"True." Ms. Cha agrees. "But you don't know where yet, so I'll go with you."

She hands me three mugs she takes out of a cupboard and we go to a kitchenette at the end of the corridor. There's a microwave, an electric kettle, a coffee machine and even an induction hob and some pots in there. I fill the kettle while Ms. Cha opens a cabinet. She puts one of the cups in the coffee machine and she pours two teaspoons of instant coffee into a second one.

"I usually drink mochaccino from the machine and Jin-ah always has coffee. She only drinks instant coffee and this one is her favourite brand." She explains, holding up a tin. "She drinks it black, but she usually adds something weird to it, so don't fill it to the brim. How about you?"

"I like anything that's sweet." I say, walking up to the cabinet she took the coffee from. I see a pack tangerine-flavoured decaff and I point to it. "Can I have it?"

"Sure. You don't drink caffeine?"

"No, I was just curious about the tangerine-flavoured thing."

"You're almost as weird as Jin-ah." She chuckles.

When we bring the coffee to the studio, Jin-ah takes a jar out of the same cupboard the cups were in. She takes a spoonful of its contents and puts it in her coffee.

"It's honey with cinnamon." She explains, seeing my curious stare. "You should try it sometime."

"I'd love to."

Jin-ah gives the coffee a stir and slides the mug my way.

"Here, take a sip."

I glance at Ms. Cha, but she just shrugs, so I take the offer. The coffee is indeed very good. Jin-ah observes my expression and she smiles.

"We're going to get on well together."

"Let's get to work then." Ms. Cha says. She passes me a piece of paper and an ID badge with my name. "You will be able to enter the building on your own now. And here is Jin-ah's this month's schedule. I already printed it, so take it, but I think it will be easier to just add you to our Google Calendar. And let us both add you on KakaoTalk."

I was starting to feel relaxed, but suddenly I am stressed again. I take out my phone and we exchange all necessary information. There are two new contacts on my Kakao now. Manager Cha and Park Jin-ah. I stare at the second one. If I've become her fan last week, I can call myself the most successful fan now.

"Can you drive?" Ms. Cha's question breaks me of my thoughts.

"No." I reply, worrying again.

"It's fine, I don't want a driver anyway. I prefer to drive my car myself." Jin-ah interferes.

"I suppose you'll just do a part of my job." Ms. Cha says. "Jin-ah has never had a personal assistant before, so we'll have to figure it out as we go. So instead of asking other personnel for help whenever we need it, we'll ask you from now on."

I nod to that, because I don't really have any comments. This whole opportunity is too good to be true, so I am obviously not going to complain, but I feel like they don't quite need me.

"Jin-ah told me you're not a fan, so you probably don't know much about her. There are some things that you should know though, now that we're working together. So your first task will be to look her up on the internet."

"I have already done some research. During my sick leave." I say carefully.

Jin-ah and Ms. Cha look at each other and then back at me.

"So? Any questions?" Jin-ah asks.

I remember everything I read and watched the past few days and there's really only one question on my mind right now. And once again I ask it impulsively.

"Are you okay?"

I can't read much from Jin-ah face other than shock. Ms. Cha looks at me like I'm crazy. I think I'm crazy, too. What the hell has gotten into me?!

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I'm sorry. I just... I'm stupid. I'm so sorry, I promise I won't be like that ever again."

Jin-ah conjures a smile on her face, it looks a little fake though.

"It's fine." She says. "Stop apologising."

Ms. Cha steps in and embraces Jin-ah gently.

"Let's call it a day. We're meeting here tomorrow at seven a.m." She orders with a cold stare.

I leave the room quickly and quietly feeling like s**t.

---

After I watched Kim Kyung-ja and Oh Sa-rang's press conference about the abuse, I returned to their interviews and shows from before. I tried to see some changes in them. I wondered how the whole world missed, what was happening to them. But when I tried to notice a change in their behaviour, to figure when exactly it had started, I wasn't able to find it.

Maybe it was the one interview where Kyung-ja got a big scare when the interviewer bumped into her accidentally. She played it off with a joke later, saying she's such a scaredy-cat. Or maybe it was the concert when Young-ae looked very tired and she even tripped over her own legs in the middle of her part. Afterwards she tweeted an apology for worrying her fans. She said she was a little sick but she still wanted to perform. Or the time when Sa-rang kept wearing sunglasses all the time for a month. She claimed it was her new favourite fashion accessory and she didn't take them off in front of the camera even once.

But after each of these events all the girls seemed to be perfectly fine. They smiled, joked, bickered with each other and interacted with their fans as if nothing bad had ever happened to them. They concealed their suffering so well no-one could discover it.

When I was watching Superwomen's interviews or the interviews Jin-ah gave after starting a solo career, I was watching her closely. I saw how her face got a little bit tense for a split second every time she was asked about Young-ae, Kyung-ja and Sa-rang. She always managed to pull herself together immediately though, and she answered the questions in a professional, concise but not hostile way.

I wondered how she was able to be so strong.

---

On my first actual day at work I am almost an hour early. I couldn't sleep anyway, so I just came here. I don't enter the building right away, I circle it a couple of times first. I find a parking garage entrance for the cars. There is no other way of entering there except for the elevator, so I guess that's how the celebrities avoid getting photographed inside and in front of the building.

I find a little shop nearby and I grab some kimbap for breakfast. I eat it at the same bench I was sitting at yesterday. When I finally go inside of the building, it's already a quarter to seven. I show my ID badge to the security guard proudly and she lets me inside.

I find my way to the studio and I knock lightly on the door.

"Come in." I hear Jin-ah's voice.

"Good morning." I say, bowing lightly.

"Hello!" Jin-ah vocalizes with a smile and Ms. Cha nods her head at me.

"I'm sorry for..." I begin, but Jin-ah shakes her head sharply and Ms. Cha breaks in.

"Forget it. Just don't mention it at all."

I just stand there awkwardly not knowing what to do next, but Jin-ah smiles at me again.

"How about you make us some coffee? Do you remember what we like?" She asks.

I give her the nod, I take the mugs and leave. 

Returning to the studio with three coffees without spilling any of them is quite a challenge, but somehow I succeed. When I hand Jin-ah her mug, she takes a bag of almonds from her purse and she pours a handful of it into her coffee.

"Do you want some?" She offers.

I've taken a caramel latte macchiato from the machine for myself this time, but I decide to give it a shot anyway.

"Jin-ah is going to work on her new album today, so you and I leave to not disturb her." Ms. Cha says. "Let's go to my office."

We take our mugs and move to a room next door. It's about four times smaller than Jin-ah's studio. There's only a desk and a file cabinet inside. On the desk there are two laptops and two chairs are standing on the desk's opposite sides. Ms. Cha points me to one the chairs and as I sit, she opens the laptop lying in front of me.

"There's a lot of e-mails to go through, and I have some other stuff to do, so that'll be your job for today."

She opens a mailbox and there's indeed a lot of new messages just sent today.

"If it's fanmail, just put it in that folder." She shows me how. "They are not supposed to send that to that address, but some of them do anyway. Jin-ah doesn't want me to just delete it, so we store it in here and once in a while she looks through it. If it's a business proposal, like an interview, a collab or a sponsorship agreement, read it to me."

She looks through the mails quickly and opens one titled Counterfeit albums. It's a mail from a group of people who bought Jin-ah's last album from some unverified website, but upon receiving it they realised it's a fake, probably copied by the seller to a lot of CDs.

"And then there are e-mails we just forward to the legal team. It's that kind of thing, like fans letting us know about someone deriving illegal profit from Jin-ah's work or image, infringement of copyright or slander. Same goes with e-mails accusing Jin-ah of something. And for death threats."

"Does Jin-ah get death threats?" I ask, shocked.

"Not often, but it happens. They're usually jokes or just some haters being weird, nothing serious. We forward all of them to the legal team though, and they handle it."

She scrolls through the mails again and finds a horoscope.

"And if it's a spam like this one, just delete it. I think it's all. Any questions?"

"No. At least not yet."

"Okay. If anything comes up, ask me later."

She sits on the other side of the desk and opens her laptop. I begin looking through the e-mails. I get through a bunch of fanmails first. Then I open an e-mail form a lingerie vendor who asks Jin-ah to model in their photoshoot. I inform Ms. Cha about it.

"Just delete it. Don't even reply." She says, sounding annoyed. "Jin-ah already rejected their offer twice, but they keep sending it. And you know what? Blacklist them. I don't think we'll ever want to work with them anyway."

Another mail is from a fan who claims some musician from Costa Rica plagiarised one of Jin-ah's songs. They explain that the text is an inexact translation of her lyrics, the melody is very similar and even the MV seems to be strongly inspired by hers, but there is no mention of the original song anywhere, so it's not just a cover. There is a link to the MV in the mail, so I click it to check if it really sounds similar. When the music starts, Ms. Cha glares at me.

"What are you doing? If you want to listen to music while working, use headphones."

"No, I'm just checking something. It's from a mail." I explain myself.

"What?"

"Alleged plagiarism."

"You don't have to do that. Just forward the mail to the legal team and they'll check whether it's legit or not. They have to do it anyway, so you're just wasting your time. And they're the professionals."

"Sorry." I mutter.

"Never mind. You're still learning." She smiles at me.

I decide to take out my headphones and listen to something while reading the e-mails, like Ms. Cha said before. I go through a couple more fanmails and I delete some spam. I forward a bunch of e-mails to the legal team. I am in awe of the fans who actually search out all of those counterfeit merch stores and who keep messaging the company about antis spreading fake news. It's some dedication. I read an e-mail from a redactor who wants to interview Jin-ah. Ms. Cha already knows him, so she calls him right away, they agree on a date and he promises her to send over a list of questions. It arrives in the mail an hour later and Ms. Cha tells me to print it out, so she could go over it with Jin-ah later.

And then I open an e-mail that I need to read three times, before I am finally able to process its meaning.

"Oh my God." I whisper to Ms. Cha, drawing her attention. "You need to see this."