FAKE PLASTIC SUMMER MEMORIES
Written by Jawni Han
Image courtesy of www.newjeans.kr
Growing up in Seoul, summer meant a temporary respite from school uniforms and strict grooming policies. It began when I took my drab blue school shirt and ever-ill-fitting gray trousers off their hangers and tossed them into the bottom drawer of my dresser. For at least a month, there was no homework to worry about, no mandated haircuts enforced by the school. I never actually bleached my hair back then, but the simple fact that I was free to do so thrilled me.
These days, I wonder if a fifteen-year-old me would have liked uniforms, had they been tastefully designed. Now that I am in my 30s and have transitioned to a different gender, my attitude toward school uniforms has changed entirely. Could it be that I just did not want to wear the boys’ uniforms? Would my life have panned out differently if I had traded my ugly trousers for a tartan skirt? Soon enough, I found myself drifting into a sea of what-ifs with no horizons in sight.
This reverie began when I came across the music video for NewJeans’s“ Bubble Gum.” The images of the five members, all dressed in uniform-style white shirts paired with black skirts or shorts, frolicking on the beach feel like a near-perfect visualization of the kind of summer I would have fantasized about as a teenage girl. At the same time, they’re a stinging reminder that this is all a fantasy about a fantasy that never could have been. I wouldn’t even say this is their best music video or song, but I became obsessed.
Of course, school uniforms and girls playing on the beach are nothing new in K-pop. But what makes the“ Bubble Gum” video stand out for me is the Mini-DV footage of the girls on vacation. Its visual style echoes the beach scenes in All About Lily Chou-Chou, where a group of thirteen-year-old boys go on holiday in Okinawa just before starting junior high. For many Korean millennials like me, Shunji Iwai was a gateway into Japanese cinema, and Lily Chou-Chou in particular played a formative role in my sentimental education. Lonely teens spending way too much time on message boards, communal parasocial relationships with musicians, violent bullying at school, and adolescent self-loathing: all of it hit painfully close to home.
I can’t say that I project myself onto NewJeans’s music video the way I still do onto Lily Chou-chou. It makes little sense for the girls to wear uniforms on vacation, and when Hye-rin, the group’s youngest member, uses a Y2K slang word that no zoomer would say, I am reminded that this is all a carefully constructed artifice designed to satisfy younger generations’ fascination with retro aesthetics. So why, despite its obvious artificiality, does the video trigger such an intense, inexplicable wave of nostalgic yearning?
Nostalgia, in its most literal formulation, refers to longing for a home that no longer exists. But that“ home” need not be a place; we often feel nostalgic for a different time, be it our own childhood or a past that we never even experienced.“ I was born in the wrong generation” might be the perfect slogan for it. In other words, nostalgia itself is a form of fantasy in which we can project our yearning onto virtually anything. The presence of the school uniforms and the unconvincing line delivery do not detract from the music video’s emotional pull. If anything, these glaringly artificial details make it that much more potent. I accept the terms and conditions of its existence as a“ virtual reality” that mirrors my nostalgia, and these“ unrealistic” details only heighten its infectiousness.
Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym posits that nostalgia comes in two different strains: restorative and reflective. Restorative nostalgia clings to the belief that a lost“ home” can be rebuilt. This is why nostalgia of this kind is prevalent on the right: the restoration of traditions and the fetishization of a homeland from a time when it was untainted by immigrants and DEI programs. Of course, the idea of an Edenic homeland is as real as the biblical phrase“ a land flowing with milk and honey.” In its naive and selective reconstruction of the“ home,” restorative nostalgia selectively reassembles certain symbols of the“ life back then,” and reinvents a past that never was: Ivy style without the campus politics of the '60s, made-in-USA vintage convertibles without labor movements and deindustrialization, and so forth.
Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, calls the object of nostalgia into doubt and revels in the unattainability of that fantasy. Actually, for the reflective kind, the act of longing itself takes precedence over the referent. It is not interested in pictorial symbols because this nostalgia does not invoke national memory, but collective memories. Instead, reflective nostalgia obsesses over certain details, timbres, and textures of a place or a time, and wanders around in that distance between the past and the present.
What interests me about the school uniforms in the“ Bubble Gum” video is not their symbolic significance, but their crisp texture and that particular shade of white. When juxtaposed with the Mini-DV look and the images of the beach, they conjure a constellation of artificial memories that feel oddly connected to my own. It may not make sense for school girls to wear uniforms during their summer break, but that heightened artificiality makes me reflect on my own attitude toward the uniform, my relationship to my pre-transition self, and the chorus of cicadas, the constant soundtrack to my summers in Seoul.
“It may not make sense for school girls to wear uniforms during their summer break, but that heightened artificiality makes me reflect on my own attitude toward the uniform, my relationship to my pre-transition self, and the chorus of cicadas, the constant soundtrack to my summers in Seoul.”
I don’t have a burning desire to wear an actual school uniform, though many of my favorite outfits are inspired by it. I will never get to experience being a teenage girl in sailor fuku, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. After all, transness looks forward, not backward. I don’t mourn this supposed“ loss.” Instead, I have learnt to curate fake plastic summer memories for the teenage girl that I could’ve been: NewJeans on the beach, the fuzzy grains of Lily Chou-chou, the sounds of the cicada heard in Neon Genesis Evangelion, Peter Pan collars from Comme des Garçons, etc. Fragments from different pasts and worlds, stitched together into something that resembles a possible girlhood.
