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Min Joo Lee, "Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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Stassi Schroeder
I am your host, Stassi Schroeder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three?
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Steven because he's so evil, I do.
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
You see everyone face consequences. It's intoxicating.
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Stassi Schroeder
The writers just know how to trick ya.
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
There's always a twist in this show. It's nothing you would expect.
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Stassi Schroeder
Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. Now streaming and stream the new season of Tell Me Lies on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hablas Espanol Spriesto Dzoich if you used.
- [01:00]
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Min Joo Lee about her book titled Finding Mr. K. Drama, Pop Culture, Romance and Race, published by Rutgers University Press in 2025. Examining a number of different sort of levels and types of of relationships between Korean men and women who are fans of a certain type of Korean man, right? Specifically what romantic Korean television shows, for instance, show as Korean men. And obviously what we see on screens is one depiction of masculinity, of romance, of race. It's maybe a different thing for women who like those things to then turn up in Korea and go, hey, actual human Korean man. Let's kind of do that. Or that's my framework. You know, that's a really interesting interaction to think about. And as Minju has done in this book to research and write and Tell us about. So we clearly have a lot of things to get into and unpack, which I think will be quite intriguing. So, Minju, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Thank you for inviting me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Miranda, could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yes. I'm Minjoo Lee. I'm an assistant professor of Asian Studies at Occidental College, and I decided to write this book on this particular topic because I have personally been always a fan of Korean television dramas, especially romantic ones, So I always wanted to write something about it. I wasn't quite sure what topic I was going to write about in terms of the Korean television dramas, because there are so many different paths that you could take in analyzing them. Um, but I did preliminary research and observed that Hallyu tourism, or these kind of tourism that you described, was booming in Korea at the late 2010s where I was doing these kind of research. So I decided to focus on these kind of tourism. Initially, I thought I'd write a book about the tourist interaction with particular Korean television drama filming locations. But then I saw that some academics have already written about those topics, and I thought that it was going to be more interesting for me to talk about how these fans interacted with individuals, local individuals, as opposed to the spaces. So that's where the book started.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for that introduction. I think it's quite interesting that so often books come out of a combination of sort of academic interest as well as personal ones.
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So good to have kind of both of those elements on the table as we go. But you mentioned their hallyu, and that may not be a term that everyone is familiar with. So can we quickly define that before we move forward?
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yes. So Hallyu is a phenomenon that has many names. It's also widely known as the Korean wave, and it's a phenomenon that emerged in the early 2000s. It refers to the transnational popularity of Korean popular culture, including Korean television dramas, movies, and Korean popular music. Music, as well as something more broad, like the popularity of Korean fashion and cosmetics and stuff like that. And it's driven by dual forces of fans, of course, and then also the Korean government and the industry to a certain extent. To explain the second part a little bit more, some scholars point to the period after the Asia financial crisis of 1997 as the point at which the Korean government decided to make its culture popular culture, a form of export, and where the Korean wave, or Hallyu, as we see nowadays, kind of came to Be okay.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's helpful to understand kind of when the timing might have been for some of this origin and the number of different facets that it encompasses. We are, of course, going to be mainly talking about television dramas, but important to keep in mind that that's not all that kind of the phenomenon encompasses, which with this foundation, then, of kind of your interest in the project and some key terms. Is there anything further we want to discuss in terms of the particular questions you're asking in the book and how you went from the initial idea of the project to those more narrow questions?
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yes. So in this book, as you aptly described, I examined the interracial relationships between the Hallyu tourist and the Korean men. And of course, if you look at these relationships on the surface, there isn't anything unusual about interracial romance or foreign woman finding Korean men attractive. But what I find interesting and why I kind of analyzed this phenomenon in an academic sense is because of the context of the Western Orientalist history and racism, to see so many Western women who seem to defy these kind of racism and Western Orientalist stereotypes to talk in positive ways about Asian men as romantic ideals or partners. So in analyzing these relationships with that note in mind and with that historical context in mind, I ask questions such as, what is it about romantic Korean television dramas, depictions of romance and masculinity that cuts across all these different cultural backgrounds of the Hallyu tourists to move them to seek intimate relationships with Korean men in real life? And what are the consequences of their racialized erotic desires for Korean mental health? And do these women, the Hailu tourists, manage to escape Orientalist epistemologies, or are their desires a new form of Orientalism? And for these questions, they kind of organically developed for me as I was looking at the field sites, such as the online fan forums, or looking at the Hallyu tourists interacting with the Korean male dates? And these were just the top questions that kept popping into my head as I was kind of collecting data.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, those specific questions are very helpful to have outlined. Thank you for that. I think the next thing then, that I'd love for us to discuss a little bit further is when we're thinking about these foreign tourists in particular, does that kind of fall into this vision you were mentioning earlier of the Korean government kind of encouraging popularity? Like, did they encourage it to this extent? Yes, this will be a good tourist thing. Or what are some of the ways in which they've gone about as a government, trying to make. Make this happen?
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yes, that's a great question. For the Korean government's role, they did play a big part in trying to initiate Korean tourism. I don't know if they expected quite this kind of relationships to form and that to be some of the like main attractions. But then the Korean government is continually trying to foster a lot of these kind of tourisms to Korea. And the reasons are twofold in my opinion. One is of course by financial and the other is political. And in terms of financial motivations for the Korean government to kind of initiate these high u tourism to Korea, it's very lucrative for the nation. Millions of tourists visit Korea and spend money and it's very lucrative for the country. And for political purposes, it has to be divided into domestic politics and the circumstances surrounding it and the international politics and for domestic politics. What I mean by it is that politicians in each region of Korea are trying individually, apart from the central government, to foster tourism to their own region in order to foster the like popularity of their region and the global reach of their region. So they invest some, quite a bit of their tax money into building Korean drama filming sets in their region to encourage tourism to their area. And this makes the place at least temporarily feel very cosmopolitan and not left behind by the rapid globalization which garners a lot of popularity for the politicians to potentially get voted into the office again in the future. So that's one of the reasons. A prime example of this being that there's a city in Korea, a mountainous one called Taebaek, and it used to be back in the day, a mining town. And of course as mining waned, it became a very silent city that felt like it was not at pace with the rapid pace of globalization that Korea, the rest of Korean society, was going with. But then it took a turn when a famous Korean television drama that became internationally popular named Descendants of the sun, filmed there. Suddenly, this tiny mining town, which was very quiet, turned into the center of attention for national media and international f who flock to this location in order to spend money on the location and to experience the emotions that they felt while watching the television drama. So this is one of the examples why politicians from different regions of Korea want to foster these kind of tourism. And for the international political reason, the Korean government wants to facilitate soft power of these kind of dramas so that they could change Korea's image from one that's focused on Korea being a war torn nation that's constantly at conflict with North Korea, and to one that shows South Korea as a place that's filled with romance potentially, and that's filled with a lot of catchy music and vibrance. So that's some of the reasons that the Korean government is working very hard, has been working hard since the late 1990s to facilitate these kind of tourism motivated by popular culture.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And that really makes sense to why it's been such a sustained effort. Because if the government only has sort of one incentive to do this, then we wouldn't maybe expect it to last over so many decades, given change of administration and geopolitics. But you've just outlined a number of different incentives, right? Local and regional and global. So it makes sense that this would kind of be sustained over such a period. And that's definitely an interesting aspect to kind of keep in mind as we continue. Of course, though, I think a really key aspect of what you're analyzing here is what's actually in the television dramas, right? Like, what is it that these foreign tourists are liking in the first place? So what sorts of masculinities are showing up in these sources, and what sorts of tropes do we see developing over time?
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yes, I personally think this is a great question that you asked just now, because sometimes I see people assuming that the televisual traits sometimes stay the same. But of course, as you mentioned, there have been these like, developments over time, and trendy type of masculinity has changed over time as well in these kind of television dramas. Back in the days, aka in the 1990s, before Hallyu became much bigger of a thing, the types of masculinities that were shown on the television dramas, Korean romantic television dramas used to be more like a stereotypically stoic and traditional form of patriarchal masculinity. So the men would be ideal type of men that were shown in the television dramas would be people who are militaristic in some ways, who are breadwinners for their families or lovers, and who was very silent and stoic, and who did not express a whole lot of emotion or were verbal about their affections or feelings for their lovers or loved ones. But of course that changed. That is not the type of masculinity that these tourists are seeking nowadays when they're traveling to Korea nowadays and the 2010s and 2020s, the type of masculinity that became more prominent as the ideal type of masculinity in Korean television dramas became not those kind of stoic masculinity that asserts its authority over family or the lover. It became more so about how some of these romantic ideals would still be breadwinners, potentially still be military personnel, potentially, but that they are kind of moving away from these traditional patriarchal gender dynamics and the assertion of their authority over the rest of the population. So in other words, they'll be more emotionally attuned, they'll be more verbal about their emotional state, and they would be more expressive about their love for the female love interest. More concrete comparison would be, for instance, in the 1995, there was a humongously popular Korean television drama called Sandglass. And in those drama, all of the male protagonists who appear in it are very stoic, they don't say a whole lot, and they're very macho masculinity, a lot of fighting scenes among them to conquer the woman's heart and stuff like that. But compare that to the more recent Hallyu drama called Descendants of the sun, which I mentioned earlier on briefly. Also, it shows men who are emotionally insightful and very sensitive to the woman's feelings and very romantic and verbal about their affections. So from my understanding, the Hyu tourists are kind of attracted to these type of new masculinities that are romantic, emotional, sexually restrained, able to restrain myself, caring and devoted. Effy.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Okay, so that's very clear then, in terms of what people are viewing on screen. You mentioned earlier, though, in terms of data collection, that a lot of this was in online fan spaces. So what's the connection between what you've just described and how this becomes racialized erotic desire in those spaces?
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yes, So I saw two main ways that this played out in the online fan spaces. For example, one of example would be some fans and fan forums randomly started to discuss what it would feel like to date Korean men or what it would be like to date Korean men. And as you can see from that kind of overarching general question, a lot of the answers or assumptions that people were writing in those posts were essentialized assumptions about Korean masculinity and what it was going to be like. And these kind of posts were not realizing that there are different types of masculinity and masculine practices in Korean context. Not all Korean men are the same. They are all sort of, in these discussions, lumped together as a singular entity that are like the Korean television drama characters, romantic, emotional, caring, devoted. Another example of racialized erotic desires and how it played out in the online fan spaces is in how some of them describe the male characters in the television dramas. They would use terms like weak or effeminate to describe the men and the television dramas, but they didn't mean to use these words as negative connotations. They used these terms like weak or effeminate as positively connoted compliments for these male characters. Which is interesting to think about, because in the Orientalist or racist Western, like Orientalist context, the terms like weak or feminine were originally used to kind of demean and put down Asian men and to argue that these men are not romantically desirable. But here, these women who I was observing and interviewing were using the same terms in a positive way. But of course, the use of these terms, the same terms that Orientalist ideals used, ideas also used, you cannot ignore the racist caricatures that used to utilize those words and what carrying these terms on means, even if the connotations might be different nowadays. So I say racialized erotic desire for these kind of desires that I see online and offline, because in my opinion, such moments are ones where race and racial assumptions are inevitably central to the desires that I was observing.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's very interesting to understand what's happening in these sorts of spaces online. If we move then into the physical world, I suppose, how did these desires translate into interactions that these tourists had with Korean men when they actually went to Korea and was like, hey, let's go on actual dates in real life.
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yes. Yeah. So the reality was quite varied for the tourists that I observed and interviewed. Some had wonderful dates with wonderful Korean men. And I noticed that that was the case, especially if the tourists approached the men as individuals rather than as reflections of the K drama's fictional masculinity. So if they approached the men, their dates as individuals, they would potentially be nicely surprised by the romantic gestures that these men show and how emotionally attuned they are, as opposed to assuming that that was what they were going to get from the default. But of course, the dates did not play out quite well if the woman would go on dates with the men with the assumption that all of them will be sexually restrained or romantic or emotionally sensitive, or that they would automatically want a romantic long distance relationship after this date because they're supposed to be very romantic, according to the television dramas. So when the Korean men that they interacted with did not meet, such assumptions were sexual and were not quite romantic or were not particularly emotional, they would be in awkward situations where they had to somehow get out of these dates. For example, one of the tourists that I was able to interview and observe went on a date with a man, assuming all of the above, that the men were going to be romantic, sexually restrained, emotionally sensitive, and she had high hopes for the date. But she soon realized after arriving at the date that the guy was potentially more interested in a one night stand than a long romantic, long distance relationship. So she had to extract herself from awkwardly from that date so that she wasn't committing to anything necessarily or feeling guilty about the different kind of desires that they were having. So those are some of the examples of the real life ways that racialized erotic desires play out in these kind of interactions between the tourist and their Korean male dates.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, that's really interesting to understand and obviously the book has loads more detail for people who want to know more, but that at least gives us a sense which is helpful. What did the sort of other side of the interaction think about this? Like, what did the Korean men who were on these dates with Hallyu tourists think about all of this?
- [20:54]
Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yes. So at the time of my research and the late 2010s, it was still a pretty new phenomenon for these foreign women to be coming to Korea to kind of say that they're interested in dating Korean men. So I observed a lot of, in some ways cognitive dissonance on the part of the Korean men that I was interviewing and observing. For example, there was a Korean man who was invited to a tourist Hayu tourist birthday party because she was interested in him and thought he was very handsome, as she was telling me in the interview constantly. But when I interviewed him, the guy who was invited to the birthday party, he thought that he was so unpopular among foreign women because of orientalism, and he did not think of himself as somebody who was very desirable to these women. So I asked him, aren't you invited to this birthday party? And isn't your presence in this party an example of how you're so popular among these women? And he just could not wrap his mind around the fact that that was the case. He tried to explain it by, oh, it's a like one off instance, she wants to be friends or something like that. So that's what I mean by cognitive dissonance that I observed. But there were also, of course, some men who caught onto the phenomenon more quickly and realized what the tourist wanted in these kind of relationships. Korean men and what kind of masculinity they were looking for. So they would sort of, in my mind, purposefully perform certain kind of masculinities to fit the desires of the tourists so that the dates would go better and they, the Korean men themselves would kind of get what they wanted, AKA have a relationship or sexual relationship with these foreign women, which would be an experience for them nowadays. I saw an interesting meme online starting a year or two ago named Hongdae boys. Hongdae is a location in Korea that's a college town, very vibrant with a lot of foreign tourists as well. And the Hongdae boy mean refers to how apparently a lot of Korean men in that area, Hongdae, is now approaching foreign women. The Hallyu tourists, for instance, claiming that they're romantic and emotionally attuned and sexually restrained and claiming that they want long term relationships. But then in reality, these kind of Hongdae boys kind of apparently want more so of sexual flames. So some women feel like they're deceived by these kind Hongdae boys who are putting on a certain front, but actually desiring or intending to do something different. So based on how popular the Hongdae boy meme was on TikTok and other kinds of social media, it seemed like the phenomenon caught on more so than in the late 2010s for the Korean men. And they realize that this is actually a thing and they're feeling less of a cognitive dissonance and more making do with the situation and trying to benefit from the situation of their sudden popularity.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. If a whole bunch of people suddenly turn up and go, hey, I want to date you. It's like, well, there's going to be some surprise, but maybe also some like, okay, well how can we make this work?
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That kind of makes sense as a reaction. And in figuring all of this out then there's so many different kind of spaces you've moved through to piece all of this together. Right. It's not an obvious thing to go, for instance, from watching a television drama and then tracing through people's interactions with it all the way to like asking a Korean man sort of to some extent on the street, like, so what do you think of this foreign woman who comes up to you and wants to date you? Like, there's a lot of work and analysis that you've put in to figure all this out. Was there anything that surprised you in this process that really kind of sticks in your memory?
- [24:49]
Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yeah. So for, of course, the book deals with like online spaces, navigating them, observing them, and then analyzing the dramas, and different kind of methods to interviews and participant observations. And of course, the actual interactions with the real life people stand out the most in my memory. And in particular, I was very intrigued and surprised by how driven some of the women that I interviewed were in finding the, quote, unquote, Mr. Perfect, which goes to the title of the book, because not all of them were successful the first time around. Of course, there are different type of Korean men Different kind of Korean masculinities. But despite the multiple failures that some of them had, they would not be discouraged at all. And they would say that they are going to try harder next time they visit Korea or next time they go on date. And they kept trying and trying to find this quote unquote, Mr. Perfect as opposed to thinking, oh, these kind of perfect men don't exist, just gonna give up and settle down or something like that. There were unanimously also these women were talking about experiences with toxic masculinity back in their home countries, which was one of the main motivations for them to travel to Korea, in hopes that in Korea there were perfect forms of masculinity that they felt like lacked in their home countries and the dating culture back in their home countries. And that was also surprising to me too about how prevalent it seemed that toxic masculinity was and how much of an experience these women had with toxic masculinity. For example, a lot of women accounting women's accounts of how they learned martial arts potentially to fend off the aggressive men at bars or clubs and how they felt like they were prepared to kind of physically fight these men off if needed be and talking about these kind of contexts, they genuinely felt like they could find the perfect men in Korea because they felt like the Korean television dramas must be a reflection of reality in some sense. So that kind of aspect really surprised me. And in some ways I was empathetic with their cause because of my feminist background. I was hoping that in some ways they succeeded in finding non toxic masculinity.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very interesting indeed. Thank you for sharing that insight into the process. Is this then something you're continuing to engage with? Do you have a current or next project you've got your eye on either in this sort of area or something different?
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
Yes. So in terms of the major book project, I'm thinking my next book project would potentially be on the intersection of digital technology and sex crime and censorship in Korean context. Because in the past few years digital sexual crimes has than a big focus of the Korean government and mass media. It's more of a somber topic than interracial relationships between men and women who desire each other. But I think it's a necessary topic because of how prevalent digital sexual crimes are becoming nowadays. So that's one of the topics that I'm potentially interested in looking at as an extension of kind of thinking about toxic masculinity and gender dynamics in online spaces. But that doesn't mean that I stopped researching Korean popular culture and hallyu related topics. In particular, I am nowadays interested in conducting these research with undergraduate students from my institution, Occidental College. Recently, as in like last week, I published and co authored a article with Occidental undergraduate students about the how K pop fans conceptualize the authenticity of virtual K pop idols. So those are some of the topics that I still continue to examine in terms of popular media and how the fans interact with them.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. Best of luck with you and your students in pursuing that research further. And of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Finding Mr. K Drama, pop Culture, Romance and Race, published by Rutgers University Press Press in 2025. Minju, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [29:27]
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Dr. Minjoo Lee
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