Find fame… and family? AleXa’s Korean-American K-pop dream

The blue-haired 25-year-old, who recently won the American Song Contest – the US version of Eurovision – told AFP that growing up, eating kimchi was one of her few cultural connections to her Korean heritage.

Until AleXa discovered K-Pop in 2008.

“It sparked my dream and drive to be a K-pop artist,” said the Tulsa-born rising star, who has been dancing since she was two years old.

AleXa, who grew up in Oklahoma, said that seeing entertainers on screen who she identified with as Korean showed her “an interesting path to follow.”

At university, she took home the top prize in a K-pop competition — a trip to South Korea to film a reality show where she met executives from her future company and took part in the grueling star-maker training that so many young hopefuls go through.

She moved to Seoul in 2018 and — having never spoken it in her teens — studied Korean at an academy for a few months and continued her classes by watching movies and TV shows while taking intensive dance classes.

While AleXa has found success as a K-pop idol, her search for her mother’s family proves to be an arduous process thwarted by South Korea’s restrictive adoption laws.

Born in Ilsan, northwest of Seoul, her mother was adopted when she was five.

Like many adoptees, she would like to find out her birth family, but “the laws here in Korea are a bit strict when it comes to whether the child can find their birth parents and vice versa,” AleXa said.

South Korea prioritizes the birth parent’s right to privacy over the rights of the adoptee.

The country has long been a major exporter of overseas adoptees, with hundreds of thousands sent away since the 1950s.

After the Korean War, it was a way of removing children from a country that values ​​ethnic homogeneity — particularly those born to Native mothers and American GI fathers.

Even today, unmarried pregnant women are stigmatized in a patriarchal society and are often forced to abandon their babies.

“The opposite party must seek the other so that the first party receives information,” said the singer star.

That didn’t happen in her case, so her mom still can’t find AleXa’s grandma.

However, she had some success through the internet and DNA testing and found some cousins ​​in other countries.

AleXa said they hadn’t given up hope.

“Hopefully we can find some of my Korean family members here in the future. It would be nice,” she told AFP, adding that she now considers Seoul her “second home.”

When NBC decided to put together the American version of the Eurovision Song Contest, AleXa – “a Eurovision fan” – was invited to participate to represent her home state.

It gave her and her team a chance to bring K-Pop to American audiences, and they immediately began planning.

“How can we direct, what concept would work, what would really grab American audiences while staying true to K-pop?” She told AFP about her process.

Beyond nationality or language, for AleXa, K-Pop is a commitment to concept, styling and execution – hair and makeup, sets, staging and cinematography must be perfect.

“I really enjoy the spectacle, the art, the wonder, the beauty that is K-pop,” she said.

For her American Song Contest finale, AleXa descended from the rafters onto the stage on a throne, then launched with her dancers into a choreography of military precision as she sang “Wonderland.”

Her victory has K-pop fans applauding her for putting the genre at the center of American reality television.

She hopes that the growing diversity in the industry will bring the music to more countries.

“Growing up, Mulan, an animated Chinese character, was one of the only portrayals I saw myself, and I’m Korean,” she joked.

But ever since Korean bands like BLACKPINK and BTS went global, “K-pop has become such a safe place for so many kids.”

She believes the growing number of non-Korean idols in the industry is also good for her adopted country.

“Korea is a fairly homogeneous country. With all these foreign idols, I think it’s a really cool opportunity for Korea to open their eyes too,” she said.