From H Mart to Holograms: Jenna Oldaker Interviews Christine Ma-Kellams on The Band

Christine Ma-Kellams is a cultural psychologist-turned-college professor, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American. Her work and writing have appeared in HuffPost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, and many more publications. The Band (Atria, 2024) is her first novel. You can find her in person at one of California’s coastal cities or online at ChristineMa-Kellams.com

The Band is available for purchase here.

From Jenna Oldaker: The Band is a remarkable debut novel about Duri, a member of a popular K-pop band whose latest solo single resulted in his cancellation. Soon after, he finds himself in an LA H Mart, where he meets a middle-aged psychologist who takes him in. Dark and captivating, this novel takes readers through topics such as mental health, parasocial obsession, and cancel culture. This thought-provoking thriller shows how the music industry and fan culture can lead to alarming conclusions.

Jenna Oldaker: I really enjoyed how you included so many unlikely scenarios in your book, from having a member of The Band going to live with a random woman he just met in H Mart to there being a holographic performance at an awards show without the audience knowing. What was the most enjoyable of these scenarios for you to write?

Christine Ma-Kellams: I love those scenes too! Between the meet-cute at H Mart and secretly hologram-based award show performance, the latter was more fun to write. At the time, I had just binge-watched a bunch of K-dramas, including Netflix's Memories of the Alhambra, which featured a plot twist involving AR, or Augmented Reality (in addition to starring my favorite K-drama actor Hyun Bin, in arguably one of my favorite places in the world, Barcelona). I don't know about you, but as a kid growing up, I always thought of holograms as gimmicky things that looked really obviously computer-generated, it took a K-drama to remind me that we've come a long, long way since then. The holograms and AR of today are already lightyears ahead of the stuff I remember from childhood, and I suspect the ones of tomorrow will be–as I write in The Band–indistinguishable from reality.

JO: That's so interesting, and I totally agree! Holograms have definitely come a long way in media, say, from the more gimmicky ones in Star Wars to the much more advanced ones in The Hunger Games. I loved how you used them in The Band. It's fascinating that technology is advancing in such an extreme way that we can't tell it apart from real life at times. Speaking of being influenced by K-dramas, what other scenarios within pop culture and/or your life influenced this novel?

CMK: Gosh, I feel like this entire novel is an ode to my obsession with pop culture. As a kid, I remember watching Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood after dinner on our family's old-school, non-smart TV. As a grownup, I get most of my pop culture feed from social media, and much of what went into the making of The Band were the highs + lows that I saw play out online on screens. Although I've always loved and followed American celebrities, following the drama within the world of K-pop broke and expanded my vision of the world. I really think K-pop fans are unique in the way they love and follow their favorite musicians, and this is both awe-inspiring and occasionally frightening. That said, I'm a total convert myself, so sometimes I like to think of this novel as highbrow fan fic. So literary fiction + fan fiction = The Band.

JO: Are there any real-life K-pop groups or other bands that you based The Band in the novel on? If so, in what ways did they influence this book?

CMK: Yes, it's no secret that BTS and their fandom (ARMY) largely inspired this book. The characters in The Band are all fictionalized versions of BTS members–but since there are 7 of them in the real group and 5 in the fictional version, a few characters are composites of multiple members.

Here's the funny thing though: I wrote the viral fictional song that Duri (the main character, "visual," and oldest member of The Band) releases as a solo single–about a boy who turns himself into a fish–several months before BTS's eldest member and visual (Jin) released a real song with a startlingly similar premise ("Super Tuna"). But my editor at Atria literally thought the fictional song was based on the real one and left me a comment about it, even though this was an uncanny case of life imitating fiction. The whole thing gave me goosebumps; it felt so unreal.

Then, just this past week, my audiobook narrator–who is also a fellow ARMY–DMed me a photo someone had posted on their socials of BTS's J-Hope shopping at an H-Mart in LA. She labeled it "Duri at H-Mart" because this is also exactly what happens in the opening scenes of The Band. I swear I've never manifested this many things into existence, particularly involving global pop phenomena!

JO: Those are such cool coincidences! That must have been so weird to experience, and it makes me wonder if anything else from your book will manifest into real life. On the topic of Duri's song, cancel culture has been a big thing since social media became widely used. What made you want to include this in your book, and what inspired the song that caused Duri to be canceled?

CMK: It's funny, at the time that I started the book, when "cancel culture" was still relatively new, it felt like a death sentence, and that was part of the fascination/terror of it. But in the years since, I've noticed that cancellation isn't what it once was: people recover from it now, and some even manage to survive multiple ones. In a strange way, the novel inadvertently reflects this too, since Duri also finds new life post-being cancelled, although it's debatable whether everything that happens in its aftermath is good or bad.

As for the song that prompts his cancellation, I wanted to play on the idea of "daddy issues" but with a surrealistic, possibly morbid turn and with enough ambiguity to make all sides defensible. As in, I wanted Duri's intentions for releasing such a weird, semi-cannibalistic song understandable–heartbreaking even–but I also wanted to situate the backlash in a very real-world context of legitimate ethnic tensions that date back generations. Even the father's behavior–depending on how you interpret what happens at the end of the song/music video–could be defended in that he didn't realize what (or who) he was eating. I find that sometimes the worst sins are committed when everything thinks they're doing the right thing, or maybe the wrong thing with the right intentions.

JO: I love how you bring these real-world issues into the story. I feel like these make the relationships between your characters even more interesting. Speaking of, the relationship and interactions between the narrator and Duri are very important to the book and the story being told. What is the significance of their relationship to you as the author?

CMK: Speaking of real-world issues and the relationship between these two: post-publication of The Band, I've had colleagues/readers who sent me news articles about the so-called “MILF Renaissance”–movies, novels, and shows that feature an older woman with a younger, usually male, love interest. These included Robinne Lee's novel-turned-Anne-Hathaway movie, The Idea of You, Nicole Kidman's Babygirl, Laura Dern & Liam Hemsworth's Lonely Planet, Miranda July's All Fours, Susan Minot's Don't Be a Stranger (which I'm currently reading and loving). I'm tickled to be considered part of this broader cultural movement. In my case, though, I didn't want to go with a love story or anything that I had seen before. I really wanted the narrator and Duri to occupy this third space that defied all the usual scripts we have about how two people who like each other's gender could connect. And the fact that the narrator is an older Asian woman who is married with children makes the stakes more interesting. Romeo and Juliet were two single teenagers with nothing to lose but their own lives; I wanted to write a forbidden relationship where there was more at stake, more collateral damage to be had.

JO: I love that you chose to portray them this way. It's nice to see a book every now and then that doesn't have a huge love story central to the plot. While I was reading your book, I came across many quotes that I loved and had to take note of because of how brilliant they were, with one of my favorites being “choice is a prerequisite to anything worth sticking around for.” What is your favorite quote from the book and why?

CMK: Wow, this might be my favorite question I've been asked about the book to date! This is a super long one, but it remains my favorite and is a riff on one of David Foster Wallace's most famous metaphors:

"What’s... tempting to believe: that the depressed or anxious or unwell person hates themself, that their mama didn’t hug them enough or their father loved money or pussy or drank too much (the top three offenders as far as fathers go), or some other tragedy— institutional, interpersonal, or divine—befell them and rendered them neurochemically incapable of appreciating their own worth. In reality, I suspect such a person loves themself just fine, loves themself as much as I love me. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be here, because they remain the only person they would die for at a moment’s notice. What is really going on is that they are trapped inside a burning building for which there are no marked exits, a burning building they lovingly attend to and maybe sometimes even stoke, not because they are self-enabling, but because they have no other place to call home, at least not now, at least not yet. We, on the outside, don’t know much either—we have our hoses and ladders and trucks, and if we are lucky, and if we hear the alarm and get there in time, and if the wind isn’t too bad, then sometimes we get to call ourselves heroes and feel good about the initials after our names. Other times— other times we do not."

JO: That quote is so well-written! You really hit the nail on the head. When looking back at this quote, I noticed that it leads to a couple of footnotes. You don't really see a lot of modern novels with footnotes in them, but I thought they really elevated the story and made for a more interesting and unique reading experience. What made you decide to include these in your novel?

CMK: Thank you! I don't see a lot of footnotes in contemporary novels either–the last one that comes to mind was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. For this particular story, I used them to blur the (artificial) line between fiction vs. reality. I think the proliferation and popularity of genres like autofiction already does that, and even though this book isn't autofictional, everything that gets cited in the footnotes are very much real scientific references. Since the narrator is a psychologist and Duri's mental health crisis is a driving force in the plot, I figured that these empirical studies and other commentary that appear in the footnotes made total sense for this particular type of modern-day story.

JO: That makes a lot of sense. Also, on the topic of craft in your novel, I really enjoyed the story's structure and how it starts with the cancellation, moves into the past to show the story of the girl group, and then moves on to the main chunk of the story. Were there any other structures you thought of using for the story's timeline? What made you land on this one where it jumps around a bit?

CMK: I wish I could say this was all planned and a matter of forethought on my part but I almost never plot out my stories before I write them–they usually come to me as the characters develop and evolve. In this case, I do think that in more IRL fiction, it oftentimes takes a canon event (like a cancellation) to make us go, "How did we get here?" before figuring out where we're going to go next. Also: I get bored easily and am a sucker for novelty, so I'm always looking for new ways to tell stories. I like reading something I haven't read before, and I've read a million and one books told in linear fashion, so I'm always more intrigued by timelines that play with structure.

JO: It's always enjoyable to read a book that doesn't stick to the "norms" of literature, and I love that you decided to take that different route. It all worked so well for your story. Final question: what impact did you hope the thriller aspects of this novel would have? How did you decide to tie the past (of the old girl band) to the present of the novel in this way?

CMK: I have to confess: I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the "thriller" designation on my book. I always thought of myself as a litfic kind of girl, but I like thrillers too–or anything with a plot that keeps me guessing (which I sometimes miss when I read things that are too "literary" if you know what I mean). In terms of the backstory of the original girl band in the book, that was also inspired by real scandals within the K-pop industry that I just could not believe went down the way they did. And since so much of the novel is also cultural commentary, I wanted to comment on the state of gender and how it continues to shape the way we're treated. I think in the U.S., gender is obviously on our minds–especially in light of the recent elections–but worldwide, gender is also fraught elsewhere, and South Korea is no exception. How it plays out in a different cultural context though makes it all the more interesting!

Jenna Oldaker is an MA student studying English at Arizona State University and an editorial assistant intern at Hayden’s Ferry Review.