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When fame fades, what's left?
My grandmother was a film star in South Korea. Now she's growing old in another country.
My grandmother Kwon Mi-Hae was once a beloved film star in South Korea. On and off screen, Mi-Hae was a timeless beauty with a penchant for elegance. Large eyes. High cheekbones. Voluminous waves (the kind you can’t achieve without classic hair rollers). Strong social ease. She never wore silver jewelry, and she donned her finest Chanel suits and crystal pendant earrings for even a 10-minute trip to the fish market. For her, there was no such thing as a day off.
With an active career that spanned the country’s fledgling film industry, from the 1960s to the late 1990s, she was one of the first female actresses in an era when talent preceded connections. She starred in notable shows and movies like Kim Ki-Young’s Io Island (1977), where she plays Park Yeo-In, one of the women in a town where men are mysteriously lured, only to disappear.
When I was younger, I was absorbed by the ways my grandmother parted her hair or applied her makeup with such regularity and intention, the deliberate strokes of her lipstick brush tracing the contours of her lips, leaving bold rings of hot pink. She always started with the pointed tip, pressing the flat edge to fill in the rest, dabbing her palette in between. Like a skilled artist, she would hold her cigarettes with equal grace, exhaling wisps of smoke from her perfectly painted pout. With her distinguished career and style, my grandmother is what Joan Didion would have considered all glamour without pastiche. In other words, far from mimicry.
When my parents separated, I had not yet turned one. Following a divorce from my birth mother, my father retreated into his studies. He was newly immigrated to America and had focused on rebuilding his life when my grandmother became my primary caretaker. I was sent on a plane to live with her in Seoul, along with my grandfather Lee Cheol-Hyang, a major screenwriter who found fame when he wrote a hit series titled Mistress (1970). Those days, they were both working for South Korea’s first national television station, KBS (Korean Broadcasting System).
My childhood years were largely spent as their obligatory plus-one for various appearances, from on-set rehearsals to ceremonial banquets. Naturally, I drew a lot of attention, being a miniature version of my grandmother in smaller designer clothes. She taught me to be comfortable around strangers, mainly because strangers were always around. During film shoots, cameramen used to seat me atop their equipment, only to end up distracting everyone on set. I felt special. When she wasn’t working, my grandmother hosted private dinners for her industry colleagues. It was a house where fabulous adults came and went. She threw parties with everyone from television executives to actors like Lee Soon-Jae and fashion designer André Kim. “Call her ‘auntie,’” my grandmother once instructed me, referring to a former Miss Korea. Sometimes I sang for the adults at dinner, and afterwards they gave me envelopes full of money in exchange. I collected so many of these envelopes that my grandparents eventually opened a savings account for me. In those moments, I often longed to “grow up,” though I didn’t fully understand what that meant.
Born to poor farmers at the onset of the Korean War, my grandmother hadn’t always had the means to live the way she did at the height of her career: in a multistory Gangnam home filled with handmade Italian furniture and couture, two cars, a live-in housekeeper. With a highly affluent life in the public eye, hers was the classic tale of a sudden stroke of luck.
Before television reached Korean households, three years after the war ended in 1953 with an armistice, radio was the sole form of entertainment. Mi-Hae, who couldn’t afford to go to school, learned to read and write Korean by singing hymns at church. She found work packing medicine at a pharmacy and attended night school with the money she earned, eventually auditing courses at Hanyang University, where she met my grandfather. During this time, the National University Drama Festival, hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Information, held its first event, for which he submitted a play titled Young People that won the grand prize. When Dong-A Broadcasting System held its first auditions, my grandmother passed all seven rounds and became one of the first professional voice actresses in the country, her first script being a translation of Tarzan, where she was the voice of Jane. After KBS was founded in 1973, she went on to be one of the first actresses to land leading roles in major K-dramas, her last one being Seoul Ddukbaegi (1990). Kim Hye-Ja and other actresses like Yoon Yeo-Jeong, now famously known in the States for A24’s Minari (2020) and Pachinko (2022), were just beginning their careers.
There are moments when I wonder if my grandmother’s legacy could have been preserved if she hadn’t retired and moved to the States before the rise of Korean pop culture (a.k.a. the Korean Wave). Long periods of political turbulence and dictatorship in the country have driven many pre-1990s South Korean films deeper into the canon of unknown works. Over the years, my grandmother has mentioned how in the post-war poverty of South Korea, only the wealthy initially afforded TVs—usually secondhand sets imported from Japan—while ordinary families had to listen to the dramas on the radio, unable to watch them. Compared to the global reach of K-dramas today, the shows she starred in had limited reach for local audiences, at least until the ’80s.
What leaves me uneasy is how my grandparents’ careers aren’t recognized in the States and how far behind Asian representation still feels in the entertainment industry as a whole. I couldn’t tell you how livid I was when, during a screenwriting course, one of my classmates mistook Andrew Yang for Edward Yang. And when Michelle Yeoh made Oscar history in 2023 and won Best Actress, I seethed at the bitter revelation that it took 95 years for an Asian woman to win. Just a year before that, Hoyeon Jung from the sensational Netflix series Squid Games was named the first Korean cover girl to appear solo on the cover of Vogue.
When I was younger, I didn’t fully grasp the extent of my grandmother’s fame. Later, I would see the dozens of photos, clips, and Korean blog sites portraying her as an icon from a distant time and place. Only then would I internalize how important she truly was. Two decades ago, when my grandfather died in a car accident,she sold her belongings to move to the States to live with my father and me. My grandfather, who had battled alcoholism, left her with very little money in the end.
Since then, my grandmother’s once-celebrated legacy has faded into obscurity. Sometimes I wonder what it means to remain the star of your own life, despite the barrage of tempting disappointments against it and the systems that try to render you undesirable or unknown. My grandmother is no longer a public fixture but rather an anonymous immigrant in the suburbs of Virginia, although a few elderly fans from the Korean churches and supermarkets still recognize her from her years on the screen. “This is your grandmother? She was on television quite a lot back in the day,” cashiers would sometimes remark as we’re shopping through H-Mart. Any acknowledgment sends her home with a saccharine smile, only for her to come crashing down to reality after refusing to come out of her room the rest of the day.
Sometimes people who recognize her look at me in a state of confusion, as if asking: What happened? Why is she here? There are too many questions I avoid asking my family, because I know how much it pains them. Since becoming my grandmother’s primary caretaker, my father refuses to speak much of her career. Perhaps it’s because she was too preoccupied, too independent, and too driven throughout his formative years to be the mother figure he needed. Or perhaps he too grieves the loss of what his life could have been had he stayed in Korea with her. Would he have been respected more? More comfortable? Sometimes it makes me think of the ways in which maintaining a pedigree is a privilege. The ways in which a traceable lineage preserves your sense of dignity as you move through the world, how people born into fame are revered as something aspirational. To be a Kennedy or a Coppola, the heir of so-and-so. I think of what happens to those, like my family, who come close to reaching the unattainable, only to be left behind by time.
I think of the way society impinges upon the unsung heroes and pioneers of past eras, such as my grandmother, and how her struggles around self-worth distort her ability to accept herself as she’s aged. Over time, she’s grown withdrawn, escaping into TV shows and religious YouTube videos. Piles of Yves Saint Laurent and 30-year-old makeup tools, once cherished, are packed away in boxes. Yet, for me, her character and beauty transcend her fears of irrelevance. For me, she’s still the sophisticated woman I’ve always known, the one who knows how to command a room with old-fashioned charisma and gumption.
These days, she prohibits me from photographing her, as she no longer considers herself beautiful. The only photos she’s willing to share are of her golden years, ones I’ve already culled through with fascination a hundred times. Most of the colleagues she was in touch with have since passed away, and these photos remain the sole evidence of her significance, preserved in her memory as the only story there is to tell. Now, I’ve become her only confidante to whom she’s able to recount stories of her former illustrious life. Yes, I remember. I was there, I say to her, the way a good friend would.
Lead image: Vivien Lee
Also read: The best period dramas of all time
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