How Korean Corn Dogs Changed My Life by ALICE AMELIA is a new tell-all memoir of a young British K-drama fan and her love-letter to Korea and its entertainment industry. Read on for an extract.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Aged twenty-one, fuelled by a love of K-dramas and a need to find herself, Alice Amelia moves to Seoul. She knows no one in her adopted country, doesn’t speak the language, and hasn’t tried kimchi, let alone grilled cow intestines or Korean corn dogs. But she soon realises that real-life Seoul isn’t the romanticised city she’d watched on television – and it doesn’t have subtitles.

Determined to follow her dream, Alice becomes everything she wasn’t in England: adding spicy gochujang sauce to every meal, dancing in K-pop videos, dating famous models, and even injecting salmon sperm into her eye bags. But as she breaks into the Korean entertainment industry which she idolised from afar, and finds a group of new friends as well as a chance at love, her life spirals in ways she never could have imagined. Wanting to stay true to herself, she wonders, will she ever belong in Korea? And what price will it cost her to stay?

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EXTRACT

Shut Up and Let’s Go

I told my family I was going to study Korean in Seoul for six weeks. They thought I was coming home afterwards. I was not.

As the Boeing A380 whirred into action, punching through the skies above London Heathrow Airport, I was in a panic.

My mind grasped for answers to the questions I was destined to face when my baffled family discovered the truth. If you’re taking a working holiday, why not frolic with elephants in Thailand like everyone else? Or pick fruit across farms in Australia? If you’re wanting to be a bit ‘alternative’, why not learn to surf on the swirling shores of Costa Rica and dabble in psychoactive drugs?

But South Korea? Why have you gone there? Wait. Where even is South Korea?

To the people I’d grown up around, Korea was still a country ‘near China’, but with lots of wars, dog sanctuaries and leaders with funny haircuts. Parasite hadn’t swept the Oscars yet. Squid Game was years away from its release. K-pop boy group BTS were yet to reach the peak of their fame. Korean skincare wasn’t mainstream. There wasn’t a Korean barbecue restaurant popping up in every major English town.

So how could I possibly explain that a love of obscure South Korean TV was my reason for moving there, to this country half-way across the world? How could they possibly understand how important these TV dramas had become to me? Dramas that had become a secret refuge during my teenage years, and saved me at the perfect time.

Worlds away from the glamour of South Korea, my early teens had been corrupted by serious illnesses passed between close family members like a toxic baton in a gruelling relay race. While other teenagers were partying, learning to be ‘good sports’ and solving one of life’s great mysteries – how to kiss with the perfect amount of tongue – I’d been stuck in hospitals every weekend, deciding which green plastic chair, still wet with streaks of disinfectant, would be the most comfortable to sit in for the next six hours.

Isolated in rooms full of whining bleeps, fading relatives and reruns of The Lord of the Rings (the only films my aunt would watch), the traditional teenage experience always felt like a train hurtling along a different track. In my all-girls’ school, my class-mates would turn up with the entire Apple ecosystem, while my Dell computer used to randomly try to cook itself. They had tanned legs and thin arms. I didn’t, fuelled by hospital chocolate biscuits and being crap at sport. I couldn’t join in their conversations about Britain’s Got Talent because I was never at home, or care about the biggest drama of the school year (when Sarah and George had sex in the school bike shed), even though it was all the entire year, every rugby player in Oxfordshire and even engineers working on satellites in space could talk about.

My classmates and I were fundamentally incompatible. When the word ‘tragedy’ was mentioned, I’d think of terminal breast cancer at thirty-four and my classmates would think of Justin Bieber’s new haircut. So I didn’t degrade myself by getting attached to gunky teenage boys or involve myself in the highs and lows of friendship groups and sleepovers. I couldn’t risk any drama. I had enough of that at home.

By 2013, six years before I moved to Seoul, I’d hit rock bottom. I was a broken record because the only thing I could talk about – apart from the origin of elves and orcs and the one ring to rule them all – was how, after everything, after the strain of all the hospital trips and then adopting my newly orphaned cousins, my dad had left my mum.

That was when I found my first South Korean drama. The thumbnail was waiting for me, lingering on Netflix in the corner of my clunky laptop screen. It had been there through my cousins moving in, being sent to boarding school at sixteen, and my parents’ divorce – ready to change the trajectory of my life.

Shut Up and Let’s Go was a coming-of-age TV show about a high school rock band’s rise from the Seoul underground music scene into the world of K-pop and world-leading entertainment con-glomerates. I clicked on it because I wanted something different; I was too far removed to watch Gossip Girl like everyone else – and the main actor looked hot in the thumbnail. But with that choice, I opened a gateway to an unknown culture halfway across the world and, desperate for a distraction, I was instantly transfixed. The drama had an incredible soundtrack, good acting and some extremely attractive boys in it – despite some questionable hairstyles. But it was the backdrop of Seoul that really snatched my interest: the winding alleys, the stacked rooftop houses, late-night ramen in smoky snooker halls and the wild basement clubs.

I don’t know how to explain it other than I could feel the city pulsating through the screen, all the way into my dark dorm room in Wiltshire. It felt like a sign, showing me there was much more to come. After years of setbacks and the feeling that life couldn’t get much worse, there was something to look forward to.

I knew that even if real-life Seoul was only a tenth of what the dramas portrayed, it was a completely different beast to any Western city I’d ever been to. It seemed to be the city of unfailing friendships, enthralling neon lights and beautiful boys. A place where I could reinvent myself. So I made myself a secret promise, one that would pull me through the rest of school and three years of university. I promised myself that I would escape to Seoul as soon as I could.

What I didn’t know was not only would I escape to Seoul, but I’d spend five years living there. In the most surprising turn of events, I’d fall into acting. I’d find myself in a relationship that mirrored every K-drama I was working on. I’d even meet and work with most of the main actors in Shut Up and Let’s Go.

All because of one click.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Amelia fell in love with K-dramas as a teenager in Henley and moved to Seoul in her early 20s, where she then lived for 5 years and became part of the booming Korean entertainment industry.

In Korea, Alice worked for many major companies including The Black Label, HYBE, Starship Entertainment and Netflix. She also featured in adverts for Samsung, Hyundai Department Stores and the Korean gaming giant PUBG Studios, accumulating a social media presence of 100,000 combined followers. Alice has acted as an ambassador for the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and worked with the Seoul Tourism Organisation.

She recently earned a Master’s in Film and Television production from MetFilm School and she is also an award-winning playwright.

Follow Alice Amelia on Instagram here

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