Heart Don't Stand a Chance - Chuu/Kim Jiwoo

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that belongs exclusively to K-pop soloists with dark, brooding concepts.

It is not ordinary tiredness. It is not the tiredness of a man who stayed up too late watching a documentary about deep-sea fish (though you have done that, more than once, because the anglerfish is genuinely compelling and you will die on that hill). It is a tiredness that lives in the bones, the tiredness of someone who has spent three years cultivating a persona that is one part noir film protagonist, one part cigarette smoke without the cigarette, and one part the kind of guy who stares out rainy windows in music videos while wearing a long coat.

Your stage name is Yomi, and you enjoy instant ramyeon, napping, and, privately, the bread section at Paris Baguette. But nobody needs to know that.

As Yomi, you have released three critically acclaimed album, all part of the same overarching storyline, with titles like Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Your music videos are all shot in desaturated palettes. In grey, burgundy, and the occasional bruised purple. You do not smile in photoshoots. You have made furrowing your brow into an art form. Your fandom is called The Crows, and they are intensely devoted people who write very long forum posts analyzing the metaphorical significance of a single flickering lightbulb in your Purgatorio MV.

You are twenty-six years old. You are, by any reasonable metric, very cool.

You are also, right now, being told that you are going to co-host a TV show called Workdol.

"Absolutely not."

Your manager, Hajun, does not even look up from his phone. He has worked with you for three years and has developed an immunity to your flat refusals the way one develops an immunity to a particular strain of flu, through repeated, miserable exposure.

"It's already confirmed," he says. "The contract is signed."

"You signed a contract without telling me?"

"I told you last Tuesday."

"I was asleep."

"You were awake. You said, and I quote, 'sure, whatever, close the blinds.'"

You open your mouth. You close it. You did say that. You have made 'sure, whatever, close the blinds' into a kind of personal philosophy.

"What even is Workdol?" you ask, because apparently this is happening now.

Hajun finally looks up. He has the expression of a man about to deliver information he finds personally entertaining. "It's the show where idols go work different civilian jobs for a week," he says. "You do it with a co-host. It's very popular. Very warm and fuzzy."

Warm and fuzzy.

You, Yomi, whose entire discography is an extended meditation on the emotional abyss of modern existence. Warm and fuzzy.

"Who's the co-host?" you ask flatly.

Hajun’s mouth does something that might be a suppressed smile.

"Kim Jiwoo," he says. "Chuu."

And that is how it begins.

You know who Chuu is. Everyone knows who Chuu is.

Kim Jiwoo, stage name Chuu, is, by most scientific estimates, approximately 70% heart eyes and 30% vocal cords. She debuted as a soloist after the whole LOONA fiasco, and she has maintained a solo career alongside her various adventures and YouTube channel with the relentless cheerfulness of someone who simply refuses to acknowledge the concept of burnout. She is famous for loving things very openly and very loudly. She loves her fans. She loves food. She loves small animals. She once cried during a fan sign because a fan brought her a handmade keychain and the video went viral, everyone called it the most wholesome thing they had ever seen.

She has, at various times, been described as: sunshine personified, a golden retriever in human form, and the human embodiment of a warm hug. The first time you meet her in person is at the production meeting for Workdol, in a conference room at the broadcasting station. You arrive first, because you are always early, punctuality is one of the few things you take seriously, alongside good headphones and the structural integrity of your ramen. You sit at the table. You fold your hands. You stare at the opposite wall with the focused intensity of a man who is definitely not nervous and does not experience nervousness as a concept.

The door opens.

You hear her before you see her, which seems, in retrospect, very on-brand.

"—I know, I know, I'm not late, I'm literally on time, stop looking at me like that, Manager Oh—"

Chuu walks into the conference room. She is wearing a yellow sweater. It is aggressively yellow. It is the yellow of sunflowers, caution tape, and the little emoji that is just a smiling face. Her hair is pulled back with a white headband and she has a tote bag over one shoulder that has a cartoon bunny on it. She is, in person, approximately the same wattage as a red giant.

She sees you. Her face does something extraordinary, it somehow gets brighter. You didn't think that was physically possible but here you are, witnessing it.

"OH," she says. Not loud, exactly, just very, very clear. Like a bell. "You're YOMI!"

"Yes," you say.

"I'm a fan," she says, and she says it like it's a completely normal and wonderful thing to say, with zero hesitation, and sits down directly across from you. Her manager trails in behind her looking like a man who has accepted his fate. "I really like Inferno. The track 'Apotheosis' specifically. It made me cry on the subway once."

You blink. In your three years as Yomi, you have received many compliments. Fans tell you that your music changed their life. Journalists compare you to Deftones and Massive Attack. Music critics write things like "Yomi has constructed a sonic architecture of alienation that feels both universal and devastatingly intimate."

No one has ever just sat down across from you and said "I cried on the subway" with the energy of reporting cheerful weather.

"...Thank you," you say.

"It's a compliment!" she adds, apparently reading your expression, which is, you're told, not very expressive. "Crying is how I know something really got me. Happy crying, sad crying, moved crying, all good cries."

"Do you cry often," you say. It's not really a question. It comes out flat and you immediately feel like an anthropologist observing a new species.

"Oh, all the time," she says cheerfully. "I cried last week because a dog looked at me. It had very sincere eyes."

The PD comes in then and saves you from whatever you were about to say to that, which in all honestly, might have been nothing, because you are temporarily without words. This has not happened to you since your first music show performance.

The meeting is professional. You learn about the structure of Workdol. It involves you and Chuu being placed in various civilian workplaces for five days each episode. You'll work real jobs, convenience stores, flower shops, fish markets, ramyeon restaurants. You'll film your experiences and react to each other's highlights. It's designed to be warm, funny, and human.

"We're pairing you two specifically," the PD, a cheerful woman named Director Yoon, explains, "because we think the contrast will be very compelling television."

You glance at Chuu.

Chuu grins at you.

You look away and stare at the table.

"Sure," you say. "Whatever."

Chuu tells this story in every interview afterward, for months: The first thing Yomi said to me was "do you cry often" and I thought, this man is either very strange or very interesting, and I was right, he's both. You have heard this story told back to you four times and each time you feel something in your chest do a small, traitorous flutter that you refuse to acknowledge.

The first episode of Workdol is set in a GS25 convenience store in Mapo-gu.

You arrive to set in all black. Black long-sleeve, black trousers, black sneakers, because you own approximately nine colors of clothing and black is eight of them. The production team gives you a GS25 uniform polo and you put it on over your black long-sleeve and manage to make even a convenience store uniform look vaguely like an album cover. The cameras capture this. The editing team will later put dramatic orchestral music under it.

Chuu arrives in her own uniform and immediately looks like she was born to work a convenience store. She has already memorized the layout in the time it took you to figure out how the barcode scanner worked.