Cancel culture is usually linked to the end of something: an event, a relationship, a career. And yet, Christine Ma-Kellams’s debut novel The Band (Atria Books, 2024) begins with the cancellation of K-pop star Sang Duri, in the wake of his downfall. On its surface, the writer’s slim debut novel chronicles Duri’s attempt to escape the public eye by approaching a woman in an H Mart and offering to cook tteokbokki in her home, a McMansion on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Ma-Kellams uses this unlikely setup to unleash a barrage of questions about international fan culture, young fame, mental health, and the nature of human relationships—all of which refuse easy answers.
As an essayist who frequently writes about music, I was drawn to The Band for its subversion of the usual cancel culture narrative—a subject often considered in broad moral strokes. I was eager to follow a story that delves into the nuances that emerge in a cancellation’s aftermath. Ma-Kellams extends this level of depth to all corners of The Band: she portrays Los Angeles as a city defined as much by its H Marts as it is the Chateau Marmont. She interweaves K-pop bands with the music genre’s complicated history and, most potently, does not shy away from the complexity of the book’s central relationship between a middle-aged psychology professor and the young star. That the novel manages to maintain a rapid-fire pace as it excavates the particulars of its characters and their moral dilemmas feels like a sleight of hand.
I was eager to connect with Ma-Kellams on Zoom to hear about her process and the ways her experiences as a cultural psychologist informed her writing.
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The Rumpus: You weave together so many themes within The Band: celebrity culture, fandom, psychology, mental health, love, judgment. What element first brought you to the page?
Christine Ma-Kellams: I think the aspect that hooked me was these newer fandoms just in the last couple of years. I mean, I’m sure they’ve been around forever, but I just did not really know about them. One of the things that got me most interested in K-pop as a genre of music was their fandoms. A lot of times when I say to other people that K-pop fans are a whole species, they’re like, “Oh, you mean like the Beatles—the Beatles have crazy fans too.” But I don’t just mean screaming girls. And maybe there was a whole other element to Beatlemania that I’m just not aware of. I wasn’t alive. I’m sure you weren’t either. But I feel like the nature of fandom, especially with K-pop bands like BTS, is the parasocial nature of it: how much these fans are invested not just in the music but in these idols’ lives—and how defensive they are of their idols. Since writing the book, I’ve noticed it’s not just K-pop fans. When I look at Swifties, for example, I notice the same thing. They don’t only love Taylor Swift for her music, but they seem deeply, personally invested in how she lives her life and what it, and their interpretations of it, means. That’s what I initially found the most fascinating. I both admire it, and I’m also a little terrified of where it could go.
I also find K-pop so much richer than I originally imagined. I think, having been a fan of NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys when I was a teenager, I had one conception of boy bands—that as an adult, I was too old for the genre. But then I learned more about K-pop and especially about bands like BTS. If you look at their level of choreography, if you look at their lyrics, if you look at how engaged they are with other elements like mental health, they are much more nuanced than I originally thought. So that also was a huge part of my interest.
Rumpus: Your background in psychology comes into play through the writing. Did certain psychological elements of K-pop and its history stand out to you as ripe for consideration through fiction?
Ma-Kellams: Yes, one of the things I’m super curious about that I’m doing research on right now is understanding how exposure to things like K-pop can change people’s attitudes toward diversity and people from other cultures. I started thinking about this a few years ago when the film Parasite won Best Picture at the Oscars. There was a lot of conversation among Asian Americans that I knew, who wondered if this would change things in terms of not just representation, which is one question, but also attitudes: what happens when people in America consistently consume another culture’s products? And as a cultural psychologist, I teach a lot about how cultural products transmit culture. You consume a culture via its products, and when you eat their food or go to their tourist attractions or consume their media, you are essentially engaging in and being influenced by that culture, whether you realize it or not.
I think Asian countries, in particular, can be very Eurocentric sometimes. In the US, we forget that our culture is being consumed by people in other countries, and when we travel to their countries, we take for granted that people speak English and know who our pop stars and celebrities are. And I don’t think we’re quite as used to the fact that every now and then, an international celebrity finds success over here. So one of the things that I’m really curious about from an empirical standpoint is, can we track the long-term impact of consuming other cultural products? Does that make you less phobic and less racist? Does that make you more liberal? Does that make you more progressive? Does that make you more just open-minded, personality-wise? I know there are a few studies in psychology that are beginning to tap into that. I don’t think it’s a huge field yet, but it’s something in my life as a psychologist that I want to explore more.
Rumpus: It seems like cultural influences from pop music could go either way, in terms of a toxic or positive outcome.
Ma-Kellams: Exactly. And I think the most interesting questions are the ones where it’s not obvious how it’s going to go.
Rumpus: Early in the book you write, “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.” This felt like a prophecy because of the ways it unfolded through the events that followed, and there were other similarly prophetic moments in this story. Were these prophecies a conscious structural technique you wrote into the book, or did they emerge naturally?
Ma-Kellams: I’ve never heard it described that way, in terms of prophecy. But I really like it because I’m generally obsessed with that idea in everyday life as well as in psychology. We don’t admit it as serious scientists—no psychologist will say, “I’m trying to predict the future.” But I feel that if you look at what the field is trying to do, we’re studying human nature so we can predict what people will do in future situations. Part of psychoanalyzing someone in the past is to say, “Okay, knowing what happened to you as a child or in the past, maybe I can predict or understand what you’ll do in the future.” One of my general obsessions is trying to figure out if people reveal themselves in ways that they may not be fully aware of and how, if you’re observant enough, you should never really be shocked by people’s behavior or the way things unfold because people are constantly—either subconsciously or consciously—revealing who they are.
I think it’s really fun to play that out as a writer, trying to figure out where my characters go. I don’t know how others do it, but I don’t typically plot out my whole story before I write it. I start with a general idea, and I have some notion of a plot line or twist, but I don’t have specifics in mind. A couple of years ago, George Saunders wrote this book on writing called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. One of the points he makes that I’m constantly thinking about just from a craft standpoint is how the difference between decent writing and great writing is causality. In great writing, you can see the causality. It makes sense. As a reader, I relate to that because it drives me nuts when I read a book and things happen, and I’m like, “Wait, why did that happen that way? How did the character end up like this? Why did they do this?” It makes no sense to me. I get really frustrated, and then I start judging the writer. I’m like, you didn’t set this up for me. Also, as both a reader and as a psychologist, I’m just obsessed with causality—why people do what they do. I think subconsciously, when writing my own work, I want to make sure that people understand how these characters became who they are. They didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s not magic. They have reasons. And if you pay close attention in fiction—as in real life—you can sort of guess where the story is going to go.
Rumpus: The relationship between Duri, the K-pop star character known as the Visual, and the narrator feels at the heart of The Band. How did you put those two together in your mind and in your writing?
Ma-Kellams: It’s one of those dynamics in the book that even as the author, I feel like I should know because I’m essentially God to these characters. But even as God, I cannot know. My editor at one point was like, “Wait, did they sleep together?” I don’t know. I created them, and I should know. But personally, I’m not even decided on the nature of that relationship because I feel like it could go either way. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. And I think that’s the most interesting aspect of many relationships, especially as a grownup. I can say this now in a way that I couldn’t when I was twenty-two and just out of college. Back then, when I thought about relationships, I was like, “Oh, does he like you, or does he not like you?”It was so clear-cut.
Now that I’m older and I’ve been married, I’ve realized that whether someone likes you or how they feel about you or whether they’re attracted to you is barely half of the equation. There are so many other layers to every relationship. Knowing whether someone likes you or finds you attractive or finds you appealing is often just the first step. Where that dynamic goes is influenced by an almost infinite number of other pressures and expectations. And I think that’s the most interesting thing—not knowing how a relationship turns out because human emotions and commitments are infinitely more complex than we can imagine. So I think in the book, I wanted to delve into some of the complexity that happens when you break all these social norms about who you should be attracted to on both ends.
The narrator is a married woman who’s older, with kids. She should not be chasing after younger pop stars. And for the younger pop star, she’s an older woman who’s from a different culture and who probably doesn’t speak his language—literally and metaphorically—very well. But I feel like in real life, so many relationships are built upon circumstance or situation. I mean, we even have a term for it called situation shift. I feel like in fiction, a lot of genre books I’ve read spend so much time setting up the relationship, and the relationship becomes the driver of all plot. Maybe I’m just a cynic, or maybe I’m the least romantic person ever, but in real life, I feel like most relationships don’t end up being that intentionally formed. In real life, accidents happen. You just go with whoever is nearby or whoever is available, whoever expresses interest, whoever seems less likely to reject you. There are a million unromantic reasons why people find themselves in romantic or interpersonal bonds. I wanted to explore and tap into that more fully in this book.
Rumpus: I don’t feel like I’ve read many other relationship dynamics that created such urgency to find out what was going to happen to the two people involved without any kind of typical, grandiose romantic trajectory driving the action.
Considering other nuanced subjects this story takes on, cancel culture is one that gets a lot of airtime in cultural discourse but often isn’t surrounded by the most careful discussions. Was cancel culture something that you were driven to write about, or did it become inevitable because of its role in K-pop’s history?
Ma-Kellams: Cancel culture is still something I’m grappling with. And I think it’s funny that we’re talking about it now because I have to admit that I feel like I have a different perspective in 2024 than I did back in 2020, when I first started writing this book. I think cancel culture itself, like all forms of culture, has evolved over time. I think back in 2020, cancel culture seemed like a death nail, for famous people at least. If you were canceled, it seemed like your entire career could vanish before your eyes. I think, depending on the case, it was both overdue for some but terrifying for those whose actions were more ambiguous. It was a shocking thing to behold, in terms of people who deserved it and all the horrible things they did, and the fact that they got away with it for so long. Men in Hollywood probably deserved more punishment than what they even received. But sometimes a person I admired would do something, and I just found myself really undecided on how I felt about them and how to continue to love an artist in light of their behavior. I wasn’t sure, am I still allowed to consume and enjoy their art? Does that make me a bad person, an anti-feminist, if I do?
And then conversely, I was terrified to talk about it in public. I could discuss it in private with friends and family, but on social media or in class, I definitely didn’t want to touch the subject out of fear for being canceled myself over supporting the wrong person. I grappled with that terror-ambiguity over how to feel. And regardless of how you feel, are you allowed to say it out loud? These questions really drove a lot of the writing of this book. And that’s why the particulars of the cancellation in The Band are so idiosyncratic that I think for the average reader, the actions are probably not worthy of cancellation. I didn’t want the debate to be over whether the actions were right or wrong to overtake the story—which is what I see a lot in the real-life movements to cancel people. I feel like so much of it overshadows more important issues that we might want to discuss beyond, “Did this person do this very specific thing?”
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Author photograph by Cubias
