Who Is E Tammy Kim? 'New Yorker' Scribe Gets Flak From Kpop Fans Over Article On BTS

There's no denying that the Hallyu wave has caught onto the entire world including India. The South Korean Boy Band BTS has emerged as an integral part of the Korean wave; the band has had great influences and their fandom known as ARMY is one of the biggest fandoms.

Korean writer E Tammy Kim, who is a contributor for the coveted magazine The New Yorker, has now come under the scanner of the Korean pop or K-pop aficionados because of her article on the boy band. While the article in itself is harmless and only speaks about what makes listeners gravitate toward BTS, there are excerpts from the article that left a bad taste in readers' mouths.

Kim, in her article published on June 21 about the band, mentions the campaign they launched with UNICEF to combat violence against children and teens. She wrote, "In 2017—the same year that Kim Jonghyun, a singer in the K-pop group SHINee, died by suicide—BTS launched a campaign with UNICEF to combat violence against children and teens." The usage of late idol's death as segue did not go down well with K-pop listeners.

Moreover, the author while highlighting how queer persons feel welcomed and accepted by BTS, mentions the controversies their precursor, the boy band Big Bang was embroiled in. Another instance which irked fans who argued that these instances she mentions are irrelevant and is disrespectful toward the respective parties as well as BTS.

Suggested Reading: ‘Sexual Dolls’: How The K-Pop Industry Sexualises and Objectifies Its Female Singers

Who Is E Tammy Kim?

E Tammy Kim is a freelance magazine reporter based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times and her works have appeared in outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation.

Kim has previously worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker magazine and worked as a national features writer at Al Jazeera America.

The co-host of the podcast Time To Say Goodbye covers beats like labour and the workplace, arts and culture. She also focuses on the news, and trends from both North and South Korea.

She is a contributing editor at Lux, a 2022 Alicia Patterson fellow, and a fellow at Type Media Center. She, in 2016, also co-edited a book called Punk Ethnography which focused on contemporary world music.

Before she became a journalist, Tammy was a legal-services attorney and adjunct professor. She was a Pollner professor at a journalism school in Montana, America, where she taught a seminar on labour reporting titled The American Worker.