In Seoul: An Actress’s Road to Fame [Showbiz]

One moment, Jian Xi was a second-year dance student. Her film had just wrapped, and the wrap party hadn’t even started.

The next, she was an idol in a disbanded Korean girl group. She’d jumped off a building to get an audition, and everyone at the company thought she was wasting a spot that should have gone to someone else.

She clutched her fraying scarf and pushed open the door, thinking, “If I don’t get the part, I don’t get it. But I have to try.”

And she got it.

From supporting roles that paid 800,000 won per episode to an award nomination for Best Actress. From being mocked all over the internet with “Idols have no business acting” to earning a round of applause that silenced the entire room.

Someone asked her how she did it.

She smiled, lips pressed together.

Maybe she had some talent, but more than anything, she stayed up late memorizing scripts and getting inside every character’s head, while relentlessly making her presence known online.

At first, she’d been a nobody too. She had fewer than three hundred followers on Instagram.

…

…

The photo in Kwon Ji Yong’s phone gallery.

He hadn’t chosen the one where he looked most handsome.

He hadn’t chosen the one with the best composition.

At three in the morning, Mia had fallen asleep on his chest, drooling a small wet patch onto his T-shirt. He rubbed his chin against the top of his daughter’s fluffy head, raised his phone with his other hand, and captured the only thing that mattered to him:

The lighting was dim, and the composition was terrible.

But he was grinning like he’d stolen all the stars in the world.

Before posting it, he glanced back at Jian Xi, fast asleep.

Sneaking this up while my wife’s asleep shouldn’t get me in too much trouble, right?

When he hit send, he had no idea he was making history.

The number one trending search on Naver wasn’t his new song. It was his daughter.

The whole world was asking: Who does this little dumpling look like?

He tickled Mia’s feet and laughed. “Isn’t it obvious she looks like my wife?”

“I can be a superstar in front of everyone, but at home, I’m just a dad who wants to show his daughter’s pictures to the whole world.”

The truth behind Kwon Ji Yong’s Instagram post at dawn on September 6, 2020

[Image: A chubby baby’s fingers clutch a daisy ring just like GD’s. The background is blurred, with the first light of Seoul at four in the morning.]

Theme: May life always be sweet