Between the Taylor Swift effect, BTS fever, and the rise (and rise) of Heated Rivalry, fandoms are having a moment—making it the perfect time to dig into Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s alternately heartrending and thrilling new novel, Superfan (Flatiron Books).
In Superfan, a lonely UT Austin student named Minnie becomes obsessed with a wildly popular K-pop-inspired boy band called HOURGlass and its enigmatic member Halo (real name Eason). This week, Vogue spoke to Zhang about demystifying pop-idol worship, living and writing in Austin, her own experience of falling down the BTS rabbit hole, and various fandoms that have entranced her over the years (think: American Idol).
Vogue: What was the spark that started this novel for you?
Jenny Tinghui Zhang: I was always interested in writing about the surge of feeling that one has when one is a fan—or, in this case, obsessed with something, so I always knew that I wanted to write from the perspective of a fan. Minnie’s character does a lot of assuming and creating stories about who this boy band member Halo is, his motivations, and what he must be feeling and who he must be on the inside. That was really interesting to me, because I thought, Well, what if a lot of her assumptions are wrong, or what if a lot of her assumptions are actually dangerous or harmful to the human behind the persona of this idol? I wanted to bring Halo’s character in because we have so many people assuming or thinking big things, and then we get to see Eason s actual side of the story and confront the reality of this figure.
Can you tell me a little bit about choosing to set Minnie’s story in Austin?
I think it was a little bit selfish on my part, because with my first novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, that novel took place in China, it took place in San Francisco, it took place in Idaho, and it involved a lot of research on my part to understand not just the places but the time periods in which we are accessing those places, because it takes place in the in the 1880s. For my second novel, I wanted to set it somewhere that would involve some research, but I just didn t want to be responsible for the amount of research that I had to do for my first novel. Austin felt like a very familiar and comfortable place for me to write from, because I’ve lived here since 2000. I was really interested in talking about Austin and bringing it to a literary space.
What drew you to tell a fandom story right now?
I started writing this novel a little bit after I sold my first novel in 2021, and the idea for this story came from the fact that the end of 2019 I got really into BTS. I just fell so hard down that rabbit hole. I saw one video of them very much in the same way that Minnie sees a video of HOURglass in the beginning of the novel; I watched them perform on Saturday Night Live and then, two weeks later, I was in Chicago for their concert by myself, and I missed my MFA graduation celebration. They had to FaceTime me in; I was at the airport and no one understood what I was doing or why. But it was that level of intensity that I could acknowledge in myself, like, this is such a wild thing for me, an adult person nearing 30, to still be having the same level of passion for something that I had as a teenager for things like Lord of the Rings.
Even then, I knew one day I would like to write about or try to capture this phenomenon, this falling-down-the-rabbit-hole feeling. That’s kind of where it started, although at that point I didn’t know that I was going to write a novel about it. I thought I was going to write an essay about it. Later on, when I was driving back from Wyoming—where I did my MFA program—to Austin, I had spent some time in the BTS fandom by that point, and I remember I was seeing a lot of videos theorizing that two of the BTS members were in a romantic relationship with each other. There was so much analysis and care put into these videos, and I was just kind of thinking about the phenomenon of shipping and how that’s something that is so common across fandoms. That was kind of where the first glimmer of the novel came to me: experiencing this overall phenomenon and wanting to explore it further.
You depict Minnie’s loneliness at UT Austin so vividly. What power do you think fandom has to address the kind of isolation and trauma we see her experiencing?
Well, it’s a community of its own, and what is beautiful about it is that it’s incredibly inclusive, because it takes place online. At the same time, it can feel like a very safe space, because you can create your own sort of enclave. It’s something that I personally experienced when I was going through times of hardship, also in college. I got really into American Idol at one point, particularly Adam Lambert. I was, you could say, obsessed with him, and there was an online community that was also dedicated to obsessing over Adam Lambert. I spent all of my days on this message board. It was just me living a life, but also living this other life where I had this wide swath of friends, I had all of these inside jokes, I would stay up until 4 a.m. chatting with people on this message board that I had to refresh constantly, and I was also—very much like Minnie—lonely. I found friendship and camaraderie and community through this community, which happened through the conduit of fandom, so I think it has all the power in the world.
What kind of research did you do into K-pop and boy bands beyond your own fandom?
Well, the great thing about K-pop is that they put out so much behind-the-scenes footage and vlogs, and I have DVD compendiums of a whole year’s worth of BTS “memories,” as they call them. Consuming all of that has provided ample research for me, as well as just being in these fandom communities and seeing the way that people are interacting with this content and interacting with each other.
What was the most important thing you learned while writing this book?
I ve been thinking about this a lot. I was kind of having a hard time after I wrote my first novel, just because it deals with some very heavy topics, and I didn’t love writing. I was quite sad. I think writing this book, not to say that it healed me, but it taught me a lot about how to fall back in love with writing again through writing about something that brings me a lot of joy and brings a lot of joy to a lot of people.
