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.
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