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10 K-POP Stars You Didn’t Know Are Actually AMERICAN

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K-pop’s biggest crossover stars didn’t grow up anywhere near Seoul.

The June 2017 video “10 K-POP Stars You Didn’t Know Are Actually AMERICAN” from TheThings Celebrity breaks down a fact that catches a lot of casual fans off guard: several of the idols fronting the biggest groups in the industry — GOT7, SEVENTEEN, f(x), Girls’ Generation — were born and raised in the United States before agencies like SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, and Pledis Entertainment recruited them into Korean pop’s export machine. Their bilingual fluency wasn’t incidental. It’s the exact tool these companies needed to sell K-pop to English-speaking markets.

• Mark Tuan, Joshua Hong, Amber Liu, and BM (Matthew Kim) were all born and raised in Los Angeles before landing in GOT7, SEVENTEEN, f(x), and KARD respectively.
• Tiffany Young and Jessica Jung of Girls’ Generation were both born in San Francisco — in the same hospital — before SM Entertainment scouted them for its early global push.
• Jay Park debuted as the leader of JYP’s 2PM before leaving to build his own hip-hop label, AOMG, as a solo artist.

The Los Angeles Pipeline

Los Angeles turns up again and again in this story. Mark Tuan lived briefly in Brazil and Paraguay as a kid before settling back in California, where JYP Entertainment scouted him ahead of GOT7’s 2014 debut. Joshua Hong, also L.A.-born and raised, relocated to Seoul to join Pledis Entertainment and became SEVENTEEN’s primary English speaker and vocalist.

Amber Liu took a different route into the same city’s talent pool. Also raised in Los Angeles, she passed SM Entertainment’s global audition in 2007 and debuted two years later as f(x)’s main rapper. BM, born Matthew Kim, came up through California dance competitions before DSP Media brought him into the co-ed group KARD.

SEVENTEEN’s New York Import

Not every American-born idol in this rundown came from the West Coast. Vernon — born Hansol Vernon Chwe in New York to an American mother and Korean father — moved to South Korea at age five, long before joining Joshua Hong in SEVENTEEN. His background gives the group two members with direct ties to the U.S., which matters when SEVENTEEN’s English-language promotion and fan interactions come up.

Girls’ Generation’s San Francisco Roots

Girls’ Generation’s global breakout in the 2000s leaned heavily on two members born thousands of miles from Seoul. Tiffany Young and Jessica Jung were both born in San Francisco, California — famously in the same hospital — before SM Entertainment scouted them and built them into pillars of the group’s early international expansion.

Tiffany Young and Jessica Jung were born in the same San Francisco hospital before becoming two of the faces SM Entertainment leaned on to sell Girls’ Generation overseas.

Solo Paths Out Of The States

Jay Park’s career didn’t stop at 2PM. Born in Edmonds, Washington, near Seattle, he debuted as the group’s leader under JYP before stepping away to build a solo career and found AOMG, his own hip-hop label. Ailee, born Amy Lee in Denver and raised in New Jersey, took a more grassroots route — she built a following singing on YouTube before relocating to South Korea to launch her solo vocal career, a path that mirrors how a lot of American-born talent gets discovered by Korean labels in the first place.

Put together, these stories track a pattern that’s easy to miss if you only see the finished stage performance: agencies like SM, JYP, and DSP Media have been actively recruiting Korean-American and non-Korean American talent for over a decade specifically because it gives their groups a built-in bridge to English-speaking markets. It’s the same instinct that’s shaped plenty of other boy band rosters and reshaped how music industries scout musicians who look nothing like their public image once you know where they actually grew up.

Amber Liu’s 2007 audition tape and Jay Park’s jump from 2PM’s lineup to AOMG’s roster remain two of the clearest examples of how far that L.A.-to-Seoul pipeline can stretch — and with SEVENTEEN, GOT7, and KARD all still active as of mid-2017, it’s a pipeline these agencies clearly aren’t done tapping.