There are times when words just drop back in your throat. I believe summer was as ripe and liberating to a kid entering high school as spiky hair and cargo pants were in 1992, when my adolescent curiosities gave way to what would become the defining moments of my early teenage career. More than a few sneakers would turn into dress shoes, I would learn how to tie a tie, college talks would be in the works, and girls would no longer have cooties. Here, somewhere in between a certain reckless abandon that excused a certain level of gayness as still "childish" and a self-aware desperado that plunged into the creeping necessity of tact and assertiveness, there was a little-known time when I was absolutely infatuated with the Korean culture. I liberally included FOBs as a part of my regular entourage, we all discovered the joys of karaoke together, and there was little admitted shame in rocking out to the latest Ga-Yo-Top-10 tunes in my... dad's Suburban. It was then when the legend of all Korean dramas that was "Jil-Tu" crashed into my life like the unavoidable breath of kimchi after a bite of bulgoggi. There was nothing like it. In a popular colloquial expression of the day, it was "the bomb." There was too much for a post-pubescent mind and emotional faculty to absorb all at once. That’s why I had to watch it at least 4 times. And as far as the new episodes came out, every Tuesday was "Jil-Tu" day. I had to beat the ninja ahjumma's to snatch a video copy before they were sold out. Then it was on. Oh man was it on. Homework, piano practice and any semblance of responsibility went out the window. Those first six electric guitar hits of the theme song satisfied my heart and soul and fired all the right pleasure points in my brain that would later seed the vices in my adult life. It was awesome. And then there was her: Choi Jin Sil (Chwe Jeen Shil). If experience is the base for faith and reason, I believe a boy can fall in love with a girl on television. I also know that Choi Jin Sil was and still is simply the greatest actress to grace the Korean drama franchise in the history of television. I knew her more than any other girl in my life (fiction or non) after viewing so many moments of her life on video, knew all of her habits and what made her so frustratingly adorable. Hyori could sell a million bottles of 처음처럼, but Choi Jin Sil was the one who stole my heart, tossed it around, blew it up like a balloon and folded it up like a love note passed around in class—all while showing me the extent of what a perfect girl can be. When she smiled, she made the stage lights unnecessary and more or less put to shame. When she cried, when I cried, everything else cried. It was a massacre on anything comic and reasonable. And episode after episode, her crescent eyelids and cherry puckered lips would make all this sappiness okay. I almost feel guilty for not knowing about Choi Jin Sil’s death until hours ago. All rhythm in my body skipped several beats as I fought to battle the almost laughable nature of its absurdity. How could she die? Worse yet, how could she take her own life away? How difficult was her life that the forces of despair triumphed over the instinctual human will to fight and survive? How painful was her loneliness that millions of adoring fans weren’t enough to overcome it? I couldn’t say anything for at least a few minutes when I heard the news. I digressed in conversation but couldn’t help but return to the tragic topic. And I kept choking on the words. How can this be possible? I tried to shrug it off, peppering jokes about how she should’ve married me, how I would love to torture and murder her abusive ex-husband. But there was something empty in my speech. It was knowing that, even as we were talking about her, somewhere out there, she wasn’t there. It might be silly to lament over someone I don’t even know personally, in adult reality, let alone devote a full-page tribute on a blog like this. But as television’s evolution of visual art goes, she was art itself—and an embodiment of my youth’s desires in the 90’s, its poster fantasies, and that deep, almost pungent trace of nostalgia that eventually fades with age, no matter how hard you try to retrace. So I’ll say it. I miss Choi Jin Sil. I wish she (one of the most beaming and exuberant characters on TV) didn’t die in such a sad way. Her name hadn’t entered my mind until yesterday’s dinner in over 10 years, but it’s as if there was always room in my memory for the idea of her—so much that it’s perhaps more than just a chapter in the confessions of an iconophile. It’s a bitter awakening that the reason why I could like someone so freely and fearlessly was because of the fictional nature of the person, and the fact that Choi Jin Sil led an immeasurably difficult and abusive life makes the most fabled of her characters come alive and die together. And the vacuum of losing her characters becomes so mortal. 안타깝네요. 부디 하늘에서는 편히 쉬시기를... | 
