Jenny Tinghui Zhang
At a glance
From National Book Foundation 5 UNDER 35 HONOREE Jenny Tinghui Zhang, a novel about a pop idol and his superfan, whose stories shockingly collide.
Freshman Minnie is adrift at college in Austin, Texas, when she discovers a boy band called HOURglass and the online forums that worship them. She especially loves Halo, whose sharp edges feel somehow familiar. After a brief romance goes painfully awry, Minnie pours everything into her new fandom, clinging to each livestream and bonding with other fans online. But when a scandal threatens to expose Halo to harm, Minnie decides that she is the only one who can save him.
Except Halo’s secret is darker than anything the tabloids could imagine. Before he was a superstar heartthrob, he was Eason: a high school dropout haunted by a tragic accident. When he is recruited for HOURglass, it feels like a chance to become someone else. And when he is onstage in front of his fans, he can almost forget the horrors of his past--until one of those very fans threatens to destroy everything.
Dazzling, entrancing, and deeply heartfelt, Superfan is about fandom in all its magic and its terror, and the extreme lengths to which we go to rid ourselves of loneliness.
"Zhang writes about obsessive fandom with the knowledge of an insider, tossing in heaps of scandals and fandom minutiae…It’s affecting to witness Minnie’s and Eason’s hard-fought journeys to self-acceptance. An earnest exploration of toxic fandom and coming of age."
- Kirkus
"Superfan riveted me. I was a frog being boiled as Zhang pulled me page by page into the book’s orbit, with writing that is deceptively perceptive, yearning, and engaging all at once. Superfan is not only an insightful examination of the all-encompassing natures of fandom and stardom, it’s a story about ultimately learning to feel whole."
- Rachel Khong, New York Times bestselling author of Real Americans
"As catchy, appealing, and achingly tender as a boy band’s hit ballad, Superfan dazzles and captivates, while raising vital questions about fandom, celebrity, and the performance of self. Jenny Tinghui Zhang captures the complexities of emerging adulthood in all its tenuous glory."
- Kirstin Chen, New York Times bestselling author of Counterfeit
The boys are there, waiting for her. They have always been waiting for her.
She is browsing the front page of a video sharing site when she sees them: draped in white, frozen, yet exploding. ASIAN BOY BAND STUNS AT LOCAL MUSIC FESTIVAL, the title of the video says. Normally, she would ignore a declaration like this, preferring to decide for herself the things that stun her, but their faces— which are undeniably lovely— give her pause. Two million views. Uploaded ten days ago. She cannot fathom the numbers and she cannot fathom the boys. Between Josh Tries to Eat Everything at Whataburger and this, she chooses this.
The music begins. The four of them leap forward, stage lights rolling off their bodies as if unable to latch on. The video was recorded on a cell phone, the picture peppered with grain, but the boys remain clean. Their hair is the color of acorn, honey, liquid silver, and midnight; their bodies are sheathed in white fabric. She can feel them through the laptop screen, count all the pixels that come together to form their sublime faces. She imagines, too, the pulsing tangle of pixels beneath their clothes, the ones that make up their blood, their muscles, their precious bones. The boys are tall and lanky, the kind of model bodies that are 90 percent legs and the rest pure charisma. Glossy boys, unstoppable boys.
It starts like this, then. With a video of boys.
The boys are singing and dancing, gliding and spinning, and glowing, really glowing, and she is glowing with them, because between her and them, there is no longer a laptop screen. There is no audience, no band, no crew in the wings. Not the concept of distance, not even air. There is only them and all the things she wants, which is to be with them, to love them and for them to love her.
The performance ends. The crowd screams their approval, the sound a white-hot current that shoots back and forth between her ears. The boys bow for the final time, each face softened with a smile. They press their palms to their lips and wave.
The screen fades to black and she is left staring at her own stunned face.
She replays the video four times more, watching one boy at a time. She tracks his dance, his song, the shimmer of his face as he struts up and down the stage. She follows these faultless boys, these irresistible boys, these boys with voices pitched to an octave of angels, and she feels herself falling and rising at the same time.
I have no idea who these boys are, one comment below the video says, but I’m in love with them.
Between the crisp, scintillating prose and the cutesy K-Pop content, Superfan is the perfect highbrow-lowbrow crossover—in fact, that’s the whole point. Mainstream and counterculture collapse under Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s keen eye, reminding readers that all art can be serious if it’s treated as such, from a multi-million dollar international pop sensation to a self-published M/M slashfic on AO3.
In this novel, the spoils of girlhood are subversive rather than trite: a K-pop band is afforded the same careful academic consideration as, say, a David Foster Wallace short story. Superfan rails against the idea that girl culture is inherently “basic” or “frivolous,” skewering the very notion as sexist. “Why are people so quick to dismiss something, just because young women love it?” our MC Minnie wonders. “Does it truly lack substance, or do we just not want girls to be happy?”
Superfan will speak to anyone who has been teased for being a Swiftie, or for liking Heated Rivalry a little too much. Read on for sharp feminist observations, an inside look on what it’s like to be a K-pop idol, and plenty of tightly choreographed dance sequences.
Mention of eating disorder, sexual assault, child abuse, assault.
