"I Agree With 'Get Closer to a Star's Stage, and Further From Their Life'" | At 22, What Is She Thinking? (27)

"Now I like TFboys, and I hope they hurry up and find a chance to date while they're young."

Editor's note: On June 20 we launched the QDaily Big Survey: College Students. Across dozens of articles we will look at what college students spend, who they love, the jobs they take, what confuses them, and how they feel about virtual worlds. A large part of the series is the individual stories of the 50 students we interviewed. This is the twenty-sixth: a young woman who has spent seven or eight thousand yuan on the stars she follows.

Faber is a senior in the architecture department at Sichuan University, from Suzhou. She has long hair and round vintage glasses, and because her hands are pale, she always paints her nails red.

She says she has no staying power — she can like anything for a little while — but liking Super Junior has stuck. From eighth grade to her senior year of college, "nine years, and it has never changed." All told, Faber says, chasing stars has cost her seven or eight thousand yuan.

This year she suddenly decided to stop spending that kind of money on it, and to become a "keyboard warrior" instead. Around the same time she started liking TFboys. She hopes TFboys hurry up and date young, because "once you're past that age, you can never get it back."

Faber's story is set down below in her own words, in the hope that you will understand her more fully:

I started liking Super Junior in eighth grade, in 2008. A classmate of mine liked Han Geng, so I went and looked up the group, and I genuinely thought Cho Kyuhyun was handsome. Then I watched some of his live videos and found he was really funny, and I liked him a lot. The reason I liked them was Kyuhyun himself — I liked him first and only then followed the whole group.

It really did cost me quite a bit. In middle school I bought fanzines and stickers and that kind of thing. From my first year of high school I started buying Super Junior albums, and every time one came out I bought every version — six years, one album a year, three versions each, 18 discs, 100 each (yuan; I'll leave the unit off from here on). One year I even bought five, so that came to 2,000.

There was also a calendar. It used to be 100 and I bought it three years running; after I started college it went up to 200, so 900 in all. Photo books were 200 each, one a year, five of them, 1,000 total. I bought my favorite's solo albums too — my favorite being Cho Kyuhyun — two of them, 220 each, and so on.

I bought merch as well. There was a fan-club branch called "Secretly in Love With HeHai" — HeHai is a Super Junior ship — and I bought the pair of them a couple's ring set, 45 for the pair. For the eighth anniversary I bought a commemorative set put out on Baidu Tieba, with a book and a set of tableware and so on, about 50.

Then concerts. I saw Super Junior live twice, 2,000; one iKON show, 680; two Sodagreen shows, 400; and so on. Add it all up and it comes to seven or eight thousand.

Most of that money I saved out of my meals. In high school, to save up for albums, I often skipped meals, or ate only a little. I didn't board at school, so my parents dropped me at the gate every morning and I ate lunch and dinner there — ten yuan a meal, twenty yuan a day.

To save, I usually had instant noodles for lunch, 4 yuan, which left 6. Dinner was easy: one steamed bun and one egg, done for two yuan.

My classmates could not understand it at all — putting myself in that state just to buy an album. It was mostly the boys in middle and high school who said so; the girls were a bit more understanding, because most of them had a celebrity they liked too. They just didn't spend the way I did, so they understood me better and the boys didn't. (Then again,) I can't understand what's so interesting about you lot watching porn stars all day.

I've never taken part in fan-club activities, and I've never thought about being a "front-liner" — a fan who goes to official events to take photos and cheer. I don't really understand changing your own life for someone who, in the end, will have no real effect on it.

What I mainly did for Super Junior was spend money. I followed a support group for my favorite member, and when he was doing a musical in Korea, another girl and I bought an empty ticket together. A ticket still cost one or two hundred; I paid half. An empty ticket means you just hand over the money and buy the seat, then leave it empty. It's to push up the attendance rate — the same idea as buying up box-office tickets.

And for some reason Korean fandoms like to show support with rice-flower baskets. A rice-flower basket is a flower basket with a heap of rice at the bottom. So I bought a kilo of rice. Putting a whole basket together is expensive too; each time I just chipped in as part of a group order, and I think I paid 50.

But this year I stopped buying albums and all that and decided to become a "keyboard warrior" — we used to call it "freeloading," a fan who watches and spends nothing. There was more and more of this stuff piling up at home, and looking at it I felt it wasn't much use. I should treat myself a little better; that money could go on food or something else. I'd spent far too much.

Also, this past year I haven't liked them as much, probably because there are too few of them left and not many activities. My favorite has put on weight, and I like him less and less. Mostly there just hasn't been much going on with them, nothing to keep the interest up. Around the same time I started liking TFboys, and there's a lot going on with them, so I don't have the energy for both. My attention got split.

Back then I really wouldn't believe anything except what oppa said, which is a sign of not being fully grown up. For example, TVXQ were the face of not smoking, and when people outside the fandom said TVXQ smoked, I'd think, how could that be? I'd join in and scold them — you must have seen it wrong, are you a hater or something. Later I found out they all smoke, and it's no big deal.

When I look at them now I feel calm, the way you feel about friends — as long as you're happy and don't do anything badly out of line, that's fine. Before, they were something untouchable, not to be profaned.

Of course I'll keep supporting them, but I'm completely calm about it now. I hope they hurry up and find girlfriends and marry properly. I wouldn't feel sad at all. If someone had told me in middle or high school that one of the members had a girlfriend, I really would have felt the sky was falling — oh my god! It would have felt like my boyfriend had been stolen. Not anymore. Now I like TFboys, and I hope they hurry up and find a chance to date while they're young, because once you're past that age you can never get it back.

Super Junior didn't influence me much. The influence came when I saw TFboys, because they were even younger. How did Karry Wang and the others already know in primary school that they wanted to sing? I think that's impressive.

At first their company had no clout and neither did they. Every time they went out to sing, they lost. Back then Karry Wang and Roy Wang formed a duo called W&W and went on a show to sing You Exist in My Song (《我的歌声里》). I honestly thought, two tiny kids out there singing that song — do you get it? Do you know what you're singing about?

Before that, Karry Wang and Jackson Yee had both been on Hunan TV's Rise Up, Youth (《向上吧，少年》), and the judges cut them off a few lines in. I thought, a kid who hasn't even started middle school goes on a singing contest, gets cut off by the judges, is told he needs to work harder, gets a row of X's — I probably couldn't have kept going. But they did keep going. At the time that probably did affect me a little.

My studies haven't gone that smoothly, honestly. I don't feel I've got the hang of architecture; I don't have much design sense. Seeing them made me feel I could hold on a bit longer, that there's no need to give up early or write yourself off early. I've always felt I'm not cut out for design, but back then, watching their raw, unpolished videos, whenever I inexplicably lost confidence about this path, I'd still feel I should hang on a little longer.

After I started liking TFboys, I'd often yell at the television, "My sons are here, my sons are here!" My mom would say, what is the matter with you! She really couldn't understand it. But she thought they were impressive too — from a primary school teacher's point of view, she saw that they had to study and perform at the same time.

I've never met anyone through the fandom, because the classmates around me liked the same things, so there was no real need to join those circles. In middle school the three of us who were closest were all chasing stars: two of us liked Super Junior, one liked TVXQ.

I remember a high school classmate who wrote an essay because TVXQ broke up, and the teacher had her read it out in Chinese class. By the end she was crying her eyes out. She was mourning all the time she had put into them, and the way the group had just split up. The teacher offered us a wish: that one day, like Little Tigers, they might reunite many years down the road.

The three of us grew closer because of it. We live so far apart that there isn't much daily life we can talk about every day, but the moment anything came up about our idols, we could rattle on and on. The other two are both in Suzhou now, and already working.

Since we went our separate ways it's been hard to find anyone else who follows stars this closely. Whenever I'm away, the two of them say, "Hurry up and come back, there's nobody to go to concerts with, nobody to go and see all sorts of things with."

One of them and I are really alike. I like The Lost Tomb, and BL comics and BL dramas and that sort of thing, and we like very similar things — but the distance means there's nobody to go with her and nobody to go with me. So I go to concerts alone and she watches The Lost Tomb alone. Last year I flew back specially to watch The Lost Tomb with her.

We were middle school classmates; in high school the two of them went to a different school. My parents kept me on a tight rein then — they didn't want me spending much time on friendships like that, so they gave me no phone and no internet.

To stay in touch we wrote to each other every week, setting down small things from daily life — though sometimes it wasn't even that, it was what oppa had been up to lately.

And things like: I got the new album, it's so damn handsome. That's basically what we wrote about. And sometimes we'd go back over why TVXQ broke up.

Back then I tried every trick I could think of. Change the letter paper, change the pen, learn every folding technique going, fold the letters into ice cream cones, clothes, feather-shaped envelopes. I sent her letter paper in every shape. Every time she opened one in class the people around her would gasp, and inside I felt so satisfied.

Every night when I got home I'd check whether a letter had come for me, and I'd send her one too. Because my stamp hadn't been postmarked, she'd peel it off and use it again — that felt like a little surprise.

I often wrote in class, in study hall, and at home at night with a light on. I didn't dare turn on the ceiling light, because I'm the type who sleeps with the door open. If my parents got up in the night for the bathroom, I'd be caught. So in the middle of the night I'd switch on a tiny LED light and write letters in bed.

It was really just talking about oppa, letting off steam, and mentioning what was going on around me along the way. Later I got into the habit of sending a postcard from wherever I went, setting down what had happened that day.

If one day I found myself standing in front of Super Junior or TFboys, I think I'd probably walk away. I'd rather keep the distance. I don't think I could say anything that would change anything for them. If I did say something, it would only be "keep it up" or "you really moved me," and there's not much point in saying that.

I really agree with that fandom saying: "Please get closer to a star's stage, and further from their life." I absolutely don't get into their lives.

I once argued heatedly about this with a classmate. She felt that a celebrity, as a public figure, has to hold to a higher moral standard, and shouldn't pull the kind of stunts Justin Bieber pulls. I don't buy that. Her view was that a celebrity gets a great deal, and getting all that comes with a price to pay.

Classmates used to say to me: they have no idea you've made all this effort for them. I don't buy that either. What they give back is the stage. They do their job, I do mine. As far as I'm concerned, as long as they haven't shortchanged their fans in doing the job of a performer, that's enough.

Some people think chasing stars is brain-dead. I think people like that feel superior — they probably can't understand longing for something beautiful. People like that probably find it hard to see what shines in anyone else.

For me, chasing stars is entertainment, the way one person loves basketball, another music, another painting, and puts a lot of time into it. Mine happens to be chasing stars. Think about it: the boys still trash-talk Kobe Bryant back and forth, and I don't know where the superiority is supposed to come from there either — Rockets haters, Kobe stans, Kobe haters, all of it.

In middle school I once watched two boys in the cafeteria get into a fight across the table, one because he liked Jay Chou and the other JJ Lin, arguing over who was better looking. What is there to fight about?

(At the interviewee's request, all names in this piece are pseudonyms.)

Cover image via: miner8