Call Her Jin-ri
I want to tell you about Choi Jin-ri, once known as Sulli. She was the child actress who became a K-Pop star when she was fifteen, and the woman who battled cyber-bullying for her outspoken feminist-leaning views. She also was the singer who battled panic disorder and dealt with a public that couldn’t accept an idol who was less than perfect. She passed away at 25 in 2019, but in the near three years since her death, her work is often pushed aside. I want to change that.
“My real name is Choi Jin-ri,” Sulli said in 2019. “It’s a name from the Bible. But just before I debuted as a child actor, a reporter who covered me in a story told me, ‘I think it would be better to use a different name.’”
Jin-ri, he said, was too strong of a religious name.
“Sulli,” he recommended.
“He did it,” she said. “At the time, I couldn't refuse in person, so I said, 'Yes,' But the next day, I appeared in the article under the name of 'Sulli.”
“I hated the name,” Sulli admitted years later. When family and friends would call her by her stage name she’d scoff at them. “Why did you call me Sulli?”
Jin-ri. In Korean the name is spelled 진리 but spoken in English the “r” actually rolls like the sound of an “l”. To pronounce it, say, “Jinli”. Try it. It rolls off your tongue, soft like peaches.
Our names are so important. They hold our history; our lineage. “Who you are versus who you wish you [were] are different people sometimes — for the most of us,” Korean-American author Min Jin Lee once explained. She was interested in how our names and heritage influence the person we become, sometimes without our control. “So I try to see both people, and then I try to see all the people behind them. And by that, I mean I try to understand your parents, your ancestors, your siblings, your regional identification, and that helps me to kind of get a 360 overview of you.”
Sulli was an illusion. To understand Jin-ri I want to start with her name.
Most of us know Sulli as a member of f(x), who are largely the architects of how experimental K-Pop has become. Their influence is so entrenched in K-Pop that they innovated how a girl group looks and sounds. Songs like “Electric Shock”, “Hot Summer” and “4 Walls” hold their ground incredibly well close to a decade past their release. New groups like NewJeans benefit from the radical work f(x) began, likely because they were created by the same woman: Min Hee Jin.
Yet, for all of their accomplishments, f(x)’s albums are out of print, and SM, the group’s company, rarely revisits the music. Each member has gone on to find solo work (Luna, most notably will appear on Broadway this fall in KPOP), but SM has done little to revisit f(x)’s legacy.
But they were boundary pushing. Their albums crossed borders into EDM, sometimes bumping into the dark, pulsating nightclubs of London. Two of f(x)’s best works, Pink Tape and 4 Walls, which Sulli did not participate in, are often hailed as masterpieces.
But beyond the music, f(x)’s members made the group transgressive. They were often called the “weird little sisters” of Girls Generation, and that was because their image was meant to appeal to girls who didn’t fit in. Amber Liu, the group’s rapper, won thousands of fans over because of her androgyny. While Sulli’s popularity - and controversy - was found in her inability to be a perfect idol.
“My biggest asset is when I do what I really want to do” she once told ELLE Korea, referring to her personal autonomy. “To dress how I want to dress; to take the pictures that I want to take; I have to do what I need to do. Then, I will look the prettiest and the happiest.”
“I use my biggest asset when I do what I really want to do”
Just a few months before her death, Sulli released her only solo EP titled “Goblin”.
The song was the story of a woman with dissociative identity disorder. In the music video, Sulli wears eccentric costumes and wanders through an old mansion. Her eyebrows vary between a pale and kitsch green. As Sulli sings, different versions of herself dance and move among her.
Sulli wanted to explore the many pieces of herself in “Goblin”, the personalities that often confused or conflicted her. Are you sick of her? She’s right there with you.
“It’s true, I’m very sick of it,” she sings in the first verse.
While the name “Goblin” is never sung in the song, the line “don’t be afraid of the cat without fur” is. This line is in reference to Jin-ri’s own sphinx cat named Goblin. “A pure white apricot color,” she sings. “Just wanna tell you hi.”
“Goblin” is dedicated to her cat whose name the song came from. Both Sulli and Goblin were ethereal, unconventionally pretty creatures who wanted to trust and love those they met. Yet the panic disorder she developed as a child only increased as Sulli grew older. On her reality show Jinri’s Store, she admitted, “Even close people left me. I was hurt by them and felt there was nobody who understands me, which made me fall apart,”
The walls closed in on Sulli the more her fame grew, but I see “Goblin” as a concept that was in development long before the song’s release in 2019. Five years earlier, IU, a close friend of Sulli, wrote “Red Queen”. The song was inspired by Jin-ri’s contour drawing of a woman with a red lipstick stained kiss. The art enchanted IU so much that Sulli gave her the drawing. In exchange IU wrote “Red Queen”.
“That girl is so pitiful,” IU sings about the Red Queen, whom I believe is Sulli. “That girl who everyone is afraid of.” IU’s “Red Queen” is full of empathy. This is a girl who no one understands and who people often look at as crazy. But why does she make you uncomfortable?
I see “Goblin” as a response to “Red Queen”, but this time from the artist’s point of view. She only wanted to say hi. Why were we so afraid of her?
What she wanted was just understanding.
“I think I’m like a child. Since I was a child, it took a lot of time for me to work and find myself,” Suli admitted once.
The girl in “Goblin”, too, is childlike. She sneaks into spaces where she’s not allowed. She plays games and tells secrets to the girls living in her room. “Something’s not right,” she observes. But she can’t put her finger on it. Things are breathing in her room. The girls in her head are multiplying. Near the end of the video they break into the mansion at night; unease mounts.
“Wouldn’t it be better if everyone disappeared?” Sulli’s character asks at the end of the video.
“I don’t know who is really me,” she admits. Nihilism is all that is left.
The closer of the “Goblin” EP is a striking ballad called “Dorothy”. Sulli never states who Dorothy is but I would interpret the name as another representation of her. “Dorothy of jealousy/ Dorothy of love/ Dorothy of the truth”, she sings in the stark opening notes.
“There was no meaning/ I had hope/” she remembers in the chorus. “At the edge of my imagination. The air buried beneath the world is empty.”
Dreams have been forgotten and left for dead. “Even if paradise doesn’t exist anymore,” she muses, she has what she calls a “prayer for the future”.
Still from the Goblin video
Sulli never flinched. She held a mirror up to us and asked, What makes you so scared of me?
“Go up on the moon,” she commands on the track of the same name, the second of her EP. “Why do you look so blue?”
“I may be a bad girl to others but I am good overall,” Sulli protested to Elle Korea. She was called “absurd” and “thoughtless” but what were her crimes? That she didn’t wear a bra? That she expressed her support of victims of sexual slavery in World War II?
Sulli, not Jin-ri, appeared like an alien from outer space to a conservative public. We’d never seen an idol as destructive, wild and transparent with her feelings as Sulli. She held her pain and dared us to empathize with it.
“Sulli’s house is only full of love,” she captioned one Instagram photo. I think of this girl often. Perhaps she’s more real to me than the icon she became: A woman who boldly put herself out on the front lines of a hostile public that is often misogynistic and sexist, knowing she would be an outcast.
Instead, I like to think of the Sulli who would drink wine while she painted and wrote songs with her friend IU. I wonder if they sat on a fluffy couch with lots of colorful pillows or if they listened to music by cool girls like Yerin Baek. I like to think of the parties she held at her home; the nights she laughed taking photos with her friend Gu Hara, who passed away just weeks after Sulli. These girls were once whole. We forget they were humans.
For many of us, Sulli represents an honesty or vulnerability we want to tap into within ourselves. She didn’t fit the mold of an idol because. Sulli couldn’t help but express herself. She never intended to be a rebel, but we called her one because she was so unconventional when she stood next to most idols.
Call her by her name.
The writer who hailed her as “Sulli” felt that her birth name was too religious and perhaps that’s because of its meaning. I would like to think Sulli became outspoken and defiant in her belief for standing up for what’s right because her name’s divine beginnings. What’s the importance of a name? Sulli mentioned that “Jin-ri” comes from the Bible, and there it means “the truth.”
Jin-ri always told us the truth.
