Reimagining a Korean Folktale, Julia Riew ’22 Finds A Part of Herself

Like so many others, Harvard College senior Julia Riew downloaded TikTok during lockdown, only to delete the viral app weeks after.

Back then, it was impossible for her to know how the app would change her life. Riew, who is pursuing a joint concentration in Theater, Dance, and Media and Music, had been working for some time on her senior thesis during lockdown. Six months into her project, she shifted gears, determined to tell a Korean story.

The librettist made the choice to switch because of a number of factors — including her dream of writing for Disney, as well as her grandmother’s moving in with her family during the pandemic. “In speaking with her, practicing with her, I realized how out of touch with my culture I was, and that I really wanted to write a Korean story this time,” she said.

Riew ultimately settled on the classic folktale of Shim Cheong, a young woman who travels to the watery lair of an underwater king in hopes of helping her father regain his sight.

On Jan. 7, in what then seemed like an ordinary Friday night for Riew, she re-downloaded TikTok and posted a fragment of her project.

By the next day, she had gained 10,000 followers.

“To be honest, I didn’t eat or sleep for two weeks after that, I was so high on the adrenaline of: What’s going on? What’s going to happen next? Are my dreams coming true?” she says with a laugh, phoning in from her Lowell House dorm.

Riew currently boasts over 89,500 followers on TikTok. Her videos, which provide glimpses into her creative process, total over 1.3 million likes. Titled “Shimcheong: A Folktale,” Riew’s thesis has since gone on to be performed in Feb. and March at The Loeb Experimental Theater and Farkas Hall Studio, respectively.

Time spent with her grandmother during the pandemic galvanized Riew to reappraise her cultural heritage. Yet her feelings of being culturally adrift are not new. (Riew adds as an aside that she wasn’t aware of Chuseok, the traditional Korean holiday heralding the mid-autumn harvest festival, until she came to college.) A Saint Louis native, she went to school with very few individuals of Asian descent. After her senior year of high school, Riew resolved to travel to South Korea in hopes of engaging more deeply with its culture.

Her heady vision of connecting seamlessly with Korea and “[being] just like everyone else,” however, never quite materialized the way she had hoped. The summer after her senior year of high school, she studied at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, an experience she calls “amazing.” Yet while she was there, Riew continually encountered reminders that she was perceived as Americanized and fundamentally unlike the other Koreans around her.

“I do remember being very surprised at how much of an outsider I felt I was. And I noticed even that when I would go to stores or when I would interact with people outside of college, people would speak to me immediately in English,” Riew said. “I asked one of my friends, I said, ‘How do they know that I’m American?’ And she said, ‘Oh, they can just tell by the way you look, by the way you dress, and — kind of everything about you.’ It really caused me to question my identity.”

Though Riew draws from the tale of Shim Cheong, she is not bound by it. In fact, she prefers to call her project “inspired” by the folktale, rather than its adaptation. When crafting her project, Riew was attentive to rendering a more dimensional female protagonist in Shim Cheong — someone who was defined not by her beauty and piety, but rather by her fortitude and conviction. “I wanted to create a protagonist that was courageous, and that took action on her own — that was basically an acting protagonist,” she said. “One of the main things that changed was, Shim Cheong’s journey is all driven by her love for her family and for her father, but it’s really a story of self-actualization at the same time.”

The gender dynamics are not the only things she wanted to reappraise through her thesis project. In reshaping the tale of Shim Cheong, the librettist also wants to “re-examine the way disability exists in the world.” She said conversations with a friend of hers, who is both blind and a composer, helped her understand how problematic this narrative is. “The moral of the story at the end — the resolution — is that the father regains his sight,” she said. “He said that his community often takes offense to these stories where the moral of the story is that the disabled person becomes ‘un-disabled.’”

Riew’s rise to acclaim has been dizzying. Parts of her artistic journey, however, were marked by the moments of doubt, frustration, and questioning — ones she pushed through to breathe life into the artistic vision that is now “Shimcheong.” Asked what advice she might have for folks embarking on a creative journey, Riew pauses for a few seconds before piecing together a response.

“Sometimes what makes you different is your greatest strength,” she said. “Nurturing that and giving that time to grow will open up opportunities, and will lead you to the people who won’t look down on you for studying what you want to study and doing what you want to do. When you find that home, and when you find that passion, I think it will point you in the direction that you need to go.”

—Staff writer Isabella B. Cho can be reached at isabella.cho@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @izbcho.