South Korean culture is whittled to meticulous perfection: the writing system was scientifically developed to be as easy as possible to learn, the popular music industry entails grueling training processes to polish its “idols,” and the College Scholastic Ability Test ensures unadulterated meritocracy in the university admissions process. Frankly, there’s a lot more to unpack when it come to South Korea’s double-edged sword of seeming perfection. Today, though, I just want to focus on the good. Specifically, there are three recent, somewhat minute facets of Korean culture that have impressed me with their emotional, intellectual, or tactical resonance, and I plan to discuss them all (and possibly more!) in my new “Why South Korea Keeps Impressing Me” series!

1. BTS’s Zero O’Clock

Songs don’t make me cry often, but this one did. In fact, I keep a Google Sheet where I track all the times I cry (I know, weird), and here’s what I said about Zero O’clock: “They talked about how when everything feels heavy, there’s always a new day. Everything resets at 12, in that hushed hour between days. They said I would be happy, that I should smile and hope for a happier me. I just needed someone to tell me that I would be happy again, that all this is worth it. I can be happy, I deserve to be happy, and I will be happy.”

For some context, I watched the lyric video for this song around midnight on March 1st, after a long day of summer program applications and upsetting news headlines. I was feeling exhausted and lonely, as we all do sometimes. Then, I took a break to listen to some BTS, as one does; in particular, I decided to indulge in a color coded lyric video (a common type of video in K-pop where fans translate song lyrics, write out the hangul and romanization, and color code by the band member singing). And when I was able to fully understand what these four Korean men from the other side of the world were singing about, the song suddenly hit much harder than it had the dozens of other times I’d listened to it before. Sometimes, you just need someone, anyone, to tell you that you’re not alone in feeling isolated and uncertain in this big, scary, competitive world. You’re always going to have a second chance, all the way until you leave this world, because each day is a new day and a new opportunity for happiness.

It’s moments like these where I truly appreciate the power of words and music, and the even greater power they can produce when combined. Yes, there’s a language barrier, but there’s also the pretty incredible community of people who care enough about an artist’s words to translate them for others, not to mention the universal emotional language of music. And I completely understand that K-pop isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; some people would rather not listen to music in a different language from a country unfamiliar and foreign, and that’s absolutely fine. But I genuinely don’t remember the last time I heard a message like this in mainstream American pop music, and that’s a shame — it’s a message that so many of us desperately need to hear, no matter where in the world we live. So for the people who discount K-pop as the fluffy obsession of internet-obsessed teenage Twitter fanatics, I implore that they listen to at least one song, like the one above, by a K-pop artist with some artistic autonomy; then the appeal of K-pop may turn out to be far more human and visceral than they would’ve believed.