Last month, the six K-pop idols collectively known as IVE made their way to Newark, NJ’s Prudential Center as part of a limited run of North American shows on their SHOW WHAT I AM World Tour. If this were any other K-pop group, I’m sure I wouldn’t have cared. But to myself and my wife, this was a very big deal.

Last spring, during a brief layover in South Korea, we decided to do the most Korean thing we could think of: attend a K-pop show. We weren’t K-pop people, but we were music people, and we were curious about the world—that’s what had taken us to Asia to begin with. IVE happened to be performing a “fan concert” (or “fancon”) in Seoul that night, so we went. The experience wound up highlighting our ignorance of a cultural phenomenon and, in turn, serving as a reminder of the world’s vastness.

In a detailed feature about that night, Fear & Posing in Korea, I broke down our confusing yet illuminating evening as outsiders attending the most “inside” of K-pop soirees. But while that piece focused on our realization of how much we didn’t know about K-pop, I wrote at the time, “IVE was now, surely, something we did know: It’s the group we saw that one time in Seoul. (Remember that? Crazy.)”

We did our best to push IVE to our friends in the States when we got home. When those efforts were met with a mix of puzzlement and outright annoyance at our out-of-character new “K-pop thing,” we would just shrug our shoulders and play “Kitsch” again. Guess you just had to be there, we figured.

But with my friends’ doubts in mind, I viewed IVE’s show in Newark as a sort of test: Did I actually like this group, this music, or had I just been viewing an impactful memory through rose-colored glasses?

Related: Fear & Posing In Korea: A Crash Course In K-pop Curiosity At IVE’s Fan Concert

In New Jersey, we were no longer fish out of water. We were a short train ride from our home in New York, surrounded by familiar American corporate logos in a hockey arena we had visited many times before. The six girls onstage weren’t strange icons whose claim to visible fame was not on our radar. Instead, they felt like friends we’d met on our travels—the kind of friends you never expect to come visit you.

The familiarity we had gathered in Korea colored our American IVE encounter. In the week leading up to the show, we watched the IVE girls throw out the first pitch at a Mets game. It was an admittedly strange look for their hyper-girly, hyper-Korean image, but to us it was as exciting as watching an old teammate make their big league debut.

During the show, we watched them navigate the English-Korean language barrier—something that had caused considerable confusion for us in Seoul—not by abandoning the extended speaking portions of their set but by employing a translator whose disembodied voice floated in through the P.A. as each Korean-language segment finished. The girls who did take a stab at the local tongue only further ingratiated themselves as bits of their banter were charmingly warped in translation.

At the “fancon” in Seoul, the demographics of the crowd had surprised us—largely teen and pre-teen girls, many of them attending alone, dropped off by their parents. In Newark, the crowd skewed both older (20s, if I had to guess) and more male, a fact the IVE girls themselves highlighted following a crowd “dance cam” segment. (“Shoutout to the male fans,” one member remarked after more than a few male fans displayed impeccable knowledge of their choreography. “The best dancers!”)

In Seoul, we remarked with amusement how virtually all of the young girls in the audience—a fandom collectively dubbed “Dive”—stayed seated for the whole show, with branded light sticks in one hand and phones in the other, shrieking hysterically over the videos they never stopped filming. In Newark, the audience largely stood, per local concert customs. The light sticks dotting the crowd were more sporadic, the cheering was more reserved, and fans’ cell phone videos captured brief moments of action rather than the entire, scream-filled spectacle.

In Korea, the fact that the crowd knew each of the group’s members as giants in their own right highlighted the extent to which we were out of our depth. In Newark, where a segment of the concert showcased each girl’s new solo projects, we found ourselves rooting for them individually like the young girls we had met last year. (Ah, Wonyoung‘s song is so badass! I love how Liz went full pop-punk for hers!)

Even as we noted how many jarring aspects of this K-pop experience had been muted for the American crowd, I kept imagining how a curious newcomer in that night might be reacting to some of the show’s more unusual (for the U.S.) elements—the copious audience acknowledgments (“We hope you enjoy, please”), the extended speaking portions and built-in single promos, the instrumental interludes set to unexplained videos of the girls looking out windows and posing on couches with playing cards. At least a few people in that room were surely just as perplexed as we had been in Seoul. But to us, the same elements that had once caused confusion now afforded the concert a feeling of closeness. Ah, remember that?

Late in the performance, An Yu-jin told the crowd that she had “cried a lot” the first time IVE performed in Newark in 2024 on its first world tour. But this time, she said, she was “happy.” It wasn’t exactly clear what she meant by that—whether those past tears had been prompted by her personal mindset, or being so far from home, or something else entirely—but the notion that time and experience had shifted her worldview was what resonated.

To IVE, New Jersey was now a place to which they could return, not a bewildering example of what they didn’t know about the world. To us, IVE represented something similar: As I left Prudential Center, I wasn’t questioning the veracity of my enthusiasm—I was thinking about how grateful I was to have gotten the chance to return to an unlikely source of joy in my life.

There’s something magnetic about being there that can live on long after you’ve left the room. While our initial interest in IVE may have been tied to an experience, the love that the experience inspired was and is quite real.

View a selection of photos from IVE’s SHOW WHAT I AM World Tour stope in Newark, NJ below courtesy of 42 West. Revisit Fear & Posing In Korea: A Crash Course In K-pop Curiosity At IVE’s Fan Concert here.