Fandom, in Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s hands, is empowering and connective; a path to absolution and to paranoia; and a serious source of revenue. Put simply: It’s complicated. With Superfan, Zhang pulls at the troubled threads of what it means to be and to have admirers from a brightly colored quilt of internet-informed contemporary fiction.
Minnie, an introverted University of Texas freshman plagued by the sense that she’s always too late to the party, finds K-pop-styled American boyband HOURglass practically by accident. From the second their sleek, choreographed bodies fill her screen, she knows that they were meant for her and she for them. Zhang details the blissed-out adrenaline rush of recognition and self-alignment in achingly relatable terms.
“She has known what it is to love: a detective book series, a gorgeous actor, the soft spot behind her first dog’s ears,” the Austin novelist writes. “Those had been her obsessions, briefly, but they wither next to the imperative of the boys.”
And fandom is imperative for Minnie. A furious hunt for information to bring her closer to HOURglass leads to an online community that, in time, muddles sanctuary with delusion. Zhang punctuates chapters with numbered posts from that world, internet snippets convincingly riddled with fan fiction terms and forum keywords illustrating the peculiar, at times perilous, position of fans among their idols and the semi-obscured world of publicists and record executives.
In Minnie’s offscreen life, those tangled ties fade away and the seamless, saccharine confidence of “the boys,” amplified by their direct-to-camera online messages of encouragement, compel the uncertain student to try sharing her voice in an alternative campus zine. As college throws all it can at the young Chinese American, HOURglass is right there in her Carothers dorm room, soothing and coaching her through every bump in the road.
Zhang pulls at the troubled threads of what it means to be and to have admirers from a brightly colored quilt of internet-informed contemporary fiction.
On the other side of the parasocial relationship, the band is receiving coaching of a totally different sort, and the road is equally bumpy. Eason, typecast as the aloof bad boy of the group, is Minnie’s favorite. Zhang bluntly pulls the curtain back to reveal his view from stardom in alternating chapters told from his perspective. The Houston-raised singer, plucked from obscurity and trained to perfection, holds his fans in high esteem but is troubled by his pre-stardom life, which must be kept as secret as possible to ensure his spotless, pedestal-worthy persona.
The meticulously maintained performers are shuffled from training site to stage to hotel room by dystopian record label tycoons determined to extract as much money as possible from their lovable faces and fan base-building potential. Their world is so darkly demanding and reminiscent of those underbellies imagined in fan fiction that it’s tempting to write off its conditions as exaggeration, though the real-life accounts of K-pop trainees and superstars like K-Pop Demon Hunter’s EJAE hint that might not be the case. The cliches of HOURglass’ reality are convoluted and, while pointed, feel secondary to the plot line directed by their devotees. The resounding chorus behind the scenes, louder than any of their songs, is that the four boys put up with it all “for the fans.”
As their fandom spreads and our protagonist superfan finds her footing, quintessential questions of representation and social reception arise. Three of the four band members are Asian American and their widespread success inspires Minnie, who grew up in the only Asian family in a Colorado suburb. “When I look at them, they feel familiar. In their faces, I see something of myself for the first time: a self I am allowed to love,” she reflects. When she wobbles, Minnie clings to their courage and wrestles with the perception of her adoration as silly or surface-level, a heterosexual, attraction-based daydream.
“Does it truly lack substance, or do we just not want girls to be happy?” she wonders. From on high, the boys do plenty of wobbling of their own, casting doubt on the glories of fame and, incidentally, on the song and dance of media-trained authenticity.
In these pages, everyone has a role to play in the beautiful synergy of fandom and the messy manipulation of celebrity. Zhang is clearly curious about it all. Who we plebeians pledge our fan allegiance to shapes more than our tastes – it can profoundly impact our social and emotional lives, as it does for Minnie. With the stars reduced to playthings and posters, Superfan ponders what it means to be a fangirl and decides that it’s bigger, always, than the boys themselves.
Superfan
by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Flatiron Books
This article appears in February 6 • 2026.