Hip Hop doesn’t always come from the places people expect. Sometimes it doesn’t come from the streets or the stage or the cypher. Sometimes it comes from a quiet corner of a library, from the weight of books stacked high enough to feel like walls.
For Hwang Chae-young, those walls were built early. Born in 2005 and now a student in the Department of Creative Writing at Hanyang Women’s University, she spent school breaks differently from most kids around her. While others headed off to private academies, she went to the school library and read two fairy tales a day. Just her, the librarian, and shelves full of stories. It felt separate. It felt like a world that existed slightly outside everything else.
Outside the library, pressure was real. Falling behind academically was a constant fear. Recognition came once in the form of a small stationery set—hardly something that felt meaningful at the time. But years later, perspective changes. What once felt like isolation looks more like protection. Those shelves weren’t barriers. They were shelter.
That’s where Hip Hop comes in.
Chae-young has loved Hip Hop since elementary school. The rappers she listened to while growing up—and still listens to now—made it possible for her to write with joy. Their music didn’t pull her away from fairy tales. It gave her rhythm, momentum, and voice. Without those songs, she says, the stories wouldn’t have been completed.
Hip Hop fans understand this instinctively. The music doesn’t just entertain—it holds you together. It becomes structure when everything else feels unstable. In that sense, Hip Hop and fairy tales aren’t opposites. They’re parallel forms of storytelling, built to protect, to guide, and to carry something forward.
Without the songs of rappers I listened to while growing up and still listen to today, I couldn’t have completed my fairy tales. I have been helped by the world in this way. I hope to help the world in return. – Hwang Chae-young
Chae-young speaks with gratitude rather than nostalgia. Gratitude for the fairy tales that lived on library shelves. For the people who believed in her writing and gave it space to exist. For teachers who encouraged her to keep going, peers she wants to keep writing alongside, and family who made her world possible. She also thanks a close friend who taught her a quiet kind of kindness—the kind that wipes darkness away from others without asking for attention.
There’s honesty here too. Writing didn’t begin as celebration. It began as escape. And then one day, escape turned into reflection. To move forward, she realized, she had to look back. The child she once was kept calling out, asking not to be left behind.
So she reaches back—not to stay there, but to bring something with her.
That gesture feels deeply Hip Hop. The genre has always been about memory, survival, and turning protection into something shareable. Whether it shows up as bars or books, beats or fairy tales, the impulse is the same.
Sometimes the wall that protects you isn’t made of concrete or speakers or crews.
Sometimes it’s made of pages.
Sometimes it’s made of songs.
Sometimes, it’s made of both.
Read Hwang Chae-young’s original article in the Chosun Daily here:
English: Hip-Hop and Library Books Shape Aspiring Writer’s Fairy Tale World
Korean: [2026 신춘문예] 힙합과 도서관의 책들이 내 동화 세계를 만들었다
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