Tim Hwang had just finished his first day of classes at Temple University when he got the phone call.

The producer liked his demo tape. Could he fly to Korea to audition?

That’s how it began.

Raised on soft pretzels and cheesesteaks in Upper Darby, Penn., a township near Philly, Hwang was a typical 18-year-old who played lacrosse, listened to Brian McKnight CDs and had hopes of becoming a pharmacist.    

“I had my life all set,” says Hwang, now 26, sitting in the lounge area of the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, dressed in a black T-shirt, jeans and a Gucci visor. “I chose pharmacy because it seemed stable. You couldn’t be called in at 3 a.m. It wasn’t really in my personality to go outside of the plan.” 

But today, here he is, surrounded by a small entourage of producers and managers on their wireless devices, casually recapping the story of how he never made it to his second day of college. How a phone call changed his life.

In Korea, Hwang is simply known as Tim, a singer whose soulful ballads and boyish good looks leave female fans swooning and swaying in packed concert arenas. Armed with a willingness to do whatever it takes to turn music into a career, he is among a growing crop of Korean Americans who’ve been recruited into Korea’s burgeoning pop industry and molded into celebrities.

Dubbed as the Justin Timberlakes and Ushers of Korea, they’ve been plucked everywhere from the quiet suburbs of Orange County to the bustling streets of New York. Brian Joo was raised in New Jersey before becoming one half of the R&B duo Fly to the Sky. Micky Yuchun was handpicked from a talent contest near his home in Northern Virginia to join the popular boy band TVXQ. Teddy Park and Danny Im, members of the hip-hop group 1TYM, both hailed from Diamond Bar, Calif. You may have never heard of these groups, but they’re making waves in a country where the clean-cut boy band formula continues to thrive.

The crossover trend emerged in the ‘90s out of a swelling frustration with America’s roped-off industry. There was no market for Asian American artists, so just as athletes have found their niche or gotten their start overseas, many star hopefuls fled to Korea for greater opportunities.  

For “American Idol” contestant Paul Kim, it took a string of rejections before he turned his sights eastward. While trying to make his mark in the U.S., the Saratoga, Calif., native says he was told numerous times that he would have been signed right away if he wasn’t Asian.

“Basically, label execs would say, ‘You know, we love your music but there’s no way to market you,’” says Kim, who eventually signed under a Korean label.

Young-hu Kim, co-founder of Xperimental Entertainment, an L.A.-basedproduction company that has worked with K-pop stars such as Tim, Fly to the Sky, Shinhwa and BoA, says that during this time, Korean sensations such as H.O.T. struck a chord with young Korean Americans, who weren’t used to seeing faces like theirs.