Jim Lee: When I was in college, we used to call “Bizarre Love Triangle” the Korean American national anthem, because like there was no other song that got Koreans on the dance floor like New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.”

Oliver Wang: I don’t actually know why we gravitated toward “Bizarre Love Triangle” as opposed to any other New Order song as opposed to any other big New Wave hit from the same era. That’s just where we landed. And it’s an inside joke. It’s a generational inside joke. In the ’90s when I was in college, like anyone I talked to who was Asian American, we were all in on it. We all understood it.

Hua Hsu: Everyone knew it, everyone loved it. And we didn’t really think about why that was, nor do we know now. It was just cool to have this little shared secret. That was the song everyone would wait for at a school dance.

Cynthia Leung: I always think of the dance floor as a metaphor because that’s when you see when people go deep into whatever song is playing. You don’t need to know the title, but they all have this collective reaction where you’re like, everyone knows this song. I think even to this day when people hear,
especially New Order, they all bond.

At our senior prom, “Bizarre Love Triangle” came on randomly and the entire dance floor cleared. And then it was Ben Cho, Eileen Tsai, and me and my prom date, and we’re just going all out.