Eyes of the Storm: Yuna on Her New Eyes and the Secret Twin She Has Never Met

What is Eyes of the Storm about?

Hana is a street artist in the slums. Yuna is the nation's beloved pop idol. They have the same face and the same dead father, and the secret twin runs both ways here: neither of them knows the other exists. That is not luck. Twenty years ago the music mogul Arthur Hollis died and left his fortune to "his daughters"; his new wife, Elena, hid the will, kept the quiet baby to raise into a star, and left the difficult one in the slums so nobody would come asking about the other half.

Then Yuna's hereditary blindness set in, and Elena remembered where she had left the spare. Hana's corneas were taken in an illegal clinic to restore Yuna's sight, and the warehouse was set on fire afterwards to destroy the evidence. Hana was not asked and was not told. Yuna was not asked either — she was sedated, and afterwards she was told the donor was an anonymous fan.

Hana survived, and she came back. Yuna, meanwhile — the secret twin who got the stage — is the most famous girl in the country with nothing in her bank account, because ninety-nine percent of everything she earns goes back to the woman who "saved" her. If you loved shows like Sirens — two sisters on opposite sides of a class line, one of them living inside a rich woman's house and unable to see the shape of the hold she is under — Eyes of the Storm runs that engine in ninety-second episodes: a pop idol drama with a supernatural twist, a secret twin on the other side of the city, and a will nobody was meant to find.

What happened when the lights went out at Yuna's concert?

InterviewerYou were mid-song. What was the first thing you noticed?

YunaThe sound going before the light did. There's a half second where the monitors die and you can suddenly hear the actual room — forty thousand people breathing at once. I have never heard that before. I've only ever heard myself, coming back at me through a wedge two feet from my shoe, which is not the same thing as being in a room with anybody.

InterviewerAnd then?

YunaThen it was black and everyone screamed, and I kept singing. I know how that sounds. Nobody told me to stop, and I have never once been in a situation where nobody told me anything, so I did the only part of my job I could still do in the dark. I got to the end of the verse. Someone got a torch on me eventually.

InterviewerDoes anyone know what caused it?

YunaElena will know by now. She always knows before anyone tells her. I'm not supposed to speculate about operational things in interviews, so I won't. But it wasn't the weather.

Who does Yuna think gave her her eyes?

Her sight was restored eleven days ago. She still touches the corner of her eye when she talks about it.

InterviewerYou woke up able to see again. What did you look at first?

YunaThe ceiling, which was very boring, and then my own hands, which I had not seen properly in five months. Then the flowers. There were so many flowers in that room you could hear them, if that makes sense. Rustling.

InterviewerDo you know anything about the person the corneas came from?

YunaNo. Nothing. They were a fan — that is the entire sentence I was given. Somebody who signed a form somewhere, and then something happened to them, and now I can read a setlist again. I asked twice. I don't know their name. I don't know how old they were, or whether they had anybody, or whether anybody is currently sitting in a room somewhere missing them because of me. I have decided to believe they were happy about it, and that they knew what it was for. I am fully aware that deciding to believe something is not the same as knowing it.

InterviewerWould you want to know?

Yuna\[long pause\] I say thank you to them at night. Out loud, like an idiot, into the mirror, because that is where I can see the eyes. I'd like to be able to say it to a name. But I've been told the family wanted privacy, and I'm not going to be the person who takes that from them as well. They already gave me the part of themselves I use to do everything.

InterviewerWho told you that?

YunaYou'd have to ask Elena.

Why does Yuna still call Elena her mother?

InterviewerYou have sold out this stadium three nights running. How much money do you have?

YunaNone. \[laughs, briefly\] That's not a complaint, it's arithmetic. I owe her for all of it — the training, the vocal coaches, the flat, the surgeries, twenty years of being fed by somebody who did not have to feed me. There's a schedule for paying it back. I'm ahead on the schedule, actually. She showed me the column once, on a laptop, in a car, and I was proud of it for about a week before I worked out what the number at the bottom actually meant.

InterviewerPeople watching you say the schedule is the problem.

YunaPeople watching me have somewhere else to go, and a person who would come and get them. I was an orphan and she took me, and every single thing I can do is something she paid to put in me — the breath control, the languages, the way I stand. You can think the arrangement is ugly and I can still owe her for it. Both of those are true at the same time and I have stopped trying to make them stop being true. I'm not allowed to discuss the terms, and honestly, I have never read them all the way through. That is on me, not on her.

InterviewerWhat happens if you say no to her?

YunaI don't know, because I never have. That's the honest answer and I can hear how it sounds.

InterviewerIs there anything you haven't told her?

YunaThere's a place at the back of my neck that goes hot when I sing. Not the throat — behind it and lower down, like a coin sitting under the skin that somebody has been holding. I mentioned it once, at the start of the tour. She said it was the surgery settling and that I should drink more water, and she said it kindly, and I have not mentioned it since.

InterviewerAnd is it settling?

YunaIt's getting worse. \[she puts her hand there, then takes it away\] It was three nights ago and now it's every night, and tonight when the power went it stopped completely for about a minute, which was the best minute I have had in a year. Please don't put that in.

The secret twin question Yuna cannot answer

One light beat, because she needed one, and then the last two.

InterviewerSomething frivolous. What do you actually do with the fan mail?

YunaI keep it. All of it, in a shoebox, which is now four shoeboxes and a suitcase I am not allowed to check into hotels. People write me the strangest things — somebody sent a photograph of their dog wearing a tiny knock-off of my tour jacket, and I think about that dog more than I think about most of my own songs. I read every single one. It is the only post in the world that comes to me and not to the office, and I have never once been asked to hand it over, which I suspect is because nobody has thought of it yet.

InterviewerDo you ever get a letter that scares you?

YunaOnly the kind ones. Somebody wrote that they hoped I was being looked after. I put that one at the bottom.

InterviewerLast one, and it's a strange question, so bear with me. If you found out tonight that there was a person out there with your exact face — same birthday, same everything — what would you want to say to them?

Yuna\[she doesn't answer for a while\] That's not possible, is it. I'd want to know if they got the good half. Not the money — I don't have any of that either — I mean whether they got the version of this where somebody asks them what they'd like to do on a Sunday. Whether anyone taught them to swim. Whether they've been outside on their own. And then I'd want to ask them something stupid, like whether their neck hurts too, and I'd want them to say no. If there were a person with my face out there and she was fine, I think I could carry the rest of it indefinitely.

InterviewerAnything for the people about to watch all of this happen to you?

YunaI'd say listen to the songs. Not the singing — everybody listens to the singing, that's the part that's been sold to them. I mean the words. I chose about four of them myself, and nobody has ever mentioned it, and I would quite like somebody out there to work out which four. \[she looks at the door\] That's the only thing I've ever actually asked anyone for.