The K-pop star looked absolutely exhausted. With her face clean of makeup, Goo Hara, one of South Korea's most popular music artists, looked at the camera during a live broadcast via Instagram from a hotel room in Japan. In a subdued voice, she read questions from fans watching from around the world.
“Are you going to work, fighting?” asked one. In broken English, she gave a plaintive response: “My life is always so much fighting.”
When he climbed into bed at the end of the livestream in November 2019, he had reached a low point after a lifetime of struggling. When she was a child, her parents abandoned her. Her father at one point tried to commit suicide. After grueling training, she debuted in a K-pop group at age 17, young even by the standards of the Korean hit-making machine.
With the group Kara found international fame and Goo became a regular presence on Korean television, eventually hosting her own reality series.
But with celebrity came voracious attacks on social media from a Korean public that criticizes stars as quickly as it fawns over them. After a sordid legal fight with an ex-boyfriend, the harassment only intensified, as commentators criticized her appearance, her personality, and her sex life.
On November 23, 2019, less than a week after her Instagram appearance, she posted a photo of herself tucked in bed, with the caption “Good night.” The next day, she was found dead in her home in Seoul.
Goo's suicide, at age 28, shocked South Koreans. But he was just one of several among young Korean artists in recent years. Weeks before Goo's death, one of his best friends, a fellow K-pop star known as Sulli, 25, also took her own life. And last year, two artists — Jung Chae-yull, 26, an actress on the threshold of a promising career, and Moonbin, 25, a member of the K-pop band ASTRO — were found dead within days. Of diference.
The deaths have exposed a darker side of South Korea's entertainment industry, a cultural behemoth whose crushing demands often fall on the artists who feed an insatiable assembly line of pop groups and streaming series.
The industry represents an extreme version of a South Korean society burdened by educational, economic and other pressures. The country has the highest suicide rate among the richest nations in the world, with the gap especially marked among women.
In the world of K-pop, the pressure starts early. Many young recruits are isolated from their families and deprived of the socialization that is essential for adolescence. They are often told what they can and cannot do in public—even what they can eat, whether they can date, and how they can interact with others.
Recognizing the strong pressures, Hybe, the agency that represents wildly popular acts like BTS and NewJeans, allows those in training to take extended mental health breaks and, earlier this year, announced the industry's first in-house psychiatrist.
It's impossible to know whether such measures could have helped Goo. Before he died, he had already attempted suicide at least once. In addition to online harassment and her problems with her ex-boyfriend, she was having difficulty as a solo artist replicating the dizzying success she had enjoyed with Kara, which disbanded in 2016.
“His work as a K-pop star got a lot of love and attention from fans,” Goo Ho-in, Goo's older brother, said in an interview in Seoul. But once she went solo, she “worked less and less and spent more and more time alone at home. So she received less and less love and attention from other people and struggled because she is someone who needs a lot of love and attention.”
He said he had practically made peace with her death. “I decided that if she died because there was nothing else she could do, and that choice would make her feel comfortable, “then she would respect her choice,” she stated.
For fans, Goo's memory lives on. At a K-pop awards ceremony in Osaka, Japan, his former band Kara reunited to debut a new single. Two concertgoers had fans printed with the faces of the group members, including Goo.
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