At the risk of shifting attention to the gummy-smiled leader again, even if this could be old news to y'all, it seemed kind of important to me so I figured I'd go through it in this thread as well.
So, catching up on my Secret-fu, I was watching the MTV documentary "Diary of Five Girls" that documented the trainee life of the group "Oh-Sonyeo" (Five Girls), which consisted of Hyosung, Uee (now in After School), Yoobin (Wonder Girls), Jiwon (Spica) and Gina (now going solo as G.Na). The documentary wasn't really anything special in itself, but what made it really interesting was that it was about a group that never got to debut due to company difficulties, but all of the five girls eventually ended up making it in the kpop world. It's an interesting thought what would have been if this group had debuted.
After watching the documentary, I thought I'd find out more about Hyosung's past, and I watched this somewhat innocently-named clip. I had no idea what to expect at that point, since I hadn't read the articles following and wasn't familiar with the theme of the show in question. And man, I had a real hard time watching it. Seeing the usually cheerful and chatty Hyosung suddenly choking on her words was tough.
In case someone was wondering about the format of the show (I sure was thinking that it seemed kind of an inappropriate environment for stories like Hyosung's) - from the description:
The show is called "Strong Heart" and the format is that celebrities tell their stories and whoever faced the most hardship or gone through a horrible ordeal is crowned the "Strong Heart" for that week. Mostly, it is a light-hearted and funny show but every once in awhile it turns really serious and something like this clip occurs.
Is what it is. As said above, this level of serious doesn't seem to happen in it a lot.
This translation of an article (or a collection of articles) at Koreaboo does a great job of outlining her childhood and journey to become a kpop idol. Anyone who didn't watch the clip should at least read the last paragraphs.
http://www.koreaboo.com/index.html/_/general/secrets-hyosung-talks-about-her-life-r3979It's a good read as a whole, so I won't starting quoting it here... but even taken out of context, Hyosung's comment about her time in Battle Shinhwa sort of stuck to me.
"I could never let myself relax. Why? Because I had to survive."
After going through all these articles and clips about her past, I sure have a new level of appreciation for Hyosung. She's been through so much. I've always been extremely interested in stuff like auditions, training camps and the trainee life of idols-to-be, and her story really helped me see again how much hardship so many of these girls go through.
Thought I'd end with this fan-made (apparently legendary) Secret vid that Tempsubber just recently subtitled. It handles some of the previously mentioned things of Hyosung's trainee life until the formation of Secret.