Singer Jang Yun-jeong [Newsis]
Singer Jang Yun-jeong [Newsis]

Singer Jang Yun-jeong has opened up about the nights she spent crying with her father after he twice drove to Seohaedaegyo Bridge intending to take his own life.

Speaking on her YouTube channel Thursday, Jang said she could now talk about it with a smile. "I can laugh about it now because it's in the past," she said. "My dad kept going to that place — he went to Seohaedaegyo Bridge to die, and he went twice."

Her father reflected on those moments with regret. "Looking back now, it was a truly irresponsible thing to do," he said. "I was buried in debt and couldn't hold on anymore — dying was just running away, escaping." He added that he had thought about what his death would mean for his daughter. "It was obvious it would all fall on her. That would leave her with nothing but death too — she would follow me."

On one of the two trips to the bridge, a fierce blizzard was raging. "The snowstorm was so violent I could barely see ahead," the father recalled. "The windshield wipers could barely keep up."

At the moment he was contemplating death, he said he heard a voice calling out to him. "I heard someone calling 'Dad' from behind me, so I turned around — but there was nothing, just the blizzard," he said. "I thought I had imagined it, but then I heard it again, louder: 'Dad.'"

In that instant, he thought of Jang sitting alone at home. "It hit me — 'Yun-jeong is by herself,'" he said, his voice breaking. "So I turned the car around in Pyeongtaek and went straight to her."

When her father walked back through the door, Jang let out everything she had been holding in. "He was trying to die, so I screamed at him — 'What do you think you're doing?' I cursed him out. I told him to get a grip. I went absolutely ballistic," she said.

"'Are you going to die? If you're going to die, we die together — you're not dying alone. You're not running away,'" she recalled. "We both just sobbed. We cried all night long. It was like a drama series."

Her father said the ordeal ultimately shaped who they became. "Going through something like that is what led to this success," he said. "If things had just gone smoothly — ordinary people, eating meals together, having a bit of money — we would have coasted along." Jang added her own reflection: "The way I see it, if you had lived like that, Dad, you'd already be gone. You had a stroke, and when you hit that point, you just let everything go."

The father also spoke of the regrets he had carried for years over what he had been unable to give his daughter when she was young. If he could go back to his 30s and raise her again, he said, "I would have given my life to figure out what you were good at, no matter what."

Jang had in fact passed a gifted education test as a child but could not enroll in the program because of the family's financial circumstances. "I wanted to learn the gayageum," she said. "But he couldn't make that happen for me."

Instead, once his daughter chose a path as a singer, her father stayed by her side through her years as a trainee. "After I won the grand prize at a song festival, my father came up to Seoul while I was a trainee, and every night we slept in the car with the heater running," Jang said.

If you're thinking about self-harm or suicide, dial the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 109, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Please request a translator for English-language services.


husn7@heraldcorp.com