Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Wonder Girls Not Quite Slaves

A story came out in many of the English-language newspapers today with information from the guy who was the Wonder Girls' English tutor while they toured in America.

Daniel Gauss goes through a laundry-list of bad care for which JYP's agency is reponsible. From minor things like small ailments not going treated to major ones, like having no health insurance and not getting proper treatment when one of the member's fathers went into a coma.

I understand not treating minor things. After all, they're Koreans. If they sneeze, they want to go to the hospital. Someone across the room could sneeze, and the non-sneezer will want to go to the hospital.

But no health insurance in an overpriced country like America is ridiculous.

And here's the father incident:

'Gauss further wrote that after the group acquired a sponsorship deal with Sony Ericsson, JYPE had Sun-ye perform in Sanya, China, for Sony Ericsson executives, shortly after her father was rushed to hospital in a coma.

He wrote that Sun-ye had told him “her father had stopped breathing and had to be rushed to the hospital. In the ambulance, (Sun-ye) and her family had to decide whether the father should be given treatment to be kept alive since he had lapsed into a coma. The family chose to keep him alive and I was told by the girl that he was never going to come out of the coma.”

“Very shortly after that trauma, she was performing for Sony Ericsson executives in Sanya,” Gauss wrote. “I did not have the heart to ask her whether it was her idea or JYPE’s idea for her to perform.”'

Obviously, JYP's reps are denying all these things. They have confirmed that this guy was the English tutor, however. His response is that he isn't asking for conpensation, but is just concerned.



The entertainment industry here is notoriously unkind, especially to young women. I'm sure it's like that in Hollywood in many cases as well. But anytime people are put at risk in order to sell their cds for "$1" so they can boost themselves on performance charts is pretty terrible.

No surprises from me if these are somehow found out to be true.

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