personality :  clumsy ; secretive ; gullible ; perceptive ; ambitious ; idealistic

Gi su is a clumsy person. Because of the issues he has with his inner ear, he will struggle with balance at times and bump into things or stumble. because of his hearing impairment, Gi su is also a very secretive person; he fears that if people were to find out about it, they would start to treat him differently, either by fawning over him and treating him like a child or by lowering their expectations of him and attribute any shortcoming of his to his hearing. Gisu is a naturally naive person, which can lead him to be very gullible. others would take advantage of his naivity and pull pranks and jokes on him because he'd easily believe them.
 

Gisu is a perceptive person; because he has to struggle with hearing people, he has become atuned to how a person's body speaks over their words and has become very good at reading people's body language. This doesn't negate his gullible nature, however, because when people are pulling pranks or jokes on him, they will alter their body language to match what it is they are trying to pull. He is a very ambitious and idealistic person; he has high dreams and strongly believes that if you just try hard enough, that you can achieve whatever it is you have set your mind to. However, these traits can also affect him negatively in that Gi su will push himself farther than he should at times to achieve a goal and will be hard on himself when he can't achieve that goal after working so hard towards it.
 

background :  as a child, gi su always loved to dance. his fondest memories are of when his grandma would turn on her old record player and play the old records she had collected over the years. He would create his own steps to the jazzy tunes and beg for his grandma to teach him the classic dances, like Swing and shag. As he grew up, however, the music began to die. When he was 10 years old, he suffered from a horrible viral ear infection that affected his inner ear and his auditory nerve. Over the next two years, his hearing decreased gradually until he had a significant hearing impairment in both ears (his right ear is worse than his left ear). He can still hear some without the use of hearing aids, but the noises have to be very loud.

 

It took gi su the better part of a year and a half to get used to having to wear hearing aids in order to hear and even longer to come to terms with it. It was difficult for him to perform in shows because the feedback and other background noises from the stage equipment would interfere with his hearing aids and make it difficult to follow along with the music. There came a point in time when gi su was going to give up, believing that he'd never be able to dance like he did in the past again. for two years, he tried to get involved in other activities, but nothing seemed to fill the void that dancing had left within him. he fell into a depression and there was a time when he would just lay in bed and not go out or socialize with anyone. Not able to take it anymore, his grandmother yanked him out of the house and brought him to a music festival in Seoul. At first, gi su was upset about it, thinking that it was just rubbing in his face what he couldn't do, but his grandmother introduced him to one of the men that performed on the main stage, a deaf man named Kim Hanbyul. being at the festival reminded him just how passionate he was about dancing and how much he missed it. that, coupled with meeting hanbyul and seeing him perform reinvigorated his spirit and he decided he was going to audition to be an idol-- to prove to himself, to prove to everyone, that he was deaf, but he wouldn't be stopped from achieving his dreams.