Yesterday I read a post about Chanmi doing an Instagram Live in wihich she didn't talk and instead communicated with fans and answered questions on a sheet by writing of paper. The reason was that she received a dm from a fan who was telling her that they were about to lose their hearing. Because I thought that this was really nice of her, I decided to make an appreciation post for Chanmi.

This wasn't the first time Chanmi reached out to communicate with fans with hearing loss. Once, a fan came to an AOA fansign and told Chanmi that they were deaf. The next time that fan visited a fansign, Chanmi had learned sign language for them.

Few people know about her difficult upbringing. When she was young, her father's business failed and left their family with a huge debt. the people who lend him money, started to make threats against her and her sisters. At age ten, her parents then divorced and she stayed with her mother who opened a beauty salon. At school, she was bullied for coming from a family with only a single parent. Their financial situation was tough, between debts, rent and school expenses that needed to be paid off, the family didn't have much money left at the end of the month. Despite that, Chanmi's mother still took in other children from the streets and made blue house petititions concerning the discrimination of single mothers.

In the end, Chanmi decided to become a celebrity, so that she could support her struggling mother financially. In 2015 Chanmi and her mother guested on a variety show, where her mother expressed regret that Chanmi couldn't grow up as carefree as other children. On the same show Chanmi said that she planned to pay her younger sister's university fees together with her older sister, to not burden her mother any more. (I have found a souce which says that Chanmi's older sister is just one year older than her, while her younger sister is 7 years younger.)

She was scouted in middle school and moved from Daegu to Seoul to become a trainee. There, she would go to school and go training directly after, leaving the training facilities sometimes as late as 7-8AM in the morning.

Currently, Chanmi is the maknae and main dancer of AOA. Her hobbies are reading mangas and webtoons and riding bikes. She loves cats and raises two of them.

 Anyways, Chanmi is super sweet and deserves more love!

sources: x  x  x  x  x



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