Jin Zihan's Sister Answered Strangers' Questions Online, and the Replies Showed a Family Split Across Two Countries
Jin Zihan's younger sister answered strangers' questions online this week about the SM trainee-turned-idol's stalled career, her refusal of treatment, and a family split across the US and China — and readers saw in it the industry's structure more than the illness.
The sister's answers arrived as screenshots on an anonymous question card, and they laid out the private arithmetic behind one stalled idol career.
Jin Zihan came up through the South Korean trainee system at SM Entertainment before building a career back home in China. This week her younger sister began replying to strangers' questions about her online, and the post that summarized the replies — liked more than 20,000 times — has become the fullest public account of her family's situation.
There are three sisters. The two younger ones study freely in the United States, the youngest still a minor. The father stays in China; the mother shuttles between the two countries, and both parents have taken Jin Zihan to see doctors — but once in hospital, the sister said, she feels she is being harmed and threatened, and the visits stop there.
The family is also trapped by a status problem. Jin Zihan gave up her life in America when she chose to return to China for her career, and that choice cost her a green card. Visa applications have been repeatedly denied since. Her parents hold no US citizenship either, so they cannot sponsor her status; the only possible route runs through a younger sister, and that queue stretches years.
The replies also contradicted the internet's most lurid rumour: that she had been imprisoned. She was safely home with her father at eleven o'clock on the night in question, the sister said — and if she were locked away, as posters claimed, she could hardly be free to post online at all.
The mental-health timeline is the part that stings. The sister said Jin Zihan showed symptoms of depression during her SM trainee days, years before the public saw any of this, and that the family did not take it seriously at the time. Doctors have now seen her — the screenshots record one exchange asking whether she has had treatment and answering simply: she refuses it, refuses the medication too. A message from the sister went unanswered.
Reactions stayed clear-eyed rather than gossipy. One Weibo user summed up what struck people first: two sisters get to study abroad while Jin Zihan lives alone, unable even to hold a visa, so the illness is framed around a family physically split across an ocean precisely when they are needed closest.