Broadcaster Cho Hye-lyeon revealed an update on her son Uju, who went to Europe because of job shortages.
On the 27th, a video titled "The heart that couldn't be filled with alcohol and cigarettes, the true happiness Cho Hye-lyeon found" was uploaded to Lee Sung-mi's Motganda channel.
That day, when asked about her son Uju's recent condition, Cho Hye-lyeon said, "I've mentioned it several times on broadcasts, but 'quit it, Uju' — what are you quitting so much for. So he ended up having only an elementary school education at 18. Because he went to Vancouver, Canada, where sister Lee Sung-mi lives. 'This is what foreign countries are like,' and he went with Yoona for about three weeks to try to learn some English. But he went there and watched soccer and came back," she began.
She said, "Watching people play soccer, he saw them blocking. So as soon as we landed at Incheon Airport he said, 'Mom, I want to play soccer. I want to be a goalkeeper.' When I asked why, he said it wasn't because he wanted to score but because he wanted to block. So he entered Baekma Middle School. He did it for a year and a half, but one day he said, 'Mom, I want to quit soccer.' There was another kid he couldn't beat. In this competitive society, not only in Korea but worldwide they have to go out, but that wasn't the point — he couldn't beat a student in one grade at Baekma Middle School and so couldn't play in matches. That was so hard, and training for hours to do that was also hard. So I told him to quit," she revealed.
She continued, "He quit and went to the international school Yoona attends. He said English was too difficult and quit. Then he went to a Christian school, but he didn't like the principal and quit. So he ended up going to the Philippines. In the Philippines the weather was too hot and having to eat only mangoes was too hard, so he begged, 'Please just let me come back to Korea and I'll live well,' and he returned. Honestly, there was no answer. When I asked what he wanted to do, what would he say? He'd probably say he wanted to play games," she mentioned, referring to successive failures.
Cho Hye-lyeon said, "But I didn't take that lightly. My husband looked into the games he liked. Isn't there an academy for game planning? Then he said, 'You should properly take the high school equivalency exam,' so he passed the middle and high school equivalency exams. He prepared so well for the game planning department that he wrote a 270-page report. He got accepted to Chung-Ang University. At 19. He entered a year earlier than other students," she revealed.
But the hardship didn't end there. Cho Hye-lyeon said, "By the time he was about to graduate, AI had advanced so much that no one was interested in games. Two hundred fifty students are produced each year, but they aren't hired. He submitted applications to nearly 20 places, but no one hired him. He was so distressed that he called me at dawn. 'Mom, I'm so distressed I opened the Bible,' he said. He had bought a book. He cried as he talked about what he felt in his body," she conveyed the reality of the employment crisis.
She added, "When he couldn't get a job, we told him to try DTS, so he went to DTS in Europe. Now he's working hard on a working holiday in Sydney. He's not using mom's card. But sometimes he still asks me to send money. He says it's expensive and he is short on money," she reported on his life in Europe.
Meanwhile, Cho Hye-lyeon married in 1998 and had a daughter, Yoona, and a son, Uju. She divorced her ex-husband in 2012 and remarried her current husband in 2014, and they are living together.
[Photo] Lee Sung-mi's Motganda
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