Getty Images The life of a K-pop star is anything but easy — and Lisa is living proof.
At 13, the Thai performer beat out 4,000 hopefuls to join the vaunted South Korean record label YG Entertainment, becoming their first non-Korean trainee. The following year, she moved to South Korea for K-pop boot camp and managed to learn conversational Korean in her first six months. Her formal training would last five grueling years, replete with monthly performance check-ins in front of label brass where trainees were cut, and an extraordinary number of restrictions: no drinking, no dating, no driver’s license, no leaving to see friends and your every movement tracked. Nevertheless, she persisted, and, in 2016, debuted as a rapper and dancer in Blackpink, a K-pop quartet that shot to global superstardom.
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