Son Dam-bi Reveals Her Mom Shaved Her Head for Missing a 6PM Curfew

Son Dam-bi has built a reputation over two decades as one of Korean entertainment's most striking performers — first with her powerhouse 2008 single Crazy (Michyeo) and the iconic chair dance that became a cultural moment of its own, and later through a successful acting career. But on the March 29 episode of TV Chosun's beloved food travel variety program Sikgaek Heo Yeongman's Baekban Pilgrimage, she offered something fans rarely see: an unscripted look at the very strict household that shaped her.

Hosted by legendary cartoonist Heo Yeongman, the show has a long tradition of drawing candid personal stories out of its celebrity guests over shared meals. Son Dam-bi's appearance was no exception. By the time the conversation turned to her high school years, the studio was laughing and wincing in equal measure.

The 6PM Curfew That Changed Everything

When Heo Yeongman asked whether crowds of boys used to wait outside her all-girls high school — a fairly routine question for celebrities known for their looks — Son Dam-bi confirmed it with characteristic ease. Boys from a neighboring school would show up during school festivals and wait at the bus stops nearby. "There were always people around," she said simply.

The story took a sharper turn when she got to her mother's response. Son Dam-bi's mother, by her own telling, was legendary in the Gildong neighborhood of eastern Seoul for the strictness of her household rules. The central rule: a 6PM curfew. "Who comes home at 6PM?" Son Dam-bi said, voicing the same exasperation she presumably felt as a teenager. "It made no sense."

Breaking the curfew had consequences. On one occasion, her mother responded by cutting her daughter's hair — fully, not partially. "She shaved my head. With scissors. Completely," Son Dam-bi recounted. The studio reacted with a mix of shock and laughter, and Son Dam-bi seemed to find the memory both absurd and still slightly raw. "I had a very difficult middle and high school period," she added, in a tone that made it clear she was only half joking.

The boys who waited outside school did not escape unscathed either. Her mother, on discovering them, reportedly threw water at them and yelled until they scattered. "She was famous for it in Gildong," Son Dam-bi said with a resigned smile. "Everyone in the neighborhood knew."

The Chair Dance That Became Too Famous

The conversation moved from childhood to career, and Son Dam-bi touched on one of the more unusual chapters of her professional life. Her 2008 debut with Crazy was a commercial breakthrough — the song dominated charts and radio play, and her performance style, particularly the distinctive chair routine she performed with it, became widely imitated. On variety programs. On parody sketches. On other shows entirely.

The imitation reached a point, she explained, where it actually began to limit her presence on broadcast television. When a performer's signature becomes so associated with parody that their actual appearances start to feel like cameos in their own brand, the calculus of scheduling changes. Son Dam-bi didn't dwell on the frustration, but acknowledged it had been a real factor in the rhythm of her career during that period.

Looking ahead, she expressed a clear artistic ambition: villain roles. "I want to try playing a bad person," she said, and the directness of it fit the personality she'd been revealing throughout the episode — someone who has navigated a strict upbringing, a complex career trajectory, and the full range of public life without losing a particular kind of frankness about all of it.

Marriage, Motherhood, and a New Chapter

Son Dam-bi and former speed skating champion Lee Kyu-hyuk married in May 2022, a relationship that had drawn significant media attention both for the pairing itself and for the couple's willingness to be open about their journey. The path to parenthood included IVF treatment, which Son Dam-bi has spoken about candidly in multiple settings — a choice that has resonated deeply with fans and with broader audiences navigating similar experiences.

Their daughter Haei, now approximately eleven months old, arrived as a genuinely transformative presence in Son Dam-bi's life. "I've become a total ajumma," she said — using the Korean term that carries connotations of middle-aged domesticity — describing how fundamentally her personality had shifted since becoming a mother. The woman who once had her head shaved by a mother with a 6PM curfew policy is now navigating parenthood herself, and the self-awareness she brought to the subject was one of the episode's most quietly affecting moments.

Why the Story Resonated

Son Dam-bi's appearance on Baekban Pilgrimage is a good example of why the show has retained its audience across so many seasons. Heo Yeongman's combination of genuine curiosity and unrushed conversation creates a space where celebrities tend to say more than they planned to, and the results are almost always more interesting than the structured revelations of a press junket.

In Son Dam-bi's case, the episode offered a portrait of someone who has clearly done a lot of the internal work of understanding where she came from and how it shaped her — the strict mother, the 6PM curfew, the head shaving, the complicated relationship between a performer's signature and their broader identity — without turning any of it into a neat narrative. It's messier and more honest than that, which is exactly why it works.

A Career That Keeps Finding New Audiences

Son Dam-bi made her official debut in 2007 and quickly became one of the defining pop acts of the late 2000s in Korea. Her single Crazy remains one of the genre's most recognizable productions of that era — a propulsive track built around a hook that lodged itself in public consciousness almost immediately after release. The chair dance she performed with it became embedded in Korean pop culture shorthand in a way that very few performance gestures manage to achieve, which ultimately proved to be both a gift and a complicated inheritance.

She transitioned into acting in the early 2010s, appearing in dramas including Secret Garden and later Oh My Lady, building a second career that gave her space to work outside the immediate shadow of her music persona. The desire to take on villain roles she expressed on Baekban Pilgrimage fits into a pattern she has been building — moving toward work that challenges the image audiences formed during her earliest years.

Son Dam-bi remains active across acting and entertainment projects, and the Gildong neighborhood's most famously strict mother presumably remains a figure of both fond and complicated memory. The daughter, for her part, now has an eleven-month-old of her own to raise — and presumably, a very different approach to curfews.