A Charter Flight Was Said to Bring Barbie Hsu's Ashes Home. It Never Flew.

In 2003, a television host asked Barbie Hsu and her younger sister Dee to imagine themselves at fifty. Dee joked that she would rather be rich and lazy. Barbie said two or three children, and then their children too. She was still in her twenties, and her sister was sitting beside her answering the same questions. Twenty-two years later that interview came back into circulation, and Dee was the one having to prove in public who had brought her sister home.

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Barbie Hsu, born in Taipei in 1976, was a Taiwanese singer, television host and actress, known across Asia as Shan Cai in Meteor Garden and as Big S beside her sister Dee, Little S. She married Chinese businessman Wang Xiaofei in 2010; they announced their divorce in November 2021 and have a daughter and a son. In 2022 she married South Korean musician Koo Jun-yup. She died at forty-eight during a family trip to Japan for Lunar New Year 2025. Dee confirmed the death through her manager on February 3, attributing it to influenza complicated by pneumonia. Barbie was cremated in Japan and her ashes returned to Taiwan by private charter on February 5; her family said there would be no funeral ceremony. That evening an influencer claimed Wang had paid for the charter. Dee rejected the account on February 6, and on February 7 the flight company, Jetbay, confirmed publicly that Dee had booked and paid for it. On February 8 — three years to the day after the wedding registration Barbie had chosen as her anniversary — Douyin announced indefinite bans on the influencer and on accounts belonging to Wang Xiaofei and Zhang Lan, citing false information and, for the family-linked accounts, repeated violations and commercial exploitation of the death. Posts claiming to reveal Japanese emergency medical records were never authenticated by Japanese medical authorities, and no authority has made any finding about her care.

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This account is drawn from the family's own statements through Dee's manager, Jane Kingsu-Cheng's first-hand recollections published in the Manila Bulletin, press-conference and interview material from Cannes, Singapore and Vogue Taiwan, PETA's campaign records, Jetbay's public clarification, and Douyin's own published announcement.

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Barbie Hsu's two children were minors at the time of her death and are not named in this episode.