Celebrities

Singer Chen Lin dead in suspected suicide

By Wang Jingqiong (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-02 08:08

Mainland pop singer Chen Lin is dead after apparently leaping to her death from an apartment building in Beijing, on the same day as her former husband's birthday.

Chen, who remarried three months ago, jumped from the ninth floor of a residential building in the Olympic Garden community in Chaoyang district early Saturday, the Beijing News reported yesterday.?She was 39.

Media reports said the apartment belonged to a female friend and that singer was neatly dressed and wore a mask. She also had neck wound covered with a bandage, Sina.com reported.

A friend of Chen's, who asked to be referred to as only Mr. Huang, told METRO that he knew about Chen's death but did not wish to comment.

Shen Yongge, Chen's former husband, owned a record company and helped his ex-wife release three albums that defined the peak of her career in 2000. Shen and Chen were a popular celebrity couple until divorcing in 2007.

Zhang Chaofeng, Chen's second husband, is a music producer and the couple married in July. The pair performed together in a Beijing bar when Chen released her latest EP in August.

Zhang was in Hubei when the tragedy happened, but has now returned to Beijing, according to the Beijing News.

Chen did not leave a message and the reason of her death is under official investigation, Sina.com reported.

It was reported that some of Chen's friends said the singer was traumatized about the failure of her first marriage.

Chen moved to Beijing from Chongqing in the early 90s. She released a total of seven albums, and her debut titled I Never Know Your Heartthrob (Ni De Rou Qing Wo Yong Yuan Bu Dong) sold over one million copies, according to sina.com.

Chen followed up her success by being appointed the first "Green Ambassador" by China Environmental Protection Foundation and was the first pop singer to hold a concert in front of the Potala Palace, on the Tibetan Plateau in 2000. However, she has spent little time in public since 2007.

In her most recent blog posting, dated July 22, Chen wrote about a trip to Hubei and Yunnan provinces, but gave no indication that she was in a low mood.

Comments on the post increased from 30 to more than 1,300 yesterday.

Luo Bing, who wrote I Never Know Your Heartthrob recalled Chen's devotion to music and said he was very sad. "She was a very attentive singer," Luo told Sina.com

Chen's death follows the suicide of Jun Zi, another young singer, who hanged herself at home in Beijing in 2000.

A year earlier, 28-year-old Xie Jin, a singer famous for a Beijing Opera-themed pop song, Shuo Chang Lian Pu, jumped from her apartment in Tianjin on Valentine's Day.

METRO