25-year-old Jinna Yang lost her father to stomach cancer two years ago. Although completely devastated by the loss, she decided that it was not too late to travel the world with her dad. So she set out on the biggest trip of her lifetime, accompanied by a life-size cardboard cutout of her father’s image, to show him all the places he had wanted to visit during his lifetime.
After her father’s passing, Jinna found it hard to cope with her regular life as a corporate employee in New York. “From the outside looking in, I seemed to have it all,” she wrote on her blog. “What people didn’t see was the toll the combination of life events took on every inch of my body, heart, mind and soul.”
“I had reached the point where I lost the will to live,” she wrote on her blog. “I gave up my dreams. I shut myself off from my loved ones and close friends. I developed alopecia and lost my hair at an alarming rate.” Jinna realized that she deeply regretted the fact that her father sacrificed his dreams of traveling and playing golf to provide for the family. For almost two years after her father’s death, she never truly dealt with her feelings.
But she woke up one morning and decided that the stress was just too much to handle. She then quit her job, ended her 5-year-long relationship, declined to renew the lease on her apartment and sold 80 percent of her ‘disgustingly huge closet’ for cash. She bought a one-way ticket to Iceland with a cardboard cutout of her father, who was diagnosed with cancer at age 51. He used to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, at his dry cleaning store in Norfolk, Virginia. “My father never had the chance to travel the world,” she wrote. “He sacrificed his life for others – his parents, his children, his wife, his family and his friends.”
“Even though he is not here in the flesh, I knew he was with us in spirit,” she wrote. “To share his story, and to help bring peace to my stepmother, my 22-year-old brother, my 9-year-old sister, and myself, I took him with me all over Europe to be photographed together in front of some of the world’s most iconic destinations.”
Jinna is now sharing all the pictures from her travels on her personal blog. They feature her alongside her father’s portrait at world-famous destinations like the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, Le Louvre in Paris, and the Colosseum in Rome. Through her pictures, she hopes to inspire people to follow their dreams and aspirations.
