How do you start a story?

Ah, I've never read one that had a fantastic beginning or even a tragic beginning, so I know a few stories if not those taught at school, where Kings, emperors and other rulers, struggled to get a piece of land that now even belong to them .

All wasted effort, eh?

History often teaches us that people are never satisfied, that man is not satisfied with what he has, especially those who have much more than just the essential to live, or better, survive.

I think that if you already have something to eat, dress and even where to sleep, this makes you already rich, but especially if you have a family that takes care of you, a shelter.

For a person you always go against the good of other people, bringing them to the same ruin with which you dig your own ditch and so is my life: a deep ditch dug by my mother.

I think I would be rude to start talking about her without first introducing myself.

Hello, I am Shim Changmin or, as they call me at school, the long-legged Dumbo.

I am a boy of seventeen years and I attend the fourth year of high school in Seoul.

Surely you will think that my life lives like every boy of my age with friends, girlfriends, bestfriends and maybe even a student model.

No, wrong.

Do I have to remember to you the historical comparison quoted above?

But anyway, let's get back to us ... to me and my mother.

I was born in this big city, from a still young woman who did not have a husband or even parents (as soon as they knew about me, those who were my grandparents, they threw her out of the house, towards her oppa but she did not want know. )

The wise thing that this sixteen year old did was to keep the baby, to keep and grow for nine months, but the not wise thing was not to give me at least to someone who would be able to support me and maybe she could also get back the apologize of his parents and return to make his good life, but she did not do it.

I often think that I inherited this "gift" from her, that of always trying to do my own thing and not to listen to others often, but she always reproaches me that this my character was of the gene of that pig of my father.

I will be honest, I have never seen my father nor any other relative who is in close contact with us.

She raised me, she kept me though several times, the social workers came to our house for those clothes I wore and also for the crying that I left when she went to work or took her work home, letting in many people and often shady people that scared me.

Can you understand what my mother did and did to keep us?

However ... as time went on I began to grow and growing up I was beginning to see many similarities with my father, so much so that I often ended up sleeping in front of my house, when he came home drunk or done (because only at the age of thirteen years, I had the first vision of the famous dust that showed the stars every time he took a little 'on the table with a nose from that straw or that piece of paper), because she saw my father in front of her and did not tolerate it.

The truth is that I think that my mother still likes him, that he had never forgotten him for what he did to us, rejecting us.

But now I will tell you why I compare my mother like those dear emperors and those who dug themselves out of the pit and then drag anyone inside: debts.

The debts are another excuse about having to keep and pay that shack that calls home and where she brings her work even if there are me too.

But in reality the debts were for the magical dust and its precautions.

« You will understand, when you grow up. »

She always tells me, even when the landlord saw that the rent did not arrive, with two months of arrears and with the risk, for us, to end up in the street, since there were very few cheap apartments.

I certainly would have ended up in his own ditch, too, but I could not allow it.

Unlike many, I could have saved myself.
To find alone my lifeline, my part of honest life that would allow me to live (or survive) and finish my studies too and this starts right in an internet cafe in the center of Seoul, in one of the many pages where jobs were sought and offered.