If one were to look deep within the archives of SM Entertainment’s video footage, one would find a rather dusty tape, dated around August of 2005, listed as Audition #22503.

A girl, roughly 14 years of age, sat silently in a dingy, green plastic chair, her legs crossed in a very formal fashion.  She leaned heavily on her hands, her fingers lingering awfully close to her light pink lips, a sure sign of a habit of biting the nails. Restraint was hard and as one could clearly see, she was overcome with nervousness.

“State your name, please,” a voice called out from beyond the view of the camera, judging from the deep voice a man, most likely one of the many judges overlooking the audition.

“Lee SunMi,” she said shyly, pushing her length hair forward, so that in framed her face. It was getting hard to breathe.

“Leading talent? Singing or dancing?” The voice asked yet again.

“Dancing, sir,” SunMi answered crisply, almost too tartly as she regretted not using a sweeter tone with the serious man before her. She wanted to do her best when it came to the opportunity of a lifetime and using the angry tone of voice that she inherited from the man she was forced to call her Father wasn’t the way to go.

“Well then what are you waiting for!” the man, whom she later found out was named Choi Minwook, ordered, annoyance heavily rooted in his words. “Go ahead.”

Now SunMi had confidence in herself. y and Fierce. She had done this dance a million times until she hardly had to do any work to show off the skills she had mastered.  All of that hard work - the extra hours she had put into after school, the secret hiding places away from YooMi and HyoMi, her twin elder sisters, and the professional education at the Younghwa Dance Academy that her Mother had secretly paid for- had all come down to this. She put her best foot forward – literally.

The music stopped. Oh, no! Had she done something wrong? It had only been a minute. She seated herself again, a look of panic could be found her in dark brown eyes.

“Tell me, SunMi, do you have anything better to wear?”

SunMi was taken aback at the man’s words. What would her clothes have anything to do with her audition? She had to admit that her clothes were not the finest even amongst her own household not with the petty squabbling between YooMi and HyoMi’s about their  fashion sense but it was the best she had. In fact YooMi and HyoMi was the big reason why she had tried out for SM Entertainment. They mocked her so greatly on her ‘horrible’ dancing skills that she had been forced to do it in secret, lest they tell their Father which would earn SunMi a humiliating scolding. “I’m sorry,”she asked inquisitively. “I don’t understand. Am I in?”

“Would I still be talking to you if you weren’t?”