Metaphorically speaking, my family was a broken glass cup. As hard as I try to pick up the fragments strewn across the floor and piece the fragments together, it’s impossible. There’s always something missing. And at the end of the day, I’m the one sobbing over my bloody fingers, shards etched into my fingertips. At the end, I always got hurt.

            When I grew up, I knew what was missing – love. My parents never loved each other. In order to survive, both of their parents had formulated a marriage contract, so to speak. Both families originated from the poorer parts of the city, and they barely survived under the marriage contract. But my mom was seeing someone else at that time. When my grandparents found out, you can only imagine how furious they were. They forbid my mom to see her lover.

            With this separation, my mom began to hate her family and my dad’s family. Needless to say, she was driven by hatred to seek revenge. By the time I was two, she had threatened me with foul words and a slap here and there. Everything I asked for, she would refuse.

            At one point, I wondered why my dad never said anything. In fact, I rarely saw him. The times I did see him, he was up at the crack of dawn or gone before the sun had set. I had hunches that he and my mom never got along. But I never said anything about it.

            Until the day my mom found out he had another family. That day was my sixth birthday. It was one of those days where my mom was actually happy and offered me desirable gifts. She made empty promises, which I soon found out to be impossible to grant. She agreed that she would give me a dog, a new doll house, and everything else a six-year old can possibly wish for.

            But that night, as we drank seaweed soup without my dad, my mom got a phone call. She had left the kitchen to answer it, only to come back with a dark face. Just like many other six-year olds, I was curious. So I dared to ask her. But she was silent. So I continued to pester her. I didn’t realize that my mom was a ticking bomb, waiting to be ignited.

            With my last question, “Where’s Daddy?” she exploded.

            In turn, she threatened me with a knife pressed against my cheek. “Say another word, and you will be sliced.” The cold steel blade rested against my skin, sending shivers through my body. For some reason, I felt that my mom wasn’t bluffing. She was talking about reality.

            The next day, my dad came home with his new family. My mom refused to acknowledge it, shooing them away when they materialized at our front porch. But they continuously showed up at our porch until my mom finally accepted it. From that day onwards, I had a step-brother named Shin Tae. He was younger than me by a year, but I envied him. His family was perfect, unlike mine.

            Every night, if I didn’t oblige my mom, I was threatened with that same knife, again and again. On her bad days, she would beat me until I had bruises blooming across my arms and legs. When I wasn’t lucky, she would starve me for days. The time I turned eleven, I had weighed only sixty pounds – severely underweight. A chubby third-grader would weigh as much as I did.

            I had no friends at school either. They were afraid of my appearance. At such a young age, I had hollow cheeks and dark circles hanging down to my chin. In our town, everyone knew everyone. My peers were fed with the rumors that circulated my mom. Of course, these rumors were fed by their own parents.

            My mom’s own parents refused to help their daughter out. They were so humiliated by the fact that their daughter had been rej