My sister and I never thought that in the future we would be singers; singers drew on their own life experiences and shared them with the world. Our life experience was dark and twisted, as were our minds, our beliefs. Singers make you believe that you can relate to them, the lyrics that they sing cast a spell over you. We sure as hell didn’t think we were able to do that.

 We had always believed that our dreams wouldn’t come true, that we were too tainted and damaged for magic to happen upon us. Our mental and physical scars stopping us from believing, even in ourselves. If you haven’t guessed already, our upbringing wasn’t full of hugs, cuddles and love.

Instead it was torture for my twin and I, we were an unexpected pregnancy for our mother, who was in her final year of high school. Our father was a delinquent who wooed our mother will false intentions and that resulted in us. You would think that they would hate and blame each other but no, instead they blamed us. When we were old enough to walk, talk and fend for ourselves our parents made us miserable.

 They let us know every day how much they regretted having us and how we were the cause of everything that happened to them. Our father couldn’t hold a job because he was an alcoholic; apparently we caused that along with our mother’s addiction to medication. At age 9 that was when things started to escalate, our father began to give us daily beatings. We assumed that we were bad kids and was why they were treating us like that.

As the oldest, I took it upon myself to protect my sister, there we nights where she would be untouched and I would be on the floor of our bedroom in pain. My sister would always cry and say that I shouldn’t protect her anymore. It was my sacred duty to look after her and to protect her from harm but I failed in that department. Our mother picked on us too, nothing physical just the mental stuff, she picked on my sister mostly because she was, in our mother’s opinion, the weak one.

My sister and I had finally had enough of our parents, we started gathering money by doing odd jobs for the elderly in our small countryside town and so after our 11^th birthday we ran away and took the first train to Seoul. We struggled trying to keep ourselves clothed and fed. It was difficult but we survived by performing in parks, in front of shopping malls and even in grade schools.

It was on a stormy night that changed our lives forever, we were singing Whitney Houston “One Moment in Time” when we were approached by a gentleman in an expensive suit. He had told us he had been watching us and that we liked our voices. We were weary of strangers but this man seemed genuine, he could obviously tell that we were runaways but he never said anything outloud. After an hour or so we ended up at his house or should I say mansion, my sister and I were in awe at what we were experiencing.

It was here that the man told us his intentions; he wanted to train us to become idols. My sister and I were ecstatic about the idea, we almost agreed to it instantly but we were smart enough to know that we need parents’ permission and we didn’t want to see or hear from our parents ever again.

It surprised us when he said that he could just adopt us and wait 2 years to put us through training, talent like us doesn’t come around so often as he put it. We said yes and that was how we met our saviour, Lee Soo Man: CEO of SM Entertainment.  

Just a short chapter to get things started. :)