My name is Rian. And to this day, I’ve never known who my father is.
Ever since my young eyes first took in the world, I’ve known only one person as my protector: Mom. I called her “Mom” just like other kids out there called their parents. But for some reason, whenever the word left my lips, it always felt different. A bitter ache lingered on my tongue. Other children had mothers who bustled around the kitchen each morning, making them a warm breakfast, straightening their uniform collars before walking them to the school gate, and gently kissing their foreheads before bed.
And me? I grew up in a cramped, nine-by-nine-foot room dimly lit by a red fluorescent bulb. That room was a silent witness to all the times Mom brought home strange men reeking of alcohol and cigarette smoke. They came and went, taking turns filling our nights like frightening black shadows.
I never knew how a woman as gentle as Mom had ended up living such a dark life. Whenever I worked up the courage to ask about her past or the man who had fathered me, Mom never got angry. She would only give me a faint smile—the saddest smile I’d ever seen—then stroke my hair affectionately with her rough fingers.
“We have to survive, sweetheart. That’s all you need to know,” she whispered.
But deep down, I knew Mom was breaking inside. She wasn’t okay.
I grew up in a marginalized neighborhood that ordinary people from the outside world could never understand. Our home wasn’t really a home at all. The only place we had to shelter us was a rented room in a cheap inn at the end of a narrow alley, a place where women gathered wearing heavy, garish makeup and skimpy clothes. Every night, the thin plank walls of our room had to absorb a mixture of shrill, forced laughter, deafening disco music, and faint, disgusting moans. It all blended together into a lullaby I’d been forced to grow familiar with since I was a toddler.
While kids my age went to school in neat red-and-white uniforms and clean shoes, I spent most of my time wandering the hot asphalt streets. I combed through the dump to collect plastic bottles, or stood behind the kitchen door of a food stall, helping the owner wash piles of dirty dishes in exchange for a few coins. Deep down, I desperately wanted to sit in a classroom, read storybooks, and write on clean white paper. But whenever I told Mom how much I wanted that, she would look at me with tears in her eyes because we never had enough money.
“Maybe tomorrow, sweetheart... If I can earn a little extra and pay off our debts, I’ll get you into school,” she said, trying to reassure me.
Tomorrow. That one magic word kept coming up month after month, year after year, until my young mind was forced to accept a bitter truth: that a bright tomorrow would never really come for us.
I knew exactly how the outside world saw me. In the eyes of people who thought themselves pure, I was nothing but trash. A bastard. A whore’s child. A shameless little bastard who didn’t know his place.
I was used to hearing those sneering whispers buzzing behind my back whenever I walked by. The kids around the alley treated me worse than a mangy dog. Some nights, they spat on the ground where I sat. Other days, a group of them would deliberately shove my skinny body until I tumbled into a black, foul-smelling ditch. Then they’d stand around me, jeering together.
“Your mom sells herself every night, huh? Do you even know who your dad is? Maybe your own mom doesn’t even remember who got her pregnant!”
I didn’t know who my father was. And, God help me, I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, that man had died before I was born. The only person I cared about in this world was Mom, the woman who risked her life and dignity to put food in my belly.
Every morning before dawn, I always stayed awake just to see her come back to our room, utterly exhausted. Sometimes she came in with a forced smile so I wouldn’t worry, but more often she returned with swollen, red eyes after sobbing in the street. There were even nights from hell when Mom came home with a split lip and a bruised cheek, beaten by some john who refused to pay her in full.
As she pressed a wet cloth to her face, Mom would hold me tight and say, “It’s okay, Rian. It doesn’t hurt that much. I’m used to it.”
Every time I heard those resigned words leave her mouth, it felt as if a massive hammer had slammed into my chest. Her heart must have been screaming, and it hurt me even more to see her so broken. But what could a frail boy like me do? I was just a useless little kid with no strength to protect her.
Then, one season, Mom’s body finally gave out completely. She fell ill. Her body suddenly burned with a high fever, her lips—usually painted red—turned pale and cracked, and her chest kept rumbling with a relentless dry cough. I panicked. Sobbing, I ran as fast as I could to the nearest food stall and spent every last coin I’d earned washing dishes for days on a few tablets of whatever fever medicine I could afford. But the cheap medicine from the corner store was no match for the illness eating away at Mom from the inside.
“I’m all right, Rian... Don’t cry, sweetheart,” she panted, doing her best to force a smile onto her pale face.
But I wasn’t stupid. I knew Mom was lying to death’s face.
A few days later, when Mom’s condition had grown even more critical, a woman named Auntie Rini came and knocked on our door. She was one of Mom’s fellow workers and rented a room downstairs. Auntie Rini usually looked hard and sharp-tongued, a result of the demands of street life, but that afternoon, I saw deep sorrow and pity in her eyes as she looked at me.
“Your mom’s very sick, Rian. Her lungs are badly damaged,” she said in a deliberately lowered voice.
I fell silent. I’d known for a long time without anyone having to explain it to me. Every night, I heard the rattle in her damaged chest. But hearing someone else say it so plainly made my knees go weak with sheer terror.
“You’re a boy. You have to be strong, no matter what happens next,” Auntie Rini continued, patting my shoulder.
Strong? How could I pretend to be strong when the one person who anchored my life, the only person I had in this world, was dying right before my eyes?
I no longer remembered the last time I’d been able to close my eyes and sleep peacefully. My long nights were now filled with the sound of Mom’s cough, growing heavier and more painful with each passing day, followed by her weak moans as she called out to God in the dark.
Then, one cold morning, as the first hint of dawn began to seep through the room’s ventilation slats, the coughing stopped. The room went utterly silent. I woke with a terrible sense of dread. I crawled over to Mom’s body, lying on her back, and touched the arm of the woman I loved most.
My body went rigid. Mom was completely cold. She wasn’t breathing anymore. She had left me forever in that stuffy room.
I fell apart. I wept uncontrollably against Mom’s stiff chest. I screamed her name over and over until my throat was raw, hoping she would wake up and stroke my hair again. But in that old inn, no one cared about the cries of a prostitute’s child. My screams simply vanished into the noise of the alley.
Auntie Rini acted quickly that day. She took care of the entire funeral, using money she said had been voluntarily donated by Mom’s fellow sufferers at the inn. I didn’t know whether that was true or just her rough way of comforting my already shattered heart.
After the grave had been filled in, I stood alone, frozen in front of the mound of fresh, damp red earth. A light wind blew through the cemetery, carrying a chill and the faint sound of vehicles in the distance. My mind and heart suddenly felt completely empty. I was like a sheet of paper drifting without direction.
“So, what are you going to do now, Rian? Your mom’s at peace,” Auntie Rini asked, standing beside me as she lit a cigarette.
I just stared silently at the scattered flowers beginning to wilt on the grave. I didn’t know what to say. I had no answer for my own future, because from that moment on, I officially had no one left in this cruel world.
The woman sighed deeply and blew smoke into the open air. “You can’t stay in that room if you can’t pay the rent. You can come with me to the rooms downstairs if you want. I can find you work around the alley.”
I turned to look her straight in the eyes. At my age, on the verge of adolescence, I was smart enough to know exactly what kind of dirty work she meant. Becoming part of the dark world that had slowly killed my mother. With the last shred of dignity Mom had passed on to me, I shook my head firmly.
“No, Auntie. Thank you. I can make it on my own,” I said, my voice no longer trembling.
Auntie Rini looked at me for a moment, then nodded slowly without pressing me. She turned and walked away, her footsteps gradually fading as she disappeared beyond the cemetery gate, leaving me alone in the silence before my mother’s grave.
Beneath the dimming sky that evening, I realized one absolute truth: I was truly all alone. The world had never been kind to me, and fate had taken everything from me.
But beside Mom’s brand-new wooden headstone, I made myself a promise. From that day on, from that very moment, I would never again let fear rule my life. I would keep moving forward, facing the cruelty of the world with my head held high—as Rian, the son of an extraordinary woman who had fought to survive in the deepest darkness.