Part 1
I have never been a very confident girl – my English father left us when I was very young, my Chinese mother always blamed me for that and never had a good word to say to me. Even though I was a pretty girl, with my mixed race looks, she always denigrated me and put me down, so I never believed it when people said nice things about me. I wear my black hair tomboy-short, have big, black-rimmed glasses to hide my face, and I always dress to disappear into the background, because I’m embarrassed by my curvaceous figure. I am bright, and left home to go to university at eighteen, moving as far away as possible, both physically and culturally – going from a small country village to the big city. I struggled for the first few months, unable to make friends and having to rent a squalid flat. I threw myself into my work and cried myself to sleep at night. And then I met the man who was going to change my life.
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