At age 11, Ding Zeren's life fell apart completely. And by that, he means that his mother who had raised him ever since he was a baby had remarried. As a kid who only ever knew his mother, he felt protective of her whenever a new guy popped up into her life. He had always been successful at doing something that caused a man to leave her, but he swear he only ever did it so that she wouldn't have to go through what she did with his father ever again.

But his mother was so in love with one particular man that even Zeren couldn't do anything about it. So, the Zhu's became a part of his "family"—or at least as family as it was going to get. Zeren slowly got used to having two other men in the house. His new step brother, Zhengting, was older than him by many, many years, but he was the caring type and he fed him food, so he didn't really mind.

At the age of 14, Zeren was kicked out of the house. once again, that's not actually what happened, but at the time of being a little, angry teenager, that's sure as hell what it seemed like, even if he did make the decision to move to Korea with Zhengting himself. Zhengting had gotten a job offering to teach students like him Chinese in a Korean high school, and for good measure, Zeren's mom and his step-father asked him is he wanted to go too. Zeren didn't want to, he really didn't. But when he saw how much his mother was so deeply in love with Zhu, he decided that maybe it was better to leave them alone for a few years.

When Zeren moved to Korea with Zhengting, they spent a lot more time together. They had to, since neither of them spoke very good Korean. They studied the language together whenever they could, and Zhengting always brought lunch for him during his class so he could eat it the next period. But Zeren didn't want to ride on the coattails of his step-brother for money, even though he knew Zhengting would let him.

So he worked in a laundromat. Every day after school, he would go over to the laundromat a few blocks down from Memory High and he would work shifts there. His shifts go until pretty late, since it was a 24-hour type laundromat and apparently someone had to make sure no one was stealing detergent from behind the counter. But he doesn't really mind, so long as no one disrupts the peace.