there are moments in life that a person would give anything to forget and on occasion, moments that are etched so vividly in your memory forever that it's like you're reliving the moment all over again. that moment for goo hara was when her parents had told her she was going to visit her grandmother for the first time in the four years she'd been alive. she didn't question why that meant packing up so many of her things to take along and she didn't understand back then what the sympathetic look on her grandmother's face upon seeing her granddaughter on her front steps meant. hara had spent a year asking about the whereabouts of her parents, why they only ever called and when were they coming back to take her home? it was an ugly time in her life, having to change schools and find new friends -- things that proved to be difficult because she was the girl without parents and they weren't dead, so something had to be wrong with her, right? maybe she was a bad child. in truth, that was something she had started to believe wholeheartedly but her grandmother would always be there to reassure her that she was never the problem.

and hara wasn't a bad child at all, but her junior high days were filled with ugly words and nasty bruises when she took to defending herself against boys and girls alike. it stopped being about her lack of parents and more about how they'd say mean things about her grandmother, something hara could never tolerate. she quickly took on an attitude of confidence and arrogance throughout those days to protect herself, going into high school with a target on her back from day one. she'd found a small group of friends to spend time with in high school after joining the track and field team, where she'd managed to find her very first boyfriend but not without having to defend herself once more against jealous girls who claimed she was full of herself just because she'd gotten the attention of one of the sought after boys in the school. that relationship ended upon his graduation a year earlier than hara, where he'd been given the opportunity to get out of south korea and study abroad.

it took hara a while to realize that she had a passion for interior design. her grandmother was the landlord of an apartment complex in a small community and whenever tenants would vacate the place, hara would tag along with her grandmother to check out what things needed to be replaced and what needed to be fixed. she would spend her time sitting in the middle of an empty apartment drawing out brand new designs, telling her grandmother over dinner about her ideas for renovations to make the apartments look more modern and appealing and less dreary and ancient. and whenever a tenant would move in, hara would sweetly talk her way into convincing them to let her set up the place free of charge. when it was time for her to graduate, though, hara had made up her mind -- she wanted to be in the big leagues. she wanted to be an interior designer and not on a small scale, she wanted her own business that expanded outside of south korea and it wouldn't hurt to have one of those television shows either. the apartment complex her grandmother owned would definitely be one of her first, major projects.

being a successful high school graduate with a scholarship to yonsei university was enough to earn hara a letter of congratulations from her parents which she packed along with the rest of her things for the next, big move. she doesn't keep it because she needs it to feel close to them, she keeps it as a reminder that even though she suffered because of them, she still made it through and she's going to continue to be fine without them in her life. moving into the dorms at yonsei honestly felt like hell to hara, there wasn't very much space to do the things she wanted to make the place feel like her own so she looked into getting her own apartment but that didn't seem to be a smart move for her financially. and so she dealt with the limitations as best as she could. it was her roommate who put her on to the idea of joining a sorority when she came to hara with a handful of brochures that she'd collected their first week there, she just still couldn't decide where she wanted to pledge after all that time. they spent the night talking about which sorority seemed like the best place and while her roommate was drawn to sigma kappa, hara herself couldn't keep her mind off of the zeta tau alpha sorority and that is why she's been a loyal zeta since.