Introduction to Rain and Sun

Confessions of Love, Silence, and an Irrevocable Past

In Asian culture, silence is the first lesson.

Obey. Endure. Keep the pain within the family, no matter how deep it cuts.

Across the glittering skylines of Beijing to Jakarta, progress hums like a promise. Yet beneath it, the chasm between rich and poor only widens—quiet, unseen, merciless.

For girls born to rice paddies and mountain villages, little has changed. Poverty is still a family heirloom—passed down, wrapped in duty and shame.

By eighteen, sometimes younger, they carry the weight of survival. Some leave home with a single borrowed dream, boarding night buses and budget flights bound for neon cities they’ve only seen on screens.

One whispers to her friends: “Don’t tell Mom and Dad I’m in Malaysia.”

You’ll find them in KTV lounges, dimly lit pubs, velvet-roped clubs, young, far from home, trading innocence for rent money under the watchful eyes of managers and bosses. The boys stay behind to plow or weld. The girls are told they have “value”—pretty, pliable, silent.

No one asks how they feel.

No one speaks for them.

This book is not only Rain’s confession.

It is a mirror, and a quiet prayer, for every daughter like her:

girls who paint smiles over invisible wounds,

who learn to bury sorrow so deep it becomes part of their bones.

We have new names for old pain now:

invisible, silent, seeping inward.

Rain and Sun is both confession and remembrance:

a hand extended toward those the world forgets,

and a light held up to what it demands of its daughters

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