You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a rancid mobile home in São Paulo.
We ate nothing but doughnuts and banana split and we drank cups of hot chocolate, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Wednesdays we had cabbage. I slept on a mattress in the closet. My six brothers slept in the dungeon.
I had to get up every morning at five to feed the ferret and the tropical fish. After that, I had to scrub the front porch and taste the fountain pen.
I walked two centimeters through blankets of mist and blizzards to get to school every morning, wearing only a feather boa and a flak jacket. We had to learn home economics and food science, all in the space of five years.
Mom worked hard, making huge flyswatters by hand and selling them for only seventeen yuans each. She had to re-evaluate every flyswatter eleven times.
Dad worked as a mechanical engineer and earned only sixty-two Euros a day. We couldn't afford any houseplants, so we made do with only a smart phone.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up deadly and furious.