A one-of-a-kind history forms the background for this book's ethnography: The author has come of age together with his protagonists. Thomas Stodulka based his study on four years of fieldwork in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, between 2001 and 2015. He inquires into 'street children's' remarkable social and emotional competences, instead of resorting to a pitiful discourse of compassion and despair. The ethnography's multi-vocal narrative couples vivid accounts of ethnographic case studies and life stories with current theory on emotion, empathy, structural violence or social interaction in the context of marginality, stigma and chronic illness.