A lot of the men come and go, but Uncle Ashok is my mother’s longtime Fish. He is my favorite and always sneaks me little treats and never spanks me. He’s a gentle man, short, but strong and stocky. His family from way back is Indian from Kenya, but he’s British through and through, from his tea to his accent. I feel safe and loved in his strong, hairy arms. I’m not afraid of him losing his temper like my father.
He has only one bed, so at night, we all climb in together. I pretend to go to sleep right away so they can get started with sex. My mother doesn’t care if I’m awake, but Uncle Ashok does. He is a Sheep, and Systemites can be uncomfortable with having sex in front of a child. It’s easy enough to turn to the wall and pretend that I’m asleep while the bed shakes and he grunts on top of my mother.
My mother enjoys going FFing—dressing up in a pretty dress and putting on makeup and perfume and flirting like Grandpa instructs. She doesn’t mind sleeping with some of her Fish, but she doesn’t like to sleep with Uncle Ashok. When she thinks I’m not listening, I’ve heard her tell my father she’s just not attracted to Uncle Ashok; it’s a trial for her. Still, it’s her duty.
My mother tells me that this is about the love of God. That sometimes women must sacrifice their own personal likes or desires to show God’s love to a man who needs it even if she finds him unattractive. I shudder. A few times I have seen her crying before she needs to sleep with a man and I know she is upset about it, but she knows that God is happy with her when she does it.
I obediently repeat my memory verse, 1 Corinthians 1:19–20, to my mother: “For ye are not your own; ye are bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.”
“Do you know what that means?” she asks. I shake my head. “It means that you belong to God. Each of us does. We can’t do what we want. We must do what God wants. God owns our bodies. So, if he asks us to wash the dishes, or go witnessing, or even have sex with a Fish, then we must obey God, even if we don’t feel like it.” I nod. I’m not sure I understand, but I know I’m supposed to.
There is no difference between men and women in God’s eyes—we are all equal, Grandpa teaches. In the Family, unlike many of the System churches, women can even be top leaders. But women are still the helpmeet for the man—there to “help his meat,” Grandpa says, laughing—and must always show their yieldedness and submission to God by being willing to sacrifice their bodies to God and submit to the men in the community, giving them sex when they need it. So, a woman should not refuse to sleep with any man who asks her, even if she finds him unattractive. This is particularly true with Flirty Fishing.
I’m not sure I understand it all, but I try to be a brave soldier for Jesus and not cry when my mother goes out at night and leaves me behind.
3
It Takes a Village
As Mary and I lay side by side on our bed, her cold toes touch my left leg. I kick her and whisper-yell, “Your foot is on my side of the bed!”
A few minutes later, I turn over sleepily and feel a painful pinch on my arm. “Ow!” I sit up, angry.
“Your arm was on my side,” Mary snaps.
“It was not!” I hotly deny.
“Was to.”
“Was not!”
I don’t like sharing a bed; my bed is the only space I have that’s my own. Mary and I agreed that if either of us goes on the other person’s half of the bed, we’re allowed to punish them, only we can’t agree on exactly where the halfway line is in our sleep. In a brush of genius, we take a broom and, after carefully measuring for the exact middle of the bed, lay the pole between us. Satisfied, we can fall sleep. Now, we know if we hit the hard broom handle, our limb has strayed too far.
Mary and I have been moved into the small room behind the living room. Our double bed touches the wall on three sides. There is only enough room for a dresser, which has four drawers, two for each of us to hold all our belongings. They are half-empty.
My father wants to annex the small house next to ours on the opposite side from the Cottage—the Pink House. But first he plans to finish the renovations on the Main House, which are moving along thanks to help from Uncle Daniel and my father’s two Chinese workers, who we’ve given the biblical English names John and Peter. Even though they are not in the Family, they take new names since they’re easier for us to remember. Already, they have fixed the roof and plastered the second, long room of our house for my brothers to sleep. Next, they will enclose our front yard to create a large indoor patio that can be a dining room and a larger kitchen.
My father and Uncle Daniel mark out the border of our new patio with tent stakes in the dirt in front of our house. A truck dumps a load of small red bricks out front, and the guys go to work. I watch as my father and Uncle Daniel use shovels to mix water into a gray powder that becomes a thick gravelly paste—cement.
Sherck layer of cement, brick, Sherck layer of cement, brick—on and on all through the hot, sticky day. I watch the wall rise in front of our house.
Very satisfied with the progress on the wall, we go to bed. The next morning, I see my father outside in the early light scratching his head. The wall has fallen, and bricks are scattered around. Maybe it’s the wind? He and Uncle Daniel go to work again and build it back up. But the next morning, the same. The scattered bricks have cement footprints through them that follow the footpath through what is supposed to become our dining room. It seems a person, not the wind, has destroyed our hard work. But who? And why? The villagers have been relatively friendly to us.
My father asks Cap San, the village elder. Cap San has a big chicken farm on the other side of the village and lives in the only other modern two-story house in the village aside from our landlord, Lok Keen. But he just shrugs. No one will fess up. My father suspects the culprit is a neighbor we call Tiger. Tiger is a gruff middle-aged man who we’ve spotted nearby in the wake of a few of the stone-throwing incidents.
After the third time the wall is knocked down, my father ponders the situation. It doesn’t matter that where we are trying to build is part of our property and we have permission from our landlord. There are no building codes or rhyme to the patchwork of mud houses here anyway. They just don’t like change in a village that has not had outsiders in a hundred years. The villagers are used to walking through this yard and don’t want to change their normal route.
My father tries a new tactic. He lays one layer of brick around the perimeter. The next morning it’s undisturbed, so he leaves it for a few days. Then he and Daniel lay a second layer of brick. Still nothing happens—the cement hardens.
A few days later, he puts a third layer of brick around the wall, which is now barely a foot tall. It is still low enough for the villagers to easily step over, but it is slowly inching higher. After six months, he eventually finishes the tall brick walls that now enclose our front yard, and it stands strong. Once the metal corrugated roof and plastic mosquito screens are added, the large space becomes our dining and activity room.