A week after we get the news that we are moving, we are on a plane. I do my best to say goodbye to my siblings, the animals, and the rest of the teen group, but it’s too fast to process. Esther has tears in her eyes as she holds each of us tight. I know she’ll miss Nina especially; she always seemed more Esther’s child than my mother’s.
As we step onto the aircraft, everything is a wonder. I keep wiggling in my seat, turning front and aft trying to see everything at once. The stewardesses wear beautiful purple orchids, and they give us each one. The air smells like perfume. I stick my forehead against the cold glass of the airplane window. I don’t want to miss a single moment of my first experience of flying. When the stewardess closes the door and the engine begins to rumble, I grip the seat arms. But that’s nothing next to the feeling of take-off—of my stomach dropping to the landing gear as the rest of me soars into the clouds.
When we land a few hours later, my mother, Jondy, Nina, and I step to the open airplane door and are hit by a wave of hot, wet air. It takes a moment for my breathing to adjust. I thought I was used to tropical humidity from Macau, but Bangkok takes it to a new level.
After wading through the sticky airport with our luggage, we spot two white people my mom’s age smiling and waving at us in the arrivals area. We hug and kiss, as is the Family custom, and pile into their van. They drive us to a huge compound with high concrete walls and barbed wire—so different from the Farm. There’s no welcome party or cute animals, at least none that I can see in the dark. We’re herded into a very large two-story school building, where I’m immediately separated from Mom and my siblings. Nina and Jondy are sent to live with their age groups, boarding school style, and I don’t know where Mom goes. “I’ll see you at family time!” she calls as I’m led away.
A man introduces himself as Uncle Steven and leads me into a twenty-by-thirty-foot room filled with bunk beds. He points to a thin mattress on the floor. “Sleep here tonight. We’ll get you a bunk tomorrow.” I sit down, surrounded by ten little bodies curled like shrimp, and the horror of the situation slaps me in the face. I’ve been demoted into the kids’ group.
The following morning, I voice my frustration at the unfairness to Uncle Steven. “I’ve already been in the teens group for some time. Can I please be sent there?”
He just stares, shocked that I’m disagreeing with his decision. Once he collects himself, he explains that the case is settled. In Thailand, the teen group starts at age thirteen. No exceptions. I’m told to yield to my new situation. I’ve got zero interest in being an Older Child again, watching and discussing the lessons from the same old OC-approved movies I’ve seen ten times. Demerit charts, boring classes because I’ve already learned the fourth-grade grammar and times tables they are teaching.
After breakfast, instead of falling into line, I find some teens to hang out with in the hallway and start chatting to them. Uncle Steven sees me and gives me a warning. He sends me to rejoin the OC group immediately. I drag my feet, but I don’t dare disobey a direct command.
The regulations here in the Bangkok Combo are much stricter than at the Farm. We march everywhere in single file, as if we actually are in the army that the Family is always going on about. I follow the new routine, but I refuse to smile about it. Whenever the teens pass by, my eyes turn to follow them. I deserve to be in their group. I’m better than this. I earned it!
But the Shepherds don’t think so. Everything I did, the person I was on the Farm, is gone. They don’t care that I’m Ho’s daughter. It’s as if I never existed before this moment.
The second time Uncle Steven catches me talking to one of the teen boys a week later, his eyes turn cold and hard. He instructs me to follow him. Back in the OC room, he hands me a big piece of white cardboard and colored markers. He tells me to use the materials to make a sign with letters one-inch tall that reads, “Please do not speak to me. I’m on SILENCE RESTRICTION! I am learning to be yielded and submissive.”
I stare at him in shock, barely understanding his words. My mind is whirling, searching for a way out. How did this happen? I’d gotten good at judging what would set off an adult, what would push them too far. Or so I thought. I’m so confused. I’m being punished for speaking with teen boys, when at the Farm I was a teen!
“You were flirting,” Uncle Steven accuses.
I don’t understand. Not a year ago I was supposed to give teen boys hand jobs on a schedule. Now it seems the Family has gone the complete opposite direction, which is fine with me, but I still don’t want to be treated like a little child.
“We were just talking and laughing about something nonsexual,” I explain, trying to make Uncle Steven understand. The boy had said something funny about soccer, and I’d laughed. I wasn’t shaking my ass or trying to kiss him.
Uncle Steven looks down at me with the stony face of the truly righteous. Then he points to the poster board and the markers. “I expect to see the sign tomorrow morning,” he says, and he walks away.
I ask one of the kids, and it seems that no one else in the large Bangkok Combo has ever received this punishment. Great. Another experiment.
I spread out the colored markers and white cardboard on my small bunk bed. I’m vaguely aware of the other kids as they leave the room, heading to dinner. Alone in the gathering twilight, I feel all my bravado dissolve. Fear of public humiliation is far worse than any physical pain. Pain, a spanking, I can grit my teeth, duck my head, and push through. But this humiliation seeps into my bones and fractures my very sense of self.
The sight of my limp hand blurs; soon I’m gasping for breath, sobbing, tears and snot fighting to escape the injustice of this trap. My head aches with the force of my sobs, my eyes are raw red, my face is swollen. But, finally, emotion spent, like a robot, I pick up the green marker and begin to write.
The next morning, I present the sign to Uncle Steven. He takes out a thick piece of rope and attaches one end to each side of the sign. Then he hangs it around my neck. The cardboard stretches all the way across my chest, and the rough rope scratches the back of my neck. My face set, I walk into the communal dining room for breakfast, the sign blazing across my front in neon colors impossible to ignore. Sixty people I hardly know stare at me. This is my official introduction to the Home members: a proclamation that I am such a horrible person that I deserve extreme, public punishment, a breaking.
Breakings derive from the biblical story of the potter and clay: if the soft clay the potter is fashioning into a vase has a hard lump in it, the vase has to be smashed, the lump removed, and then the clay refashioned into something better (Jeremiah 18:1–4). A breaking is not the average correction or spanking; it’s a crushing and remaking.