Tears pool in my eyes, but I won’t let them fall. I push my shoulders back and walk up to the Main House. I am afraid to see what has happened there.
I open the heavy wooden door and take in the empty living room. Dirt everywhere. Dust motes float in the air. A Jesus Loves Me poster lays discarded on the clay tiles, a muddy boot print on Jesus’s face.
A rat scurries across the living room. Not a mouse. A foot-long fat brown rat.
How will we live in this big house, just the five of us?
It’s so terribly lonely and empty without my brothers and all the people who used to buzz around, but at least there’s a feeling that we’re safer than we’ve been in a long time. I don’t have to worry that we won’t have a place to sleep or food tomorrow. I think of Thailand, the humiliation and breakings, the military-style marching and cleaning. If I could survive that, I know I can survive this, too.
Over the next few weeks, we get to work cleaning and rebuilding. Boy, do I miss dishwashers, carpets, a soft mattress, and countless little luxuries that are commonplace in America. I was completely baffled when I saw carpet in the bathroom at my grandad’s house, but it sure beat cold tile on bare feet in the long winter nights. After living in houses built by professional contractors, I see all the imperfections of our homemade construction—the exposed pipes, slightly crooked walls, the slanting, uneven tiles covering the bathroom floor to ceiling.
My father, unflaggingly positive, says losing our animals is an opportunity. He reaches out to some old connections at the Jockey Club, and soon we are offered several thoroughbreds that need a retirement home.
Dad has me down at the stables every morning mucking stalls again and exercising the horses. I’d learned to ride our pony years before, but now I’m getting a crash course in controlling animals who weigh a half ton, leading trail rides, galloping, and jumping.
“Praise the Lord. We’ll start a horse boarding and riding school,” Dad says, “and we’ll make money catering to the local government officials and their kids.”
Our riding school opens within a month. At first, only a few people show up, but as word gets out, we soon have whole groups, sometimes forty to eighty people a week, local visitors from Macau and tourists from Hong Kong paying 100 patacas ($12) for an hour on a horse. I teach them how to sit, hold the reins, and direct the horse as the sun beats down and the humidity makes us all drip with sweat.
Dressed in his favorite outfit—a plaid cowboy shirt, jeans, leather belt, cowboy hat, and boots—Dad teaches me to roll ice cubes in a towel and put the towel around the back of my neck to ward off sunstroke. When I finish with the horses, I head to the house to help my mom with the cooking, cleaning, and caring for my younger brother and sister.
After all the trauma we went through in Thailand and the US, we’re okay with being on the fringes, preferring to be forgotten rather than cut off. We are back in the Family, but neither of my parents accepts everything the leaders say as gospel anymore. We no longer take pride in being the most dedicated disciples on earth. Our “accidental” excommunication broke my mother’s faith in the Family, and those cracks are showing in our everyday life.
We still have daily Devotions, but they are much shorter so Dad can get on with farm chores. If people come to our Farm to ride horses, we still give them posters and talk to them about Jesus. We participate in parades with our horses for events and holidays, but we don’t have to be a daily on-call singing group or even busk every week.
We read the new Mo Letters that arrive in the monthly Letter packets, and Dad still receives his allowance of $1,000 from Grandpa every month. We survive on that and the earnings from the horse riding, though Mom complains that Dad spends every penny he makes giving lessons on saddles and tack.
More than the little luxuries of American living, I miss my novels. On my day off, I go to the local library in Macau, but the only English books are for learning English, and those are dumbed-down versions of classic literature meant for a child, like Charles Dickens in 35 Pages for an English Learner. I don’t have money to buy books at the bookstore, and most of the shops keep the books covered in plastic wrap, so I can’t sneak off and read them in the aisles.
I write to my grandmother asking her to send me books, and seven weeks later, a small, weather-beaten cardboard box arrives. My mother cuts open the tape and pulls out ten books, and once more I inhale the smell of temptation and adventure, of escape and discovery. I wait, hands clenched, to keep from grabbing them.
Mom runs her thumb along the spines and finally says, “I’ll read them first, and if I think they’re appropriate, I’ll give them to you.” I breathe a sigh of relief. This becomes a pattern. She seems to be following the Family rules now more from reflex than from zealous devotion.
Every few months, another box arrives: Moby Dick, Ivanhoe, the Anne of Green Gables series, and novels by Jane Austen. I snoop until I discover where she hides the books that she has not yet reviewed, and I secretly read the books before she does. That way, even if she decides that some are inappropriate for a Family girl, I’ve already read them.
To manage the boredom of having no big group of Family kids to play with, I live in the fantasy world of my books, imagining myself as a heroine in each story. The first time I finish reading Pride and Prejudice, I sit with the book clutched to my chest. It’s 5:00 a.m. Once again, I’ve stayed up all night and feel a profound sense of completion in its perfection and a deep sadness that it’s over.
The more I read, the more I want to know. I’m insatiable. I read each book in the growing pile under my bed over and over, but there are months of waiting between book packages.
In Dad’s old office, there’s a room with a whole wall of old VHS tapes categorized by child, teen, and adult. The room used to be off-limits, with a constant dehumidifier running, but it’s unguarded now, and many of the tapes are white with mold. After living in America and watching shows daily with Grandma, I miss television.