Within a month of the Prodigal Prodigy series, a wave of bad publicity about the Family—and our personal family—hit the newsstands in Hong Kong. Unlike the positive press we’d gotten previously, these articles, written by reporters from England and the US, accused the Family of promoting prostitution and agitated the Hong Kong government into banning Family members from the country.
My parents, unsure what the fallout would be, decided to head to Hac Sa, a remote beach at the farthest end of Macau. Battered from within and without by the Mo Letters and the media, they felt that the isolated village of Hac Sa seemed like a haven to try to rebuild their lives with minimal interference. Little did they know our lives would be anything but quiet.
1
The Great Escape!
“Faithy,” my father’s Texas drawl barks in my ear. “Get up. Don’t say one word. Not one word, you understand?”
It’s pitch-black outside the window. I nod, half-asleep.
Mommy Ruthie’s long, brown-black hair forms a frizzy cloud around her head as she runs around the tiny room, stuffing things into the type of cheap, colorful, striped canvas bag the Chinese market hawkers use to carry their goods. My father gathers me in his arms and throws me over his shoulder, and my world turns upside down. My bare foot scrapes his cowboy belt buckle. Through half-closed eyes, I see the orange linoleum tile floor, the threadbare living room carpet. I strain my neck up to see Mommy Esther, my father’s other wife, standing by the door with her six blond children, my half siblings. She brushes her straight pale hair from her lovely face, which is now pinched with concern. They all have small bags in their hands.
“We’re all going to walk down the stairs and get into the van,” my father says. “Make no noise.”
Struggling to hold up my head against gravity, I spy eighteen feet and four paws racing down five flights of dirty white-tiled steps, the slap of my older brothers’ flip-flops loud in the dark stairwell. We wait as my father unlatches the heavy steel door entrance to our small apartment building before stepping out onto the worn, rounded cobblestones that were brought as ballast by Portuguese trading ships several hundred years before. As we pile into our old Dodge Ram van, Daddy passes me to the back. I’m pulled onto my mother’s lap while he wrestles with a sliding door that refuses to stay shut. His wiry frame is surprisingly strong, and the door eventually closes with a hushed clunk. We’re off. Questions bubble to my lips, but as soon as I open my mouth, I feel the pressure of Mommy’s finger.
“Just keep quiet,” she whispers.
The narrow, colonial-style streets are empty as my three parents, six siblings, and beloved Doberman escape into the darkness.
It’s July 1981, a couple of months after my fourth birthday, when my parents decide to flee our home in the city of Macau, a province of China and, until 1999, its own country and a Portuguese colony.
I curl up on my mother’s lap and settle into the vehicle’s soft rocking motions. From my position, I can’t see much, just shadows and momentary glimpses of empty cobblestone streets. It looks so different from Macau during the day, when the thriving city is a hive of activity and people shoving and shopping.
This city I’ve called home since before I can remember is built on a peninsula jutting out from the south China coastline and connected to two trailing islands by bridges. In the 1600s, the peninsula was only one square mile. But by 1981, the inhabitants added another five square miles to the city by dumping all their garbage in the sea and gradually claiming land as the refuse built up. Even with the added land, Macau is listed in the Guinness World Records as the most densely populated country on Earth. Its 250,000 citizens (95 percent Chinese and 5 percent Macanese, an Asian-Portuguese blend, and a far smaller population of Portuguese government officials sent over to govern this neglected colony) occupy a considerable amount of cubed space by standing on each other’s heads in their six-hundred-square-foot apartments. My family rents one of these on Rua Central, right off the main shopping area, hardly big enough for our family of ten and various other helpers who live with us.
In ten minutes, we’re on the mile-long bridge that links the peninsula city of Macau to Taipa, the first island. A three-foot-tall white statue of the Virgin Mary sits at the bridge intersection—the Catholic protector for bad drivers. We continue around Taipa and over the causeway to the next island of Coloane, traveling over pitch-black water until the bridge releases us into the dark countryside. The only sounds I hear are the thrum of the old V8 engine and our overnight bags rattling around in the rear cargo area.
Finally, my father breaks the silence. “We’re moving to a new home,” he announces.
“Isn’t it exciting?” Mommy Ruthie adds, squeezing me reassuringly.
She is answered with a soft snore; my siblings have passed out on top of each other in a tangle of small arms and legs. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.
Even with my eyes closed, I hear the crunch of dirt under our tires as we leave the paved road. When we finally stop, my mother grabs my hand, and we march into the darkness to a chorus of chirping crickets. I feel my way through a doorway but trip on the raised stone lintel, hurtling into emptiness until I’m lifted off my feet and hustled onto a hard mattress.
The next time I open my eyes, the morning sun is leaking in through a dirt-streaked skylight. I am in a big room with newly plastered white walls and a cold concrete floor hastily covered with beige linoleum.
I roll off my mattress to find myself sandwiched between two very tall beds of unpainted pine, three and four bunks high, where my siblings are sleeping. Mary, three years older than I and closest to me in age, is on the other bottom bunk. Our older brothers are like stair steps, all one year apart. Aaron (or Bones, because he’s so skinny) is sleeping above me, the goofy clown still for once. Standing on my toes, I try to make out Josh and Caleb, identical twins, curled up on the two bunks above Mary. Everyone has trouble telling them apart, but Caleb has crossed eyes, wears glasses, and rarely brushes his hair, so that helps distinguish him from Josh, who always has a comb in his pocket. Mary, Caleb, and Josh all have white-blond angelic hair that belies their naughtiness. For the rest of us, our hair has darkened from a reddish-gold when we were toddlers to a nondescript brown. I can’t see Hobo until he pops his messy head over the bunk rail. I’m the youngest, and at four, I’m still too short to see the tops of things.
Nehi is still fast asleep. He’s in the highest bunk because at eleven he’s the oldest. I like him well enough, but he’d rather clean his Nikon or play guitar than pay attention to the rest of us. “Head in the clouds,” my parents say. “Nose in the air,” counters Josh.