Let's Get Acquainted
Being a child was never easy. I was THREE years old. I moved to Florida on my first trip to America with a new GI step-father and a new baby sister. I could speak a little bit of English but not enough. My new step-family were nice hospitable white Southern folks from Louisiana. I knew nothing about America or the various regional cultures or dialects that existed.
Overall I was a happy child that was able to mimic anyone and sing any song that I heard on the TV or radio. America seemed to offer me everything a child could want.
In contrast to my Mom, Noi, was pregnant with my half-sister, my step-father left us and went back to Thailand for a year. We lived in Louisiana in a trailer park home near our in-laws. Noi could not speak or communicate very well with our new white Southern family, but I caught on fast to the new language. Noi was not happy that the in-laws were always upset that she didn't know how to care for the baby in the traditional white woman world.
Noi was twenty-two years old with two girls in a country that she thought was suppose to be paradise.
Not so. Noi ended up divorced from her cheating second husband and the mother in-law gave us money to return to Thailand; but, she had taken my new half -sister as her own child. My step-dad married the next door neighbor whom he had been having an affair with after his return from a year in Thailand. She was a white brunette woman whom had helped Noi by coming over ALL the time to cook for us, since there was no Thai food for Noi to cook.
We never saw my half-sister again until I was thirty and married with my first baby. It took me my whole life to find her, and then save up enough money so that I could pay for her plane ticket to visit us in Illinois from Louisiana
Seeing the first snow of my life didn't prepare me at all for what was to come that winter. An immovable iceberg bulldozed into Noi and I forever. Returning back to Thailand tattooed us with GRIT and determination. Noi also had Revenge in her heart that corrupted all of her future relationships.
As for me, I've learned the lessons of the coldness in human hearts that was foreign to me. Never would I again trust anyone as I did when I was just an immigrant child full of awe for America. A child's life is not always full of unconditional loving innocence, but rather is full of self-doubt and sadness.
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