I AM 21. The trees flit by, sun-bleached and wonderfully familiar, so different from pine, maple, oak. A Thai singer croons “chan rak ter” on the radio, which means I love you. The cab is sweltering, the leather seats sticky against my legs and shoulders. It is the summer between junior and senior year. I’m visiting my family, splitting time between Momma and Papa, and working at an orphanage three miles from our old gated community. I blink my newly LASIK-ed eyes. The surgery was an early graduation present from Papa. Blink, blink. Things seem clear.
Three miles, and reality shifts seismically. The orphanage, Baan Fuen Faa, is for children with physical and cognitive disabilities. Baan means home. Most children arrive as infants, orphaned by their families because of their disabilities. Some students aren’t orphans but come purely for the uniquely welcoming environment. The Baan was founded by Her Majesty the Queen. The Royal Family is exceptionally generous, compassionate, and connected to the citizens and their needs, one of the few monarchies truly respected and loved by their people.
Every day, these three miles peel away the world. Every day, I arrive at 7 a.m., leave around 5 p.m. I speak little Thai, and the other caregivers speak little English. The children, from infancy to age 18, speak solely Thai. But in the infant and toddler ward, where I’ve been assigned, we communicate fluently. Our language is made of intuition, touch, smiles, meals, diaper-changes, and baths in an assembly line. The day begins with hugs and nuzzles and ends with lullabies.
In our ward, most of the kids have cerebral palsy. There are forty kids and four adults, but we aren’t strictly assigned to ten children each. We move as a four-person unit, adapting to the children’s needs.
I received this job by showing up. I completed the school year, drove to JFK Airport with a professor, wrote my final paper on the plane, arrived in Bangkok twenty-seven hours later, slept the day, and taxied here the next morning. I followed the signs to the director’s office and asked her how I could help.
Due to my rudimentary Thai and my eagerness to serve, brimming deep and alive as an ocean, I’ve been entrusted with the lives of small children despite my staggering lack of experience and accreditation. The days have confirmed, though, that care is a thing one learns by doing. There is but one way to learn how to curve and distribute my weight when holding a child: I hold her.
We’re underfunded and understaffed. The floors are cement like those in the slum school I worked in during high school. The surrounding grounds are gravel and clay, caked by the 100-degree weather. The diapers are rough linen. We wash them by hand and secure them in place with safety pins, like Momma used to with mine. Momma swears that I, like most third-world babies, was potty trained by eight months. Washing endless nappies by hand is perfect incentive to potty train a child as swiftly as possible.
Most of the cots resemble the one I used as a newborn. Government sanctioned, metal painted white, chipped and rusted by time’s touch. Speckled among them are other cribs, wooden, brightly painted with teddy bear or rainbow decals and carvings, like the ones my siblings had. These cribs are secondhand, donated by our gated neighborhood or purchased by church groups.
We maintain a calm, strict schedule for meals, baths, and naps. Above all else, kids need love and stability. Consistency and routine are calming and comforting. The nurses move among the children with steady, confident cheerfulness. They teach me rudimentary physical and occupational therapy to do with the kids. It’s marvelous and humbling to witness their development.
I’ve met an angel. Little Star is a boy unlike any other at the orphanage. He is 4 but the size of a 1-year-old. His head is shaved, like most of the kids’, to lessen the likelihood of lice and for relief from the heat. But other than his shorn scalp, he bears no resemblance to the others.
He was born with all four limbs fused in place. His joints don’t exist. He doesn’t have rotator cuffs, elbows, hip joints or knees. His arms and legs are permanent right angles, turned downward. He’s unable to move them. His spine is fused as well. He cannot sit on his own, and lies flat on his back or on his tummy. He shimmies his body, flopping like a fish, to propel himself along the floor. He has a tiny, well-defined six-pack because of this motion. The rest of his muscles have atrophied.
We’re unclear whether he can grow beyond his present size. Nor is there a way to measure life expectancy—he is an absolutely singular child. Every child is unique; he is vividly so. He knows only a few words. He knows “sawasdee krap,” which means hello. “Ahaan.” Food. “Naam.” Water. And “khop khun krap.” Thank you. He forms the words the gummy, gooey way most toddlers do, dropping the consonants. He hasn’t many friends. He uses the four phrases to spice his own language of sounds, gentle gurgles, squawks, and squeals that croon from his mouth in an ongoing soft patter, keeping himself company. He babbles and bubbles, a cheerful brook beginning and ending by the same rock.
He nearly always grins. If he grows hungry or tired, he’ll be a little quiet. Sometimes, he whimpers. But unlike most 4-year-olds, he won’t sob or throw a tantrum.
I love him madly. I nickname him Little Star for his limbs, his starfish shimmy, and the smile that rarely leaves him. Despite his lonesomeness, he smiles. He is a star, faraway light.
Solitude. A lack of frequent, consistent connection. A lack of deep love. These are the reasons Little Star hasn’t learned any phrases other than those four. Attributing his voicelessness to a learning disorder would feel kinder on the heart. No. He rarely speaks because a lack of intimacy has atrophied not only the muscles in his arms and legs but also his voice. The voice, too, is a muscle.
Every week, women’s groups from various embassies, NGOs, and churches visit. Aside from donations, they gift companionship. Every week, the women gravitate toward their favorites, kids particularly cute, charismatic, and lively. Little Star is rarely visited. Finding him discomfiting, most people avert their attention.
All the caregivers are devoted, loving, and well-trained. They’re weighed down with countless responsibilities and dozens of children. Little Star’s basic needs are met, all except for the one needed most: authentic closeness. Embraces, eye-contact, and most of all, language. Language fosters personality. Humor. Curiosity. Interests. The light in us is lit, and we begin to discover our voice. He needs stories and lullabies, jokes followed by laughter, someone to point outside to the birds and repeat the syllables back for each word, not just once but as many times he needs.
Little Star is cheerful. But is he happy? He chirps. But is he communicative or inquisitive? Does he feel wonder, and when he was 3 years old, did he ask “Why?” all day long? We ask questions when we trust Momma is there to answer them. We stop asking if ignored repeatedly. We cry first from impulse and reason, but if our cries are not met, we stop. All the orphans are exceptionally even-keeled. They’ve learned to mute hunger, loneliness, and their need for others. Perhaps Little Star did ask why until he learned his call for love and acknowledgment was rarely answered. Like his limbs and voice, his faith in others has been sapped of life, by life.
I see him trying to connect, communicate, be heard and understood, and I’m hit with memories of my own attempts. There are so many ways we humans can atrophy.
Today was like most of our days. Quiet, peaceful. It is 3 p.m. and the children are napping in rows of cots neatly organized, mosquito nets swaddling each bed like dainty cocoons. The kids are dressed in tunics or tank tops and shorts made from strong, durable cotton. Some are faintly pink or blue, assigned by gender. But time and wear are fading them into one shade of beige.
Now, watching the children sleep, I need a sudden break. I need these sometimes. I walk outside, duck behind the building, and breathe to keep from crying. I feel your presence nearby. I blink a few hard times and return to the kids.
The air is languid and thick. The ceiling fans try their best to cut through the humidity that hangs like breath, moist and close. The faint scent of antiseptic and baby powder lives forever in the air. We lather the children in both, creating a paste that cools, soothes, and protects their skin from heat and mosquitos. The song of the orphanage is gentle. Quiet humming, trills of laughter, children running and playing, giggling and cooing. The usual heartwarming sounds of childhood. Only softer.
The kids have so little and they feel deep gratitude for it all. When receiving a hug, a box of hand-me-down toys, or a new set of crayons, they smile and thank effusively. Every Friday they receive a special meal—rice porridge with steamed ground pork. The gift thrills them. They giggle, smile, and, those who can, leap to their feet to dance and applaud the meal’s arrival.
There is another child I’ve grown very close to. Her name is Apeechaya. She calls me Ma. The women of the orphanage call me her Ma as well. She is 2 and has cerebral palsy. Her left leg is slightly bent and thinner than her right. She crawls using the other three limbs, pulling the left leg along tenderly, like a wing at rest. The staff have trained me in her physical therapy. We also do speech therapy, exercises to facilitate language, and I’m teaching her to use a baby walker so she can gain mobility and confidence. I dream of adopting her one day. If I can’t grow up quickly enough to give her a home, I’ll make sure she finds one all the same.
It will take a few years, but we do manage to find her a home.
Here at the orphanage, my vast desire to give love and feel love is welcome. I feel peaceful. The summer months move altogether too swiftly. I leave, promising to return.
I AM 22. In the fall semester of my senior year, I write, direct, produce, and star in my first play, Spinach and Babies. My professors give me full creative freedom and theater space. The play is magical realism with archetypes for characters, a tale about a mother in search of her child, aided by a nurse, impeded by a politician. For every performance, the audience fills the space to bursting, breaking every fire safety code. At the end of one performance, a girl in the audience is sobbing so vehemently, she vomits.
Having played every role, I don’t have any need to stay. I have enough credits to graduate early, it’ll save money, and I’m ravenous to work. I graduate summa cum laude, with two degrees and a minor. I forgo the ceremony and move to New York City on January 15th, 2006, in a blizzard, with two suitcases, a laptop, $1,000, and the ferocious zeal to make the city mine. I have a five-week sublet my playwriting professor helped me find and a job as a hostess at a five-star restaurant, starting the 16th. My first sensation in the City is kinship; her appetite, pace, and hardened grit fit like a mother tongue. My immediate goals are simple: take film classes, get headshots, find an agent. April seems like a nice deadline.
I am the only person I know in New York City. Our family is scattered across different time zones. Momma, Dad, and my sister in Seoul, my brother and Papa in Bangkok. Phone calls are luxuries. Emails are gifts. I’ll visit Thailand and Bangladesh briefly, this coming summer, to work at the orphanage and visit family. Aside for those few weeks, New York has me in totality.
The City teems with men. I’ve dated since I was 17 and have been dating through college, but the energy here is entirely different. Most of us who move to New York City have “I Want” at our core. We arrive with dilated pupils, hungry to make our dreams come true. Ambition, desire, and seduction take on a feral pitch. We don’t simply court one another; we hound, frothing at the mouth. One man, then another, and another and another, will tell me I am his, and I will love this like water. I drink each syllable of every promise, letting their honey drip down my chin. Their words tease aside the fibers to soothe the parched place I imagine is my heart. I’m a dehydrated peach, a jolt of energy, perfect for easy consumption. Shrunken and pinched by my desire to love and be loved, to belong and hold close, so pleasing and sweet that I’m nearly cloying.
All I want is to make you happy.
Most of the time, “you” means purely you, my lifelong friend. But sometimes, my vision blurs and “you” means you, and includes him, him, her, and her, anyone, everyone, and most importantly, the man I’m with at that present time. He stands stark center.
I learn swiftly this mentality can drown a girl.
The faster a man declares love, the more likely and quickly he’ll rescind. Within months, I learn not to confuse passion for proof that a man, any man, is my beloved. I learn, too, that I tend to move toward unkind and often dangerous men, and they rush toward me.
The first of my suddenly born, suddenly dead affairs is with a man who works at the same restaurant as me.
“You unhinge me,” he says, and I think this means he loves me. Silly Reema.
A few weeks later, during my shift, I feel a searing pain in my abdomen. I retreat to the ladies’ room. As a hostess, I don’t have a uniform, but it’s required I dress elegantly and entirely in black. I wear a tight pencil skirt, a long-sleeved V-neck, and four-inch stilettos. The pain keeps rhythm with my heartbeat, each throb threatening to tip me off my heels and onto the marble floor. With one hand on the wall to prop myself, I shimmy up my pencil skirt, hovering over the toilet. Something blue, pink, and veined with purple slides out of me and into the toilet bowl, landing with a sickening plop.
My body hadn’t realized anything was different. Like the rest of the City, I run so hard, with jaw-clenched single-mindedness, it’s difficult to separate any fatigue or twinge from the daily usual. I clean up, ball my thong in a paper towel, and stuff it deep into the trashcan with the heel of my stiletto. I flush the toilet, bid the memory of my lover and I goodbye, and return to work. He’s working the same shift. I don’t tell him. He’s rather angst-ridden and dramatic and is likely to spin this into a sign that he must save me with his love.
As I, clearly, need saving.
A miscarriage isn’t a cosmic message that we’re destined loves. This miscarriage was a blessing and evidence that my body knows how to take of herself.
I brush the event aside. I send out headshots, resumes, and cover letters to a list of agents culled from Backstage, an industry resource. A few call me to audition. Every agency asks me to prepare one 90-second contemporary monologue. I haven’t a clue what that means. My training has been Shakespeare, the Greeks, the French, and Chekhov.
For my first audition, I walk in beaming and perform three minutes of Chekhov. Nina from The Seagull. It isn’t light, lovely fare. By the end of the meandering monologue, Nina and I are crying. When I return to my body, I scold myself for my stubbornness. I should’ve adapted. I have completely botched this opportunity. I look up to find all three agents have tears in their eyes. Sitting center, a beautiful man with the slightest Southern swing in his voice asks, “What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Hostessing.”
“Thursday?”
“All yours,” I grin.
During our meeting, he shares the agency’s philosophy. The company was founded by two powerhouse women, pioneers in the industry. They’re a boutique with a roster of carefully selected clients. Thus, they are able to closely understand and guide each individual on their unique path.
“I always ask actors two questions,” he says. “What made you choose acting, and when did you know?”
I smile. “I’ve known since I was 15. That I’d adopt kids, and be a voice for those without one. For me, that’s the best way I can serve the planet.”
He looks thoughtful, a slow smile stretching like light breaking through morning clouds.
“I grew up in a Southern Baptist community,” he says, “in a very small, insular town. My dad was our minister. When I realized I was gay, a thought that helped me align my homosexual self with my spiritual self was that maybe one reason God makes gays is so we can give homes to the orphans of the world. We are all one big Self, one big love.”
“Where can I sign?”
He laughs and we share our first hug. It is the first of April. On this same day, across town, I sign with a different agency for modeling, commercial, and voice-over representation. I begin auditioning for theater, television, film, commercials, and print.
My body is now a fine science. I am now a 00. “Doublezerodoublezerodoublezero” is the mantra I chant while running on the treadmill. My anorexia feels like an omnipresence residing inside me, more a siren than a disease. It bewitches my arms, legs, mind, actions, trying to lure me toward hostile waves. It nestles within me just like you do, but it is shadowy while you are lit and pure. You are my better self, while Anorexia is the name of my punishing voice.
As with any behavior that is self-admonishing, when things feel calm, I eat, rest well, and speak to myself kindly. When around chaos, I revert to punishment, tucking tightly into my harmful habits, like a centipede recoiling from the world’s graze. This, now, the life I’ve chosen of an aspiring actress in New York, dating the kind of men I date, swarms with chaos.
I let six of my eight piercings close and decide to grow my hair. I’ve kept it pixie short for seven years. My hair is mine. The look at any given time is less about appearance and more about my controlling it. I decide its importance, its length, its style, when it grows, and when it’s cut. In three months, my hair grows from two inches to my chin. By the end of the year, it touches the middle of my back. I guess it yearned to grow.
Quickly I realize the length of my hair parallels the amount of power it commands over others. Unsurprising yet stunning. I now viscerally understand why hair is revered in Bangladesh and tied tightly to a woman’s worth. Why it’s lusted after and feared to the point where women are ordered to hide it in certain religions. Hair tempts, distracts, seduces, impresses, and is therefore very threatening to mindsets that preach women matter very little. How offensive. How volatile. Of course it must be hidden.
A year is all it needed to grow. Now, when I turn my back to the mirror and peer around, I see locks down the length of my back, covering sharp shoulder blades. Lightly, I toss my head. My hair sways languidly, moving like a sheet of lava.