by Helen Thorpe
When I knocked, Christina answered the door. She introduced me to Martha, her adoptive mother—a woman with cropped iron-gray hair, a hefty bosom, and a worldwise manner, who was wearing a magenta T-shirt, black shorts, and a clunky leg brace.
“You hurt your leg,” I said to Martha.
“Well, I have MS,” she replied, in the tone of voice someone else might use to say, Oh, I have a little cold.
Christina’s adoptive father, Steve, was a slim, bespectacled, kind-faced man in a brown collared shirt and worn-looking jeans. He kept ducking in and out of the house because he was transplanting things out in the garden. I followed Christina into the kitchen, where she was cooking for everyone. She loved cooking passionately and it had become a form of self-expression. She had even gotten to the point where she was creating her own concoctions, such as the one she was busy making at the moment, a mustard-colored curry into which she was putting a lot of hard-boiled eggs. The peeled white eggs floated like boats in a thick yellow sludge of potatoes, turmeric, garlic, ginger, onion, and lime leaves.
“What do you call that?” I asked Christina, expecting to hear an exotic name in Thai or in Karen.
“Egg curry!” she said.
Christina was simultaneously supervising her two younger sisters as they ground chili peppers—just as Kaee Reh’s mother had been doing—to make chili paste. At Christina’s house, however, the act of grinding chili peppers had to take place outside, because nobody else could tolerate chili oil in the air. Martha and Steve had learned to be careful around the potent oil. “When you wash dishes, the vapor will come up out of the sink!” Martha exclaimed.
* * *
In her “Autobiography,” as she titled a paper that she wrote in high school, Christina memorialized some of the family members who had taught her how to prepare food.
When I learned how to cook, my mom was the first one who taught me, but she wasn’t a nice teacher. She always taught with anger and she always got mad at me without a reason. Whenever I cooked, my mom always yelled at me because she said I didn’t cook really well.
My uncle Sha Moe Ko was the one who later taught me how to cook and he was really nice to me. He was always patient with me when I learned how to cook. He taught me his favorite recipes and I really like his recipe for Kaw Now. Sometimes I cook his favorite recipe to remember him as my uncle. And I remember the day I lost him because of a land mine that blew up in front of my face; it was really a surprise. I myself cannot believe why it didn’t happen to me in place of my uncle. Many people were surprised that happened to him, not me, because I walked along that road every day. He was my favorite uncle and a kind uncle. I am glad he taught me how to cook before he died. I will always miss him. To remember him I cook his favorite food that he taught me.
Christina said her uncle’s favorite meal was chicken curry. The egg curry we were going to have for lunch was a variation on that theme. Christina had also prepared white rice and spiced green beans. When the meal was ready, eight of us sat down at a long wooden table in a room painted the color of butter, with sun streaming in the windows. At the table were Martha, Steve, five of their seven children, and me. The couple had three biological children, a daughter they had adopted from China, and the three Karen girls. Christina and her blood siblings served Martha and Steve first. “That’s our culture,” one of the Karen girls explained. “We always serve our parents before we eat anything ourselves.” Steve warned me about the chili paste, advising that I take a minute amount. Martha echoed his sentiment, saying, “Just maybe hover your fork over it. Two or three molecules and you’re set.” I put a tiny dab on my plate; Christina stirred three or four spoonfuls into hers. The family explained the term “Thai hot.” When they went out to eat at their favorite Thai restaurant, Martha and Steve used the restaurant’s regular scale of one to four to indicate how hot they wanted their food to be. Christina and her sisters instead told the waitress they wanted their food in the twenties or thirties.
The three Karen girls took turns getting up from the table and draping themselves over Martha, half lying along her shoulders, or went to the other end of the table and huddled against Steve. The amount of physical affection the adopted children showed their parents exceeded what I was used to seeing. Martha explained that she had used physical affection as a tool to reassure the girls during the difficult transition when they had changed homes. When they had first joined the family, they hadn’t been able to tolerate much affection. Hugs used to make them flinch. What I was seeing was the product of many years of mothering.
After lunch, Steve wandered back outside, the other kids disappeared upstairs, and Christina, Martha, and I stayed at the table. Martha listed the various traumas that she had gradually discovered, over many years of parenting Christina. I could see that she wanted me to understand how badly her daughter had been wounded. “You know, they’re going to school and they don’t know the language and there are all these cultural issues, but then underneath there’s also trauma at the same time, and nobody at the school knows about it, and they’re navigating all of that,” Martha said. “It’s so hard to tease that out from just ‘doesn’t speak the language,’ which is also true, of course.”
Martha went upstairs to gather some books she thought I needed to read, which she spread across the dining room table. Christina’s favorite was Undaunted, a memoir by Zoya Phan, a young woman whose father was a leader in the Karen resistance movement in Burma. Phan’s life bears notable parallels to Christina’s—both were born in the Karen state, both fled their original home villages as small children, both went to school in refugee camps in Thailand, both almost died of cerebral malaria. Christina fan-worshipped Zoya and was communicating with her via email.
From the material Martha shared, I learned that the military regime that had controlled Burma for my entire lifetime had created more child soldiers than any other country in the world. The Burmese military also encouraged its soldiers to employ rape as a tool of war against women from ethnic minority groups, and used land mines rampantly across its own territory to suppress the various ethnic groups that had taken up arms against the regime. As a result, Burma was the most heavily mined country in the world. The Burmese military was also accused of beheadings, the butchering of infants, deliberate starvation of entire villages, and various additional atrocities that Karen activists based in Thailand worked hard to document by stealing across the border on fact-finding missions, because the repressive regime had shut down objective journalism inside Burma. Of all the countries in the world, it was Burma that sent the largest numbers of refugees to the United States during the fiscal year 2015, when both Kaee Reh and Hsar Htoo arrived in Room 142.
At lunch, Martha said it was Steve who had met Christina first. Steve belonged to the First Universalist Church of Denver, and he had volunteered to mentor a newly arrived refugee family—Christina, her two siblings, and their grandmother. When he came home bearing a photograph of the three Karen-speaking girls, Martha took one look at the faces of the children she had yet to meet, and asked, “Where are the parents?”
* * *
Christina was born in a small village in Kaw Thoo Lei state, which literally means “a land where the Thoo Lei flower can grow,” or “a land without evil.” It is what the Karen people call their home state in Burma. The Burmese considered the Karen armed rebels who needed to be suppressed, and the two forces had been battling ferociously since 1949. The fighting in Kaw Thoo Lei reached an especially fierce pitch in 1997, when Christina was only three years old. This is how Christina wrote about what happened in her Autobiography:
I lived in Burma for 3 years before I moved to Thailand. I moved to Thailand because the Burmese government treated us like animals and tried to kill us. Burma is a beautiful place but the government is dangerous. When I lived there I had to hide by the bush most of the time. When the Burmese government came to our village we had to hide because we knew that they are coming to kills us. On February 14, 1997 my fami
ly, my friends and other people we had to run and move to another country.
Prior to her arrival in the United States, all of Christina’s schooling had taken place in Tham Hin Camp. She showed me photographs of hillsides crowded with makeshift huts made out of bamboo and tarpaulins, photographs of the Christian church she attended, and photographs of Basic Education Tham Hin High School. (“Karen people don’t know how to name things!” she joked.) The school’s walls were made of cinder block, and the roof of corrugated tin, and big green tarps served as awnings. In the refugee camp, Christina had learned to read and write in Karen, Thai, Burmese, and English. Karen and Burmese use distinct but related alphabets with letters that largely overlap, but Thai uses a different script altogether, and none of those alphabets corresponds in any way with the Latin script used to produce English. So Christina’s education involved learning to read and write while employing four different alphabets simultaneously.
Christina had excelled at schoolwork. One teacher who grew fond of her nicknamed her “Silly One,” because although she showed up in her mandatory navy blue plaid skirt and short-sleeved white blouse, she invented her own idiosyncratic way of writing Burmese, which he alone spotted and teased her about. She would only write Burmese sentences using the Karen alphabet and Karen spellings, instead of employing the slightly different Burmese lettering. If called upon, however, she would pronounce the words as Burmese. “He thought it was silly,” she said. “And he thought it was smart, too.” Writing Burmese the wrong way had been, for her, an act of resistance.
Meanwhile, Christina’s biological parents were not getting along. “They were always, always arguing,” she said. Christina and her younger sisters were devastated when their parents divorced. The split resulted in the three girls being raised by their maternal grandmother, who had journeyed with them to the refugee camp. Malaria and other highly contagious diseases plague the residents of refugee camps all over the world, and one of Christina’s most vivid memories concerns her bout with cerebral malaria. Malarial parasites affect the body in various ways, but in the case of cerebral malaria, parasite-filled blood cells block the small blood vessels to the brain, causing swelling that can result in brain damage, coma, or death. Christina was actually mistaken for dead by medical staff after she entered a coma. Of this, she wrote:
I had to go to a Thai hospital and stayed about one month. When I was in the Thai hospital the doctor told my mom that there was no hope for me and then they put me in the place where dead people were put. My mom was very upset that the doctor had told her that I was no longer alive. After about 12 hours of being asleep, I woke up and I thought, “Where am I in the earth?” I saw a humans lying down with cloth covering their faces and then I started crying.
It was Christina’s grandmother who applied for the family to resettle in the United States. Christina’s mother was listed on the initial application, but when the family was chosen, Christina’s mother decided not to accompany her daughters to the United States, because she would have had to leave behind her second husband and their children. Forced to pick between two sets of children, Christina’s mother chose to prioritize the younger ones, trusting that the older ones would survive without her.
On the eve of their departure, camp officials briefed Christina and her siblings and their grandmother about what to expect once they left the camp. Posters pinned to a bulletin board covered the basics. One poster named the four seasons they would experience in the United States. The whole idea of winter boggled Christina’s mind. A second poster named what they would encounter during the airplane ride: airplane seat, seat belt, bathroom door lock, tray table. About her transition to the United States, Christina wrote:
When I heard that I would come to Colorado I was scared and nervous. I was scared because people told me that in Colorado there were a lot of cowboys and no Karen peoples. On November 7th my grandma, sisters and I left the camps. I was very upset because I didn’t want to come at all but my sisters were looking forward to seeing a new place. I was sad to leave my mom.
I arrived in Denver the evening of November 7, 2007. Between that day and December 1, 2008, many, many things happened in my life. It was a very hard time.
One day, I met Christina for coffee at Kaladi, a popular coffee shop near the neighborhood where she lived with Martha and Steve. Christina mentioned that the apartment building where she had formerly lived back when she first arrived in the United States was close by and asked if she could show it to me. We drove over there and parked by the side of the road and sat looking at the building for a while, just chatting about whatever came into our minds. Christina said that at one point she had gone up to the roof and thought about jumping off but had decided not to because her two younger sisters needed her to stay alive. She had to protect them from the wrath of their grandmother, who was abusive to all of the girls, according to Christina. I asked Christina if the level of domestic violence she had experienced at the hands of her grandmother was representative of Karen culture in general, or unique to her own family. Christina answered, without hesitation, “Unique.” Later her adoptive mother, Martha, said she believed that the extremity of life inside a refugee camp affected families by amplifying their basic dynamics. Strong families grew stronger, dysfunctional families slipped into worse dysfunction.
Christina’s grandmother was close friends with the mother of the man whom her grandmother said she should “marry.” Her grandmother and her grandmother’s friend had hatched the plan for the “marriage” together, according to Christina. She said that one day, the young man chased her all over the apartment building. The structure had rectangular balconies, one per apartment, and to escape, Christina jumped from a third-floor balcony down to a second-floor balcony, and then to the ground. She landed wrong when she hit the parking lot and hurt her arm. I could see why Christina’s favorite book in the world was Undaunted—I thought she was pretty undaunted herself, to risk injury rather than endure the advances of a young man she did not want to sleep with.
Her grandmother used to let him into their apartment late at night when he came home from work or from socializing with friends, and he would wake Christina up and demand that she cook him dinner. Once, he came into the bedroom and instructed her little sisters to go sleep in the living room, but instead of staying in the bedroom with him, Christina went to sleep in the living room, too. She had no desire to be intimate with the man, who stank of beer and cigarettes. Christina never wanted to press charges against her “fiancé,” but she wanted to say publicly that even though she had been raised never to contradict a man, she knew that what he was trying to do with her was wrong. And in her opinion, he should have known it was wrong, too.
We puzzled for a while over the mystery of what Christina’s grandmother might have been thinking. We had no idea. Christina described various incidents between them, and it sounded to me as though they had been locked in a battle for supremacy over who would control the course of Christina’s life. Her grandmother seemed to feel that Christina was noncompliant, both in terms of obeying her grandmother and in terms of kowtowing to her “fiancé.” Often, when Christina made herself scarce to avoid spending time with her suitor, her grandmother went knocking on doors around the apartment building to hunt her down. Christina hid in various locations, including under the bed of her best friend.
At one point, however, her grandmother tracked her down and administered an especially severe beating during which she cut Christina’s right hand with a knife. The cut was deep and the blow broke bones. Her grandmother packed the wound with tobacco, a homemade remedy to stop the bleeding. Almost exactly one year after her arrival in the United States, Christina showed up at Merrill Middle School with a swollen right hand, unable to hold a pen. One of her teachers, a Bulgarian-born woman named Miss Petrova, asked why she could not take a math test. Christina’s ability to comprehend English had grown dramatically, but her ability to speak remained limited; she enlisted the help of a Karen-speaking fri
end to reply that she had hurt her hand. The teacher insisted on knowing how she had gotten the injury.
“What happened, Christina?” Miss Petrova asked.
“It was an accident,” Christina replied.
“Christina, what really happened?”
“I hurt myself.”
“How did you do that?”
“I cut myself with a knife.”
“Christina, how could you cut yourself on your right hand, if you are right-handed? You have to tell me what really happened.”
That’s when Christina made the enormous leap of trusting a Bulgarian-born, English-speaking woman whom she hardly knew. Her grandmother had cut her with a knife, she confessed. At that point, everything in Christina’s world turned upside down. It took her a long time to sort it out, but looking back on that moment from the vantage point of sitting in my car, parked beside her old apartment building, after a total of eight years had elapsed, she said that she believed Miss Petrova had saved her life. When I reached out to the teacher to confirm the details of what had happened, Miss Petrova wrote back in an email to say that she kept a picture of Christina on her refrigerator to this day. “Not having any other relatives in the U.S., my students become my family,” she wrote. “Being an immigrant, just like them, I have a lot of empathy for them.” She had recently seen Christina. “We talked about the book you are writing, our time together at Merrill, the unfortunate event with the injury, but above all, we remembered caring and supporting each other. We think of this time with a lot of gratitude.”
Although the teacher had promised not to call the police, when they went to see the school’s social worker, a uniformed police officer was there. School officials retrieved Christina’s two younger sisters, both of whom became hysterical at the idea of being separated from their grandmother. The social worker explained that all three girls were being taken to the city’s child welfare division. The social worker did not know what would happen next. When a family-worth of kids entered the foster care system, they usually did not remain together.
