The Half-Child

by Angela Savage

  They agreed she would start the following morning.

  ‘I have one last question before I go,’ Jayne said. ‘What happens to the children who don’t meet the criteria for adoption?’

  Frank glanced at his watch. ‘Come and I’ll show you.’

  He led her back out the golden gates, where a different guard from the previous day saluted as they passed. Jayne was careful not to let on that she knew the way and made sure Frank reached the blue gates first.

  A muscular man in a navy blue uniform, New Life Children’s Centre logo on his chest pocket, sat on a white plastic chair just outside the compound reading that morning’s edition of Thai Rath. A blue tiger tattoo stretched along his inner right arm. This man Jayne recognised—the tough guy from the previous evening. He looked even tougher up close, his dark face pockmarked with scars.

  He leapt to his feet when Frank approached.

  ‘Sawadee krup, nong,’ Frank said to the man as he unlocked the gate. ‘This is Mister Chaowalit,’ he added in English. ‘He’s the guard and handyman for this part of the centre.’ He turned back to Chaowalit. ‘Sabai dee mai?’

  ‘Sabai dee,’ Chaowalit said to him. ‘Farang khon nee put thai dai mai?’

  He was asking if she spoke Thai. Frank shook his head and Jayne pricked up her ears.

  ‘There’s a problem—’ Chaowalit said, but Frank cut him off.

  ‘I don’t have time now,’ he said in Thai. ‘I won’t be long with her and then we’ll meet, okay?’

  Chaowalit scowled but stepped aside.

  ‘This section of the centre is for children whose parents place them in institutional care but don’t consent to them being adopted out. We call these kids boarders to distinguish them from orphans.’

  He led Jayne into the nursery. It had much the same layout as the orphanage, but with fewer toys and no foreign volunteers. The smaller babies dozed or wriggled around on grass mats. Older children—Jayne guessed around age nine or ten—played with the younger ones. The Thai carers were dressed like nurses. One sat on a chair mending a mosquito net.

  ‘Most of these children come from families too poor to educate, house or even feed them. So they send them to the centre,’ Frank said. ‘Many of the parents are itinerant workers with irregular income and no stability. We become the keepers of the children’s birth certificates, vaccination records, even school reports.’

  ‘Why don’t the parents give them up for adoption?’

  ‘Different reasons. Many intend to maintain family ties.

  Others count on a change of luck putting them in a position to care for the child. This is particularly common among the…ah…working girls in Pattaya. They think marrying a rich Westerner will solve all their problems. It doesn’t occur to them their future husband might not look too kindly on raising another man’s child. Nor do they consider whether such an arrangement would be in the child’s best interests—’ He stopped mid-sentence.

  ‘Forgive me, Jayne. Once I’m up on my high horse, I get a little carried away.’

  She gave him a polite smile.

  ‘The sad fact is that most of these children are abandoned.

  They’ll remain in our care until they finish middle high school, at which point we are obliged by law to release them to fend for themselves.’

  Jayne recalled the words in Maryanne Delbeck’s letter home. It seems so unfair. It’s not as if their families visit them all the time. Some never come back for them at all.

  ‘It seems so unfair,’ she echoed.

  ‘Tragic, really.’ Frank gestured around the room. ‘Many would be perfect for adoption. Thai girls and half-ca—I mean, mixed race—babies are particularly sought after.

  And as you can see, we have a lot of the latter here, both Eurasian and Afro-Asian.’

  A tinny rendition of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to joy’ sounded from Frank’s shirt pocket. He took out his mobile phone and glanced at the screen.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Jayne. ‘Feel free to have a look around.’

  She wandered into the main room. The children might not have as much stuff as the orphans, but they looked well fed and cared for. On the plus side, their bookshelves were free of Bible stories.

  She watched one of the older girls encouraging an infant to walk.

  ‘Come on Dollar, you can do it,’ the girl coaxed.

  Jayne smiled. It was trendy among Thai people to give a child an English cheu len or nickname and not uncommon, as in Dollar’s case, to choose words rather than actual names.

  ‘Look, watch how Kob does it!’

  The girl pointed towards a little boy who stood upright using the edge of a chair for balance. He was what the Thais called look kreung, literally ‘half-child’ but meaning half-Thai. With dark skin and corkscrew curls, high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, he looked like something from a utopian society where humans were designed to be beautiful.

  Jayne wondered if this Kob was Mayuree’s son.

  Casting her eye around the room, Jayne spotted a few more look kreung, or what Frank referred to as Eurasian and Afro-Asian. She supposed these were the offspring of the working girls.

  ‘Can you wipe Moo’s nose?’ A Thai staff member gestured to a boy at Jayne’s feet.

  She almost fished a tissue out of her bag before remembering she wasn’t supposed to understand Thai.

  ‘Sorry?’ she shrugged.

  The nurse made a wiping gesture and pointed again at the child.

  Jayne nodded, suppressed a shudder and squashed the slug of snot beneath the child’s nose.

  Frank reappeared.

  ‘Already putting you to work I see.’

  ‘Just trying to be helpful,’ she said, holding out the used tissue.

  ‘There’s a trash can just outside the door.’ Frank motioned for her to follow him.

  ‘This section is only down the lane from the orphanage, but the two facilities are separated by a yawning chasm when it comes to opportunity,’ he sighed.

  Jayne threw away the tissue and held out her hand.

  ‘Thanks for the tour. I guess I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Nurse Connie and the others will put you through your orientation. If you need me, I have offices in both parts of the centre. I’m usually in one or the other.’

  ‘So you work with the boarders, too?’

  ‘There are sometimes opportunities to counsel families to reconsider their decision and relinquish the child for adoption. It’s part of my role at the centre to pursue those opportunities. As I said, many of the children would be ideal for adoption and we have such a long waiting list of suitable applicants.’

  ‘Do you ever have foreign volunteers working in this section?’

  The mild curiosity underlining the question surged when Frank blanched in response.

  ‘We tried it once but decided it wasn’t in the children’s best interests.’

  And there was Jayne’s answer: Maryanne had been granted her wish to work with the boarders.

  10

  Frank Harding glanced at the framed photo as he placed his mobile phone on the desk. Him with his brothers, Kevin and Sid, taken just before Kevin left for Nicaragua. Frank was not the only Harding with a missionary calling. Kevin was working to repair the damage done by years of socialism, while Sid was doing the Lord’s work on the island of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines.

  Like Sid, Frank’s calling had brought him to Asia, though Thailand was not his original destination. Five years earlier, Frank was posted to Laos under the auspices of Charitable Care, part of a consortium formed to bring relief to drought-affected areas of southern Laos. His mission was reconnaissance, to explore opportunities for evangelism through Charitable Care’s work in food security and famine relief.

  Frank was amongst those who volunteered to carry supplies into villages that could only be reached on foot. Ten people participated in the two-day trek, each carrying what they insisted on calling ‘fifteen kilos’ of s
upplies—it was thirty-three pounds where Frank came from—plus water for personal use. When they finally reached their destination,

  Frank unloaded not the rice his colleagues assumed he was carrying, but thirty-three pounds of Bibles.

  He knew he was doing the right thing, bringing something that would sustain the villagers through far more than a single drought. But his colleagues did not see it that way, even when he pointed out that the translation was in the relevant village language. A French doctor, clearly with communist leanings, resorted to name-calling and harassment.

  ‘What does it matter that the Bibles are in the local language?’ the man sneered. ‘The villagers cannot read, you imbécile.’

  He said the word in French, but there was no mistaking what he meant. Frank refused to be baited.

  ‘Does it occur to you that the reason they cannot read is because they don’t have inspirational reading materials?’

  Frank said calmly. ‘Surely there’s no stronger motivation for them to learn than the word of God.’

  The Frenchman shook his head and muttered something under his breath, adding in a louder voice, ‘Alors, they are good for one thing.’

  He took a Bible from the pile at Frank’s feet and handed it to the village headman.

  ‘Sahai, soup yah, bo?’ he said, addressing the man as ‘comrade’.

  Frank watched in disgust as the headman tore out a page, dipped into a leather tobacco pouch at his waist, and proceeded to roll a cigarette. He handed the Holy Book around for the other men in the village to do likewise. Their laughter was still ringing in his ears as Frank turned and walked away.

  When they returned to the Lao capital Vientiane, he was summoned to the Ministry of the Interior and charged with crimes against Lao culture. Frank was baffled. He’d only wanted to save the villagers who, in their pagan ignorance, were destined for eternal damnation. And for this he was deported. He suspected the Frenchman of turning him in, but reminded himself that vengeance was the Lord’s area of expertise.

  The deportation turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it brought Frank to Pattaya. And if ever there was a place in need of the Lord’s redeeming light, it was Pattaya and its twin town of Jomtien, Thailand’s own Sodom and Gomorrah. People of means came here expressly to gratify their basest desires, preying on the weakness of the poor, the ignorant and the avaricious. A place where the Devil spent his holidays. A place where Frank could make a real difference.

  At the same time, after the anti-American paranoia of Laos, there were aspects of life in Pattaya he welcomed: familiar food, convenience stores, modern communications. His grounding in Lao made it easy for him to learn Thai— they were closely related languages—and he applied himself diligently to his studies.

  Frank also made a careful study of Pattaya’s sex industry in the spirit of ‘know thine enemy’. Different sources suggested there were anywhere between six thousand and twenty thousand Thais working in the sex industry in Pattaya, including girls and boys as young as ten years old. His own observations put the figure towards the higher end of the spectrum. In addition to brothels, prostitution operated out of nightclubs, discotheques, beer bars, massage parlours, karaoke clubs, garden restaurants, short-time hotels, even barber shops and hairdressing salons.

  The prostitutes—he’d never warmed to the politically correct term ‘commercial sex workers’—in the low-end brothels tended to be among the poorest and least educated, earning as little as one American dollar per ‘session’, the euphemism researchers used to refer to the exchange of sexual favours for money. They were often in bonded labour, their meagre earnings going to the brothel owner to pay off their debt.

  Prostitutes in the middle and higher ends of the market tended to be better off, receiving a base salary in addition to commissions and fees that could amount to as much as one hundred dollars per session. They were morally impoverished: with higher levels of education and working under less compulsion, these were women who should have known better—who had choices.

  Frank supplemented his desk-based research with fieldwork. Posing as a tourist, he visited a go-go bar where women danced stark naked around poles on a stage while patrons ogled them. A topless woman young enough to be his daughter grabbed at his crotch and rubbed hard tiny breasts across his face. Caught off-guard, Frank was revolted as much by his spontaneous erection as he was by the girl’s lewdness. He left quickly, muttering invocations to restore his self-control. Frank had chosen a celibate life, and no teenage whore would jeopardise that.

  Worse than the go-go bars were the ‘live shows’ where women squeezed ping-pong balls from their private parts like they were laying eggs. Or inserted all kinds of objects inside themselves: bananas, fire-spitting sparklers, even razor blades. He’d once seen a woman squat over a birthday cake and blow out the candles with her vagina. It disgusted Frank not only that people treated such profanity as a spectator sport, but that the women—many of them mothers, judging by their stretch marks and caesarean scars—allowed themselves to be so degraded.

  Pattaya thrived on degradation. They could blame it on the Americans based in Thailand during the Vietnam War— Pattaya was a sleepy little fishing village until the GIs started using it as an R&R port—but the Thais could put an end to that whenever they wanted. The war had been over for more than twenty years. Instead, they continued to hitch the town’s economy to human depravity. The local authorities staged periodic crackdowns on prostitution and vice. And every now and then a billboard went up promoting Pattaya’s ‘exciting diving destinations’ or Jomtien’s ‘family-friendly beaches’. It was all just for show—another tawdry Pattaya performance.

  In the five years since Frank had arrived, Pattaya had only gotten worse. There was nothing that couldn’t be bought or sold, no limit to the lengths that people would go to for a buck.

  Frank needed to figure out how he could turn this to his advantage—the ends always justified the means when it came to saving souls—and to that end, he scoured the town for a workplace suited to his skills and mission. He’d worked briefly as an army chaplain, but spent most of his working life in the US as a pastoral care worker attached to an innercity public hospital in Detroit where he specialised in family counselling and foster care placements.

  The New Life Children’s Centre was the answer to his prayers. The Thai director had been looking for a qualified foreigner to assist in processing inter-country adoption requests and preparing the children for life with their new families. Frank was employed in the role of special adviser and, as the only foreigner on staff, given licence to develop the program.

  The pre-departure program that paired individual babies with foreign volunteers was Frank’s brainchild, as was the idea to use church networks to recruit volunteers. His work on the adoption program was deeply satisfying, his achievements measurable in the number of children he helped shepherd out of Pattaya. His only frustration was that the New Life Children’s Centre could not meet the increasing demand for babies eligible for overseas adoption.

  And then the Lord sent him Constance.

  They met after a church service. Connie, as she liked to be called, was a nurse-midwife from Hong Kong who had worked throughout Asia, including a stretch in a slum near the US Naval Base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. She’d come to Thailand to take up a job in the maternity ward at the City Hospital. As the least expensive health facility, City Hospital was where most pregnant prostitutes went to deliver their babies.

  ‘My role in the clinic in Subic Bay,’ she told Frank, ‘was to counsel pregnant women against illegal abortion—’ she dropped her voice, as if the word itself was too terrible to mention ‘—and support them to give birth and adopt the baby out.’

  For Frank, it was the missing piece of the puzzle.

  The New Life Children’s Centre had an existing relationship with the City Hospital. Babies found abandoned at the hospital entrance or in the car park were brought to the centre following medical clearance. Frank s
ought to strengthen links between the two organisations. Connie alerted him to the possibility of counselling women while they were still in the maternity ward and encouraging them to relinquish their newborns. Those who persisted in keeping their babies were referred to a new mothers’ clinic at the New Life Centre, not so much to help them care for their babies as to keep them in Frank’s sights. Almost invariably the women failed to cope with the demands of motherhood, and the new mothers’ clinic became a conduit for babies to be placed in the centre’s institutional care facility.

  It wasn’t enough for Frank. His mission was conversions. Not in the first instance from Buddhism to Christianity— though that remained the ultimate goal—but to convert babies and toddlers languishing in institutional care into orphans eligible for inter-country adoption.

  Frank initiated a range of methods to increase the conversion rate. First there was the hospital-based counselling program; the poorer and younger the woman, the more likely she could be convinced to relinquish the child. Secondly, Frank made sure the new mothers at the clinic were given a full tour of the facilities; they got to see the orphans being looked after by foreign volunteers and could envisage the opportunities this afforded them. Thirdly, Chaowalit, the eyes and ears of the place, alerted Frank when any boarders were visited by family members, so Frank could take the opportunity to work on them. He had a similar arrangement with Ittiphol on the centre’s investigation team, who let Frank know when an abandoned child’s family had been located and could benefit from his counselling.

  With the steady influx of converts from boarders to orphans, Frank experimented with deploying a volunteer into the boarding house facility to begin acclimatising the children to foreigners before they officially entered the pre-departure program. Maryanne Delbeck had been the first to put up her hand.

  Frank sighed at the thought of Maryanne. He opened his filing cabinet and took out her personnel file. At the front were a copy of The Bangkok Post article into her death, a file note on his meeting with the Australian Embassy consultant, and a letter of condolence from the Young Christian Volunteers.