Excerpt

Chapter Eleven

A Marriage or a Merry-Go-Round?

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.  –Mignon McLaughlin xi

“Dear God, I have a problem. Well, not exactly a problem . . . I’d call it a grave concern. It’s about my marriage. No, I’m not contemplating divorce, although several of my friends have encouraged me to consider it. I’m not there yet; just a little confused. You see, we were so excited on our wedding day…and for some time after. One of our friends told us this was normal because the fairy princess expects to marry the handsome prince and the handsome prince thinks he has married the queen, but after a while reality sets in.

“It took some time for reality to set in for Tom and me. After scrimping and saving for the down payment, we finally moved into our first home. And then, the children came. Two of them…as you know. Don’t misunderstand, we are thankful for all you’ve done for us.

“But then, after a few more years, the chore of daily living settled over us. Occasional squabbles turned hostile. Disagreements about money…vacations…in-laws, and well, you know…sex. We’d always make up. Some times that was the only alternative. But the problems were never completely resolved.

“Now I wonder if we are getting as much out of marriage as we should. I don’t know what more we can do. If it continues like this…feast and famine…hot and cold…war and peace…I’m confused and worried. Is this what marriage is supposed to be—a merry-go- round—or is there more? Anyway, thanks for listening, God.”

If you had to answer that prayer, what would you say? Would you mention that many become confused about marriage because if it doesn’t start out right, it’s got less chance of being right. In the beginning, they imagine days of meaningful activity and nights of togetherness and passion. Along come the kids, mortgage payments, career changes, personality clashes, and arguments over trivialities. Startled, they realize they are going round and round with no goals or objectives other than short term emotional thrills, soon forgotten in the drudgery of daily living.

God’s Attitude About Marriage

Is that what God had in mind when he presented Eve to Adam and pronounced them one flesh? Is he now willing to make concessions? “Whoops. I made a mistake. Those human beings aren’t behaving. I’m going to cut them out of my will. What was Plan B again?”

Nothing of the sort. Take off your shoes; marriage is holy ground. It’s a permanent and sacred union of two personalities who find a physical and spiritual satisfaction with each other which they could not find alone. With Jesus as guide, they navigate lofty mountains and steep valleys, the three of them locked together all the way. Two pilgrims, one leader.

Notice any compromise here? Any uncertainty? A concession, perhaps? God doesn’t compromise when it comes to marriage. He is just as serious about marriage as he is about sin and grace for dope addicts, about love and mercy for murderers, as well as for the thieves and liars who sit in the front row in church.

A Christian marriage is more than an experiment in Let’s-Make-a- Deal. Those locked in the one-flesh contract don’t get a free get-out- of-marriage token when words like thunder shake the house and dirty looks are daggers that cut pride into small pieces. Marriage is a union of a man and a woman founded on mutual respect, a determination to succeed, and a resiliency established through faith in Jesus. They have a rock to cling to, and guidance from someone who knows them better than they know themselves. That rock and guidance are based on a few simple words of Jesus: “Love each other as I have loved you” (l John 15:12).

Just a second! In his final instructions before his passion, wasn’t Jesus simply instructing his disciples how to behave toward one another after he was gone? Plugging that passage into the context of wedding bells and nuptial vows is pushing the envelope too far when it comes to arguments about who’s going to clean the basement, take out the garbage, pick the kids up from school, show up at school functions, or…well…you know the drill.

There’s no stretch here. Jesus sets the love-bar high when he uses the key phrase as I have loved you. Love each other as I have loved you from before you were born, from before the world was set in place, from eternity. Love each other as I have loved you as the apple of my eye. Love each other as I have loved you as the one who humbled himself for you, as the one who died for you, as the one who watches over you night and day.

The Cornerstone of Marriage

The cornerstone of a Christian marriage is neither difficult to describe nor tough to understand. God didn’t say, “Feel good about one another.” He said, “Love each other.” Love each other with a love that indulges itself in the happiness of the other; a love proud to serve and eager to forgive; a love that fulfils its own needs by satisfying the needs of another. Like peanut butter and jelly, a sheep and its wool, a stamp on an envelope, husband and wife come together to become something they could not be alone.

Read more about Talk to Me, God… I’m Confused and Wayne Bartelt HERE.

Copyright 2010 Wayne Bartelt. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

“Where Do You Come From?”

“Where do you come from?” asks the teacher of the adult class in Leopoldville, where I am registered for a course in Lingala.

I hesitate. It is a simple query that puts me in a quandary. Should I state my origins, nationality, or citizenship?

“From my mother’s womb,” I want to tell him in short but resist the urge.

Nobody asked me that kind of question in Cairo where I grew up. We were a known minority. The usual question was “Are you Greek?” “Italian?” “Armenian?” or “What nationality are you?” if my name had not given it away already.

Now in Leopoldville, on an expatriate assignment with the United Nations, I stand out with my foreign accent, wavy hair, and possibly body language, gestures and all.

“From Egypt,” I mutter, to keep the conversation short. I wonder why he doesn’t ask the same question of the other students in class – half a dozen from the United Nations, five from the Swiss Red Cross, and two businessmen.

“Egypt! C’est vrai?” he exclaims in French, “I thought they were all black!”

I feel uncomfortable in my skin but remain silent.

“Is your husband Egyptian, too?”

“I’m not married,” I blurt out, embarrassed to my core. At the ripe old age of thirty, I am shelved as an old maid, all hopes gone.

“I want to show you to my friend. He has never seen an Egyptian!”

My cheeks burn. Am I the first Egyptian in town, the discovery of the century or an antique from Pharaoh’s tombs? Should I be put on display with a distinct label slapped at my feet?”Imported African. Rare species. Handle with care.” How can I explain to my Congolese teacher that I am not a real specimen?

More than three thousand years of history define me as an Armenian, a descendant from the people living at the foot of Mount Ararat where Noah’s Ark settled. The mountain was in Armenian territory for centuries. Politics moved it beyond the national boundaries and we became immigrants. How shall I explain that the DNA in my Armenian blood will survive forever, irrespective of the citizenship I have?

“I’m…I’m not a real Egyptian…” I mumble, trying to avert a misconception.

Thirteen pairs of eyes stare at me, as if I have just come out of ghost town.

I look at them and shrink at the task ahead of me. How will I define in two sentences our family history? My parents are survivors of the waves of “ethnic cleansing” that swept the Ottoman Empire from the 1890s through the 1920s. Under the pressure of reform, demanded by the foreign powers to improve the lot of minorities, the Ottoman Government “solved” the problem by reducing them in massive, harrowing, so-called called “displacements” into the Arabian deserts of the Middle East. Thus, the “starving Armenians” came into existence – skeletal, homeless, wandering survivors seeking refuge wherever a country offered asylum. Thanks to this “solution,” half the nation now lives in countries around the world, constituting the Armenian Diaspora.

“Who remembers the Armenians?” exclaimed Adolph Hitler to his officers on the eve of his invasion to Poland. We, and the members of my parents’ generation do, suffering in silence. The effects of genocide were present in my mother’s glassy eyes and in my father’s angry temper. It affected us all and will probably have its effect on a few more generations. We are the extra- uterine children of Motherland with different citizenships. Once transplanted, always a foreigner. Migration is not our family business, nor is it a national pastime, but circumstances forced us abroad to create a safe haven elsewhere. I cannot explain all this in two sentences. Nobody will understand my dilemma.

“Not a real Egyptian?  What do you mean?  Where do your parents come from?” asks a man who eyes me curiously, taking over the queries from the teacher. The determination of my nationality takes precedence over Lingala.

“They come from Turkey.”

“Are you Turkish?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then what do you consider yourself?”

Good question. I have been a floater all my life, a thin cloud flirting with the sun, daring it rather to disperse me. How can I explain my ethnic longevity?

“Armenian,” I say, with a smirk. I know it will not register.

“Armenian?  With an Egyptian passport?”

“It’s complicated. I’ll explain after class.”

The teacher takes over. We start the first lesson in Lingala. I sit there like a freak of nature. How did I end up here?

I am going through a period of adjustment in Leopoldville and an intense degree of cultural shock, coming from a conservative country. I am lost in this Babylon of United Nations. Last week I invited two compatriots from Egypt to lunch as a payback for their courtesy on my arrival. In this remote city of Leopoldville, one suddenly becomes friends with strangers holding similar passports. They treated me like kin. They advised me that life in Leo is built around entertainment, to escape boredom. So it was my turn. We walked home at noon, all three of us, from across the street, the United Nations headquarters, to find my meticulously prepared hot lunch in the refrigerator! I was indignant beyond control

“Why didn’t you cook it?” I hollered at M’bala, the houseboy.

“You say one o’clock!” M’bala shot back angrily, showing his index and grumbling in an incomprehensible language. My instructions were to cook for one hour.

I joined this class as a last ditch effort to communicate with him and other locals. Sometimes, in my ivory tower of despair, I question myself: is this the expatriate experience I dreamed about? Have I done the right thing by changing the course of my destiny?

Living alone should not be a problem, I thought, before setting out on this journey.  I lived in Alexandria on my own, about three hours away from home. Working with the United Nations was an honorable solution to leaving the parental roof. I didn’t care for Father’s iron rules but I missed my conversations with Berj, my younger brother. The older one, Kev, had repatriated to Armenia, fifteen years ago. He was only eighteen then. He hoped to find a better life in Motherland and meet our Aunt Ebrouk there, Mama’s much-talked-about sister, who repatriated from Lebanon. Was he looking for the same thing I was – a place to fit in?

Now it looked as if I had left my identity behind and more than that. Old friendships, community presence, extended family, and a world of minor pleasures taken for granted, like a handshake, a nod of recognition, eye contact with an acquaintance, a smile from across the street, or a hug from a friend had disappeared. Did anybody miss me? Was I already forgotten?

Perhaps I should not mention my origins at all, but then I don’t want to mislead this man who wants to show me around as an Egyptian. I know some of my new classmates will corner me with more questions by the end of class. I am not mistaken.

“That’s interesting,” says Walter, the Swiss gentleman sitting to my left, engaging me in conversation as class disperses. He is intent on finding out who I am. Fair hair, blue eyes, five foot eight in height, strong muscular build, he is attractive enough to shake my soul. “How can you be Armenian when you’re Egyptian?”

“Have you heard of Armenians?” I ask.

“Yes, vaguely. I really don’t know who they are.”

“Armenia is in Asia Minor, right below the Caucasus, but we live all over the world.”  While I wait for the information to gel, I add, to ease the process. “It’s part of the Soviet Union, you know.”

An eerie silence hangs in the air for a moment:

“Are you a communist?”

“No, for heaven’s sake.”

“I still don’t understand. What’s Armenia like?”

“I don’t know. I never lived there.”

“Then where did you grow up?”

“In Cairo.”

“How was it growing up in Cairo?”

“We had pharaohs for teachers and rode camels to school.”

Walter’s hearty laughter eases my tensions. I can’t imagine that working for good grades, fighting with siblings, rebelling against parents, and waiting for a knight in shining armor is any different elsewhere.  Am I mistaken?  For the first time in my life, I feel like a hybrid, not knowing exactly what the Motherland looks like, what our original traditions are and what superimposed customs have seeped into our culture. This class teaches me more than Lingala – the need to redefine myself.

One of the independent businessmen has heard our conversation.

“Did you say Rumanian? I didn’t really catch it,” he butts in.

“No, Armenian.”

Good Lord!  With such titans as politician Anastase Mikoyan, composer Aram Khatchatourian, and writer William Saroyan, Armenians should have carved a page in history, but they haven’t.

Raised eyebrows size me up. I realize that if I make a wrong move now all other Armenians around the globe will be judged by my behavior. I may not be a chip off the old block. In fact, I may even be the black sheep of my community, but, to the uninitiated, I am now the single specimen that represents the mass.

This “where do you come?” scenario repeats itself all during my vagaries, from the Congo through travels in Europe, through my transfer to Togo to my attempted stay in the Lebanon, and to my permanent residence in the United States.

As an immigrant, I am the suspicious new strain of virus wherever I settle. The immunization system of the local community produces antibodies to arrest the spread of invasive elements of my type. Landlords look for the transient in me. Educational institutions detect an accent and frown upon certificates earned abroad. They devise elaborate schemes to deny me college entrance, but they don’t know how stubborn and persistent this strain of virus can be. Employment agencies shrug off my international experience as they give me an obscure slot. To preserve dignity, I hoist my ethnic pride… and pray. Will I ever be accepted as an integral part of the local community where I will feel comfortable in my skin?

“Why can’t you give up being Armenian?” Caroline, a roommate in my migrant life, asks. Like my classmates in the Congo she is puzzled.

“How can I?” I reply. “My forefathers were massacred for their Christian faith and identity. I can’t betray them.”

I wonder if she understands what it is like.  Can one expect pears from a transplanted apple tree? Heritage runs in my DNA. It squats in my womb. I need to keep language and ethnicity intact in order to keep the communication lines open with my extended family and between the generations strewn across the world.

“My best friend never invites me to her Armenian Club,” a colleague complains. “She’s so clannish!”

“She’s doing you a favor,” I offer, “do you blame her?”

“How’s that? I find it rude.”

“Wouldn’t you feel left out in a community where everybody speaks his ethnic language, down to the dialect? Most know each other anyway.”

“I never thought of that.”

Should I mention that we treat the seventh generation still as family? That nobody is once or twice removed? That our theory of relativity is more complex than Einstein’s?

Where does all this leave me? Like all children born in the Diaspora I persist on foreign soil by standing close to the local ethnic oasis, the expatriate Motherland, where I feel safe and secure in being me, while making forays into the local culture. We cajole our parents, but keep pace with the world.   We end up living a double life, externally the law-abiding citizen, internally the conservative traditionalist. No wonder the question “Where do you come from?” follows me from the Congo to California, where I have lived longer than in Egypt.

This book defines my roots and perhaps will help promote awareness of the problems of many immigrants like me who, for various reasons – ethnic cleansing, political dissidence, unfamiliar religious practice, or, simply, lust for the unknown – travel the world in search of a haven where they keep their splintered souls together.

Read more about The Immigrants’ Daughter and Mary Terzian HERE.

Copyright 2010 Mary Terzian. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

The Boy Next Door

We all learned as children that the “Man of Steel”, Superman was not really human at all. Our super hero was actually an alien born on the planet Krypton and sent to earth by rocket ship by his scientist father. I can still clearly hear the announcement that Superman stood for “Truth, Justice and the American Way.” This was something that I deemed important as a child and something that I would try to emulate as an adult.

What about America’s real super heroes? Were they also “Strangers in a Strange Land” like Robert Heinlein’s Michael Valentine Smith or maybe the sons of some fictional Rambo?”

During my brief tour with the US Army I had the honor of standing and fighting beside many of those American super heroes. These real heroes were lads that sat next to you in church or who lived next door and perhaps mowed your lawn. These brave men had lived in our neighborhoods, attended our schools and churches and had done all the things that American kids do. But these brave men were different in a very special way. They too had the strong moral compass of Superman and had heard the call for “Truth, Justice and the American Way.” They had heard the call of their country and had stood proudly to accept their responsibility as United States citizens. They were not afraid of the talk of war or its intrinsic dangers. These men volunteered over and over again for the good of their country. These men were the Green Beets of the Studies and Observation Group (SOG).

Green Berets were three time volunteers. They had to join the military on a voluntary basis and not be drafted. Furthermore, they had to volunteer for airborne training and willingly jump out of perfectly good airplanes as part of their training. Thirdly, they had to volunteer for Special Forces. The volunteering part done, there was a long period of testing, qualifying and training before these young men could wear the Green Beret. Once awarded the beret, there remained a lot more training in a job specialty and in other areas such as jungle warfare and survival training. In the end, these few, these Green Berets, were the boys next door now grown into men of honor and dignity, highly trained and motivated to go wherever their Country would send them.

Special Forces medical class 67-1, Fort Bragg NC

My story began in Los Angeles, California where I was born to wonderful parents, George and Estelle Perry. My parents had dignity and had taught their children honor and love. My parents raised me as a Catholic. After moving to a home in Whittier California in 1952, my sister Judy and I were enrolled in a Catholic grammar school named Saint Gregory the Great School. It was in St Gregory’s parish that I learned more about my God and my Country. I learned that it was honorable to serve my Country and my God. I learned that the freedom to worship God was a right unique to free societies and a right that was indeed worth fighting for.

Growing up I was a typical lad who enjoyed hiking, camping, nature, and the out of doors. I joined the Cub Scouts and remained a member of the Boy Scouts of America until I was fifteen years old. I made a number of the long range hikes that were popular at the time including the Silver Moccasin and Golden Arrowhead. I was “tapped out” for the Order of the Arrow when I was thirteen years old and I remember being taken out in the woods of the Brea Canyon by a young man dressed as an Indian brave and made to spend the night alone on the ground with no sleeping bag or tent. Little did I know at the time that I would repeat this act may times in the jungles of Vietnam.

One day at St Gregory’s church I was saying the prayer that Roman Catholics say when they receive communion and I had a very special encounter with He who would remain my God and my protector to this very day. The prayer goes like this “O Lord, I am not worthy that thou should come under my roof. Say but the word and my soul shall be healed.” I said the prayer devoutly while gazing upon the image of the crucified Christ hanging on the cross and I was overcome with a peace beyond my understanding. When the day ended, I got on with my youthful life and grew far from the God I had encountered that day.

I earned many badges and awards while I was a boy scout, but the best were the Ad Alteri Dei which is the highest award a boy could earn from the Catholic Church and the Rank of Eagle Scout which is the highest rank a boy scout could earn. Not too many months after earning the rank of Eagle my interest turned to hot rods, surfing, and girls and my days as a boy scout came to an end.

I graduated from St Gregory’s in 1959 and attended high school at Don Bosco Technical Institute in South San Gabriel, California. I graduated from Bosco Tech in 1963 and attended my first year of college at what was then Fullerton Junior College (Now Cal State Fullerton). Since our family had grown over the years to now include my brothers David and John, and sisters Judy and Marilyn, it was time to replace our three bedroom house with one more suited to our family. A beautiful new five bedroom home was found in Huntington Beach and we moved in late in 1963. The following year I moved in with a few new friends from Orange Coast College. We shared apartments in Costa Mesa and later in Newport Beach where we lived until four of us enlisted in the Army in November of 1965. We enlisted on the buddy plan and each of us had hopes of winning the Green Beret.

I had enlisted with roommates Bert Merriman, Jim Sexton and Chris Cox. Each was just another “boy next door” until the spark of patriotism ignited a fire to serve. We all completed basic training at Fort Ord, California. We were tested and screened for Special Forces and two of us were selected to proceed to our goal. Friend Jim Sexton, the blond haired surfer I had shared many an adventure with while living on Newport Beach was found to be too young to proceed to Special Forces. At the time a candidate had to be twenty one years old to begin training and Jim would only be twenty and, therefore was disqualified. Jim went on to serve out his years of enlistment somewhere in Alaska.

My friend Chris Cox was diagnosed with a severe case of asthma and was disqualified and later medically discharged from the service. Chris went on to become an entertainer. He moved to Aspen, Colorado and sang his ballads in clubs within the town over the years while he pursued his love of the mountains and skiing.

Bert Merriman and I were accepted for further qualification and training in Special Forces. We were sent to Fort Leonard wood, Missouri for training as combat engineers and from there to Jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. After completing Airborne training and receiving our “silver wings” we were bused to Fort Bragg, North Carolina and the John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare. Here we were assigned to Special Forces Training Group where we were tested, screened, interviewed, and tested some more as part of the SF qualification process. After passing all the mental, physical and psychological tests we were given more tests to best determine our academic abilities and strengths. From here we completed eight weeks of Special Forces qualification training followed by issuance of our Berets and assignment to a Special Forces specialty school. Bert was sent to engineer school and I was sent to medical training.

For the next year I was trained in all aspects of medicine. My training was conducted at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Classroom training was followed by on the job training at the Army hospital at Fort Rucker, Alabama. My medical training class got smaller over time as men failed to complete sections of the training. After completing on the job training we were returned to Ft Bragg for another eight week class on tropical medicine and then the notorious “dog lab.”

In dog lab we were assigned a patient (a stray dog collected from a local dog pound). My patient was ironically named “Whiskey” and like my classmates I became attached to my pet-patient. The patients were worked up medically and then one day each was individually taken into a chamber and shot through the meaty part of the rear thigh with a high powered rifle. The high velocity of a bullet tearing through flesh sends out shock waves that kill flesh. Our job was to stop the bleeding, debride(cut out the dead tissue), and battle dress the wound. Over the following days and weeks we would change the dressing and nurse our patient back to health. When recovered, it was our job to put the patient under general anesthesia and amputate the leg as though it were a human patient. The patient was then over sedated and dog lab was complete. This whole process may seem cruel, but was necessary to give the Special Forces Medic the hands on training in skills that he would be expected to perform on his comrades when the need arose. Public protests at some point after my training led to a change where goats replaced man’s best friend as the new patients of the SF medics.

After successful completion of dog lab, my surviving classmates and I stood individually before oral boards where we were tested orally on everything we had learned over our year of medical training. A team of four doctors fired difficult medical questions expecting correct and immediate responses to all. Several more of my classmates fell by the wayside as they failed to perform well under the pressure of the oral boards. By this time in the process, the men who washed out of the medical training were given the option to attend some other SF specialty training, but were not allowed to serve as Special Forces Medics.

After completing the Special Forces medical training there was another short training session of about eight weeks followed by graduation and assignments to the various Special Forces Groups around the world.

My friend Bert had graduated long before me due to the shorter nature of his training and he was already in Vietnam. Bert had been assigned to Project Delta. My classmates from my medical class (SF medical Class 67-1) were sent all over the world; Germany, Panama, Okinawa, Vietnam but I was left stateside, assigned to the Seventh Special Forces Group. My assigned duties for a time were to provide medical coverage for war games being conducted in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. It was here, in the then dry counties of North Carolina that I encountered my first moonshiners and sampled their potent brew.

Not wanting to be left behind, I called Mrs. Alexander at the Pentagon and volunteered again, this time for the Fifth Special Forces Group in Vietnam. Within a month, I received orders to report for transport to the Republic of South Vietnam. And so, the boy next door had become a man wearing the Green Beret.

After returning home for a two week leave I reported to Fort Lewis, Washington to be transported to the Republic of South Vietnam. It was here in early December of 1968 that I befriended Ken Cryan another boy next door and native son of California. Ken and I became great friends and remained very close until his death in May of 1968. We traveled to Vietnam together, arriving at Cam Ranh Bay and from there to Fifth Special Forces Headquarters at Nha Trang. All of the other Special Forces men who had arrived with Ken and I were quickly assigned and shipped to their A or B teams around Vietnam. Ken and I began wondering what was wrong with us that nobody wanted us assigned to their teams. Then one day before Christmas 1967, we were called into the office. As we stood at attention before the officers desk, the stoic faced captain informed us that we had both been assigned to C and C North and that we had been held pending approval of our Top Secret Clearances. Neither Ken nor I had any idea of what the officer was talking about or what C and C North was. We were loaded on a C 130 transport later that day (Christmas Eve 1967) headed north to Danang and by Christmas day, we had learned our fate as new guys assigned to the Special Operations Group (SOG). SOG was not officially part of the Special Forces operations in South East Asia, but Special Forces was used as a cover to shift highly trained insurgents into the top secret operations.

When Ken and I arrived at Phu Bai a few days after Christmas 1967, we stood formation with other newcomers and were greeted by the FOB 1 commander, Major Ira Snell. The CO told us that the medics had a critical MOS and would be assigned to medical duties in support of the teams. He said that the FOB was in dire need of volunteers to serve on the recon teams and that he would consider any of us who volunteered. After thinking about this overnight, I went to the COs office the following day and volunteered once again.

Major Snell was delighted with my choice and assigned me to ST Idaho under the command of SFC Glen Lane. In the following days and weeks, I would get to know the men on ST Idaho during both training and leisure time.

Read more about Bright Light and Stephen Perry HERE.

Copyright 2010 Stephen Perry. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt
Am I Walking Worthy?

Often times I wonder, am I walking worthy of my calling? Am I walking circumspectly and not as a fool? What about my prayer life? Is it effective? What can I do to improve it? Am I studying enough? These are all questions that many Christians should be asking of themselves? It is called self-evaluation. You take a critical, spiritual look at yourself and ask the Holy Spirit to show you where you are weak.

Other questions I ask myself are: Do the people I allow in my inner circle bring me down or do they lift me up? What about myself? Do I encourage others to seek God’s face and to study His Word to improve their walk? What about my light? Is it shining brightly or is it dimly lit?

Every day I strive to honor God and bring Him glory. When I shared these questions with my “first friend,” a fellow minister, he welcomed me into the Christian club or the minister’s club. (I get to pick which one.) He reassured me that God will let me know if I pull too far away from Him. His response was comforting.

I like the idea that I am asking myself all of these questions because that lets me know that I am not spiritually dead. In fact, I am growing and maturing in my Christian walk. I am running in this Christian race because of my deep rooted love for God. He made it possible for me to be alive and well in this day and age. I have lived through three decades which is more than what most people lived to see.

Now, back to my initial question about whether or not am I walking worthy of my calling.  Honestly, I believe that I am. Every day, I encounter situations that can make me or break me. I can set my eyes on God and come out as a victor or I can focus my energy on my situation and come out defeated. I would not want that added stress when all I have to do is give everything over to God? To walk circumspectly simply means that I walk in my Christian life looking for opportunities around me to glorify God.. It means that I look for a chance to share God with others. As an ambassador of God, I look for opportunities to assist/minister to those who are lost and struggling and need encouragement and I look for those who are saved and need to see Christ lived out.Martin Luther said it best, “The world does not consider labor a blessing, therefore it flees and hates it, but the pious who fear the Lord labor with a ready and cheerful heart, for they know God’s command and they acknowledge His calling.”

When God gives you life, He expects you to live it. Not as you see fit, but as He sees fit. His ways are not like man’s and His path is not crooked and wide, but straight and narrow. And your destination (whether it’s on the wide and crooked path or on the straight and narrow path), is truly left up to you.

Copyright 2010 Satara P. Ferguson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

I did start showing myself that next week. At first it was not too difficult, because I could play on my ramkie and sing while I was doing this. But when he took my ramkie away and made me turn this way and that way for hours on end, I became very fed up and angry. And I showed him how angry I was.

One day, many moons later, I was still standing there. The big exhibition hall was full. It was in Piccadilly, opposite the William Bullock’s museum, so people came there when they left the museum.

I stood for six hours a day and people came to stare at me, passing remarks all the time, which they thought I could not understand. Sometimes Hendrick would allow me to play my little guitar. I loved feeling the dried pumpkin skin against my hands, which were now going soft because I was not doing proper woman’s work. I loved to play on the three gut strings, holding it under my chin, smelling it, and singing. Those were the best times.

At other times he took the ramkie away from me, especially later in the day, when the men came to stare at me. Then I had to stand and turn when he ordered me to. He made me smoke a pipe and blow smoke over the crowd. He painted my face in a funny way. This I was not used to. We never painted our faces back home. I felt ridiculous. And Obi, the boy, laughed at me.

One afternoon a famous actor came to stand by the cage I was being shown in. His name was John Kemble. Obi told me his name the next day, because it was in the newspapers.

I was very cold and had my arms around me, although Hendrick had told me many times not to do this. When Hendrick saw me put my arms around me, he shouted at me in Dutch, and the famous man heard him, so I dropped my arms.

“What a disgusting sight,” I heard John Kemble say. He must have thought I could not understand him, for he mumbled to a woman standing next to him, “I feel so sorry, so deeply sorry for her”.

I was very tired. By this time I had been standing for more than five hours, and I needed to sleep. With great effort I pulled my  back straight and wriggled my body as I tried to shift more comfortably into the knee-length dress which pulled tightly around me, showing every bump, every fold of me.

I sighed. Every time I took a deep breath, my chest strained against the tight bodice and my breasts flattened against the see-through fabric.  My two nipples spread out flat, gaping at the crowd, like two blobs of black gum pressed out under the glass of a microscope. I felt shy and embarrassed.

“Forward,” I heard Hendrick shout from behind the curtain, where nobody could see him. He said this in a loud voice, so everyone could hear him.

“Like a wild beast being ordered around,” I heard John Kemble mutter again, but I could not see his face, for I had turned away from him, “more like a bear on a chain than a human being,” he said, for I was totally under Hendrick’s command and afraid of what he would do if I did not obey.

I knew that John Kemble was looking at me from behind, and I felt hot with shame.

“Draai!” Turn! Hendrick barked at me again, in his heavy Dutch.

This time I ignored him. I was too tired.

Hendrick came out from behind the curtain. I turned my head away from him, and looked slightly to the right. Straight into the eyes of John Kemble. I closed my eyes then, too embarrassed to look into those kind eyes, and hugged my arms again.

The exhibition hall was freezing. All the people were dressed in their outdoor clothing. Men were wearing greatcoats and waistcoats and cravats around their necks for warmth. Women wore chamois coats with satin linings, which reached down to their ankles.

“She’s falling asleep,” a woman screeched in a high-pitched voice. I pretended to keep my eyes closed, but I was peeping from underneath them, at the woman.

She was kneeling in front of the cage, peering up under my dress, her green eyes large and shocked. She had been staring up for at least five minutes. Pretending to tie her shoelaces, the woman sat on her haunches, her head bent sideways as she tried to get a better look from under the little cloth which covered my private parts under the dress.I opened  my eyes and they looked straight into John Kemble’s. I could see that he was very angry. I was angry too. I bit my lip and scowled down at the woman.

Then someone poked a parasol through the metal bars of the cage and stabbed me in my soft flesh from behind. “Is this natural?” the voice asked stupidly.

“Aargh!” I shouted. I could hold back my anger no longer. I shouted so suddenly that the green-eyed woman’s husband, who was peering through the metal bars of the cage with an eye-glass, jumped back. He tripped over their dog, which yelped and jumped out of his way.

At that moment I turned and hit down onto the parasol. The parasol fell with a loud clang into the cage.

“What a savage!” the woman shouted, stepping back and tripping over her wide skirts. But instead of falling into her husband’s arms as she had expected, she stumbled back. Her husband, instead of helping her, stepped further out of her way. I thought good for you!

The commotion forced Hendrick Cezars to come out from behind his curtain. He ran around the cage to the woman.

“My sincerest apologies, madam,” he murmured, offering her his hand, helping her up. Flustered, she pointed at me.

The parasol was lying inside the cage, on the little stage at my feet.

The crowd went silent. All eyes were fixed on the parasol. I stared at Hendrick, frozen in fear.

Hendrick took full advantage of the situation. With exaggerated care he opened the low gate of the cage and pulled himself up onto the stage. As he came close to me, I stepped back. I thought that he was going to strike me, for he came towards me with a black whip in his hand.

With the whip out in front of him, Hendrick stepped forward. He made as if he was facing the gravest danger. He bent down, one hand behind him with the whip held high. With the other hand he slowly reached for the parasol. He kept his eyes fixed on me, then stood up, holding the whip between us.

Not a sound came from the crowd.

I was mesmerized with fear. My eyes were glued to the whip. As Hendrick moved closer, I stepped back and felt the cold bars of the cage against  my back. I could go no further.

“Stay!” Hendrick barked out at me in English. His voice boomed across the hall. He paused dramatically, as if I were an angry wild animal.

He quickly jumped back and out of the cage, slamming the gate shut.

Once outside the cage, he slowed down his movements again, like a magician exaggerating each careful move. He knew all eyes were on him as he pulled a metal chain out of the pocket of his coat. He fixed the chain in place and padlocked the gate.

The crowd clapped as he turned around. He bowed three times, his silly dark red wig (which he was wearing only since he came to England), shifting forward.
My knees gave in and I sank to the floor. I cried without tears. My tears had dried up long ago.

“Stand up!” I heard him shout from behind the curtain where he had once more disappeared.

I jumped up and leaned against the side of the cage. I trembled. I felt lost and defeated.

“Poor creature. Poor, poor creature,” I heard John Kemble murmur to himself.
Hendrick saw John Kemble and he came back from out of his curtain. “Please feel free to touch her, sir,” he said. The man ignored him.

Then John Kemble caught  my eye. I could see the kindness in his face and I could not look away. I pulled myself away from the metal bars and turned my body squarely towards him. I looked straight at him this time. I patted my palms together, as we Khoi do when in front of someone we respect.

“Babba, Babba!” I said.

“What did she say?” John Kemble asked Hendrick. “Does she call me her papa?”

“No, sir. She says you are a very fine man.” He lied again.

“Upon my word,” said John Kemble dryly. He was looking at me from the side, with his head at an angle. He looked pleased. “Upon  my word, the lady does me infinite honor!” he said.

“Do touch her, sir, if you so wish,” Hendrick said again. “It is without additional fee,” he stressed.

John Kemble pulled back. “No, no!” he said. “Poor creature, no!”

I could see tears in his eyes as he turned away from me. “Now that was a sight which made me melancholy,” he said to his friend as they turned to walk away from the cage. “I dare say, now, they ill-use that poor creature! Good God. How very shocking!” I heard him say.

And yet (not too long after that) the court believed Hendrick when he said I wanted to stay in England, that I wanted to be put on display, that I did not want to go back to see  my family. All things which he and that doctor Alexander Dunlop made up between them, and forced me to say. All things which they wrote down and made me put my mark against. I was so scared of them that I agreed to repeat those lies to the men whom the court sent to speak with me personally. I said those things to them because I was afraid.

But the whole world believed Hendrick’s lies.

As the rest of the people followed John Kemble out of the hall that night, I fainted. The day had been too long.

I woke up as Hendrick dimmed the lights. He returned to my cage. He unlocked the gate, stepped into the cage and pulled me roughly to my feet. Slowly I came awake. I shivered, this time not from cold, but from fear and fever.  My body was hot and felt dry. I could feel yet another boil in my groin. The boils had started developing a few days before. A small one, throbbing ones, big ones.

I stood up, confused and unhappy. I leaned against the metal bars as Hendrick walked away, leaving the gate of the cage open.

I closed my eyes, trying to understand what had gone wrong.  My mind could not wrap itself around the change of events, try as I might. I could not figure it out.

It was not as if it had been my decision alone. It was a big decision. In our culture sending a woman away on a big ship to far away lands was a big decision.

Frowning, not understanding, I moved out of the cage. Slowly, with difficulty, I climbed down from my platform of persecution, shivering with thirst and fever.

This was how most of my days went.

Copyright 2009 Monica Clarke. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

Introduction: Infopreneuring In Action

There is no doubt in my mind that the old saying “Knowledge is Power” is absolutely true. It gives me the power to make money.  But more importantly, it gives me the power to live the flexible lifestyle I desire.

And, apparently, it makes me a cool Aunt!

I was in Florida on a vacation for a much-needed change in scenery and to visit family. One evening I was online checking my sales statistics, and my young, computer-precocious niece came into the room, curious about what I was doing. I explained to her that her Aunt was a writer among other things (I thought that trying to explain the full concept of infopreneuring to her might be just a bit much), and I had gotten some book orders from some customers on the internet.  She was puzzled because I had been playing in the pool most of the day with her and her younger sister, and couldn’t figure out how that could happen.

Easy, I said “people come to one of my websites, check out all the information I give them, and many sign up for one of my lists for more information. The smart ones, who see that I know what I’m talking about, eventually buy one or more of my books or lots of other things I have for sale.  That can happen any time, day or night without me having to do anything, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It can happen while we’re playing like it did today. It can happen while I am sleeping; it can happen when I am eating lunch, when I’m at the gym, watching TV, or traveling.”

ANYWHERE and AT ANY TIME!

Being very business-oriented for her age, she then asked me how much money I made. I told her, “not that much” because I didn’t want her to think I was loaded and then she could hit me up for the laptop she wanted.  I just told her about the orders for one of my early books to keep it simple. I made a little more than $15 for each book, and I had sold 5 of them while we were playing, or $75. Her eyes got wide and she said “that may not be much to you, but it’s a lot of money to me, and we played the whole time! Can you teach me?”

I laughed and relished her enthusiasm. Kids have such an open mind and are not weighed down with the baggage us adults accumulate. I have no doubt that one day I likely will teach her all about infopreneuring, and I told her I would when she is just a little older.

Now infopreneuring is not just about books, and that was just a small example of what infopreneuring can do for you, but it clearly illustrates three important points about my work as an infopreneur:

1. I can make money from what I know
2. I can make that money while I am wherever I want to be
3. I can make money while I am doing whatever I want to do.

See? Knowledge really is power, and money!  And it can absolutely change your life, and the lives of those you empower with your knowledge.

Read more about What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know™! and Melanie Jordan HERE.

Copyright 2009 SunLover Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt
Jasch’s Letter from Hell: Russian Gulag History

Writing letters to the “West” during Stalin’s regime is a criminal offence. According to NKVD documents, sending or receiving a letter can result in arrest without trial. For this offense, and other trumped up charged, millions are sentenced to Stalin’s Gulag of over 2000 prison camps. The survival rate is one winter.
In their home village in southern Ukraine, on a warm summer day in 1931, an entire family is arrested. Father Jasch Regehr, mother Maria (Bargen) Regehr and their six children are declared “enemies of the State” and sent into northern Siberia. A space 5′ X 5′ in a three-story barrack becomes their new home. From this space they write letters to they write letters to their family in Canada.

Jasch’s Biography
So far, Jasch has been a survivor. When he is born in 1885, infant mortality rates are extremely high. He is the only survivor of six children. His mother dies ten years later. As a young man, Jasch serves in the Medical Corp as a “conscientious objector” during World War One. After the war, at 26 years of age, he marries lovely Maria Goosen. Six children fill their house in Altonau, a small Mennonite village in southern Ukraine.
In 1929, the family attempts to escape to Canada. A few others had been successful, but the Regehr’s attempt fails. Jasch is immediately arrested and held in a local prison. Maria is allowed to visit him and bring him food, but he is weak and emaciated from the beatings, nightly interrogations and meagre food rations.
He manages to survive his eight-month prison term. Escorted by guards in June 1931, Jasch is taken to a large granary where his family is being held. Then together with hundreds of others, the entire Regehr family is arrested and shipped in cattle cars on a nine-day train journey to the northern Ural region of Siberia. In the prison barracks, typhus and malnutrition further weaken his body. He tries to work to earn more bread rations, but he only grows weaker. Typhus is a menacing disease transmitted by fleas, lice and bed bugs. Days of pain, fever and muscle spasms confine him to the hard wooden platform in the barrack. Yet Jasch works whenever he is able. He also writes letters while he is strong enough. Desperation drives him. But his weakened body cannot sustain him. Jasch Regehr dies in a prison camp named Tarabunka on October 8, 1933. Maria drags his wasted body from the barracks and buries him in the frozen primeval forest near their barrack.
But while father Jasch has the strength, he pleads for his wife and children in prison. The paper available is a Soviet postcard imprinted with a red broom sweeping away “enemies of the people”.

Jasch’s Letter (approximately 1931/32)
[illegible] ….when she will experience it. And so we are robbed of all our children. One often gets close to despair. But God always leads out of the depths onto the heights. Many thousands have starved. Yesterday we received the 9 dollars from you. Oh, I just cannot restrain myself out of sheer thankfulness. Yes, dear siblings, if you were not here we would no longer be here either. “Remember us at all times” is our cry to God as well as to people. When will things change? Hearty thanks to all those who have given. May God reward them. How are things with your Peter. Fritz, be rescued while there is time. Greetings to all the children. Oh what advantages your children have over ours! God be with you. Your humble, Jacob.
My Marie just said we have no more flour. The dollar is worth about 1 r. 37 k. [rubles and smaller currency]. Things are looking very very bad for our Peter. Help Geschwister [siblings] please. — We can hardly carry our burden any longer. He can no longer walk. On June 27th we reported the news from grandfather to you. This night I dreamt a lot about him. “Auf wiedersehen” [we'll see you again] Your humble, Jacob.

Copyright 2008 Ruth Derksen Siemens. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt
World War Tree
Chapter 10

Just for the record, I’d like to point out that that Mother Nature is constantly trying to kill us with little tantrums like hurricanes, tornadoes, monsoons, blizzards, floods, lava flows, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural occurrences. If you survive each round of “pin the weather disaster on the human” you get to bask under blue skies and hike on moss-covered trails until the next time she has her geological period.

We like to fool ourselves into thinking she likes us by driving our hybrid to the local park, siccing the kids on the swings, and taking a brisk walk on a man-made nature trail which contains no poison ivy, no
elevation changes to wind us, no sharp rocks to fall onto, and no hidden branches to poke our eyes out.

Don’t get me wrong: there is natural beauty all around us but Mother Nature is a femme fatal. She is a deadly, beautiful woman who constantly utters under her breath PMS: People Might Survive. You can get all touchy-feeling about it if you want but remember: Ma Nature is a drama queen and does not like to be upstaged. We are surviving by the skin of our teeth in an environment which offers us just enough respite to allow us to live and thrive until it turns the tables and kicks our fragile asses.

Life on Earth is the biggest cosmic bait and switch ever. Sure, it looks good at first (a lot better than say the surface of the moon) until an asteroid comes along out of nowhere and creates AN ICE AGE. One day you’re a carefree dinosaur, munching on mammals. The next day you’re part of an oil field and what used to be your head is being sucked up a pipe so Exxon can refine you.

Which makes me wonder: why does Mother Nature create oil? Where did the environment get this crazy idea to turn the remains of marine life and plants into gobs of grease? Why would a perfect ecological system sabotage itself by creating a substance which creates greenhouse gases when refined and burned in internal combustion engines?

Is oil really the environment’s version of urine and God just never thought we stupid humans would find it? I’m sure on the 5th or 6th day, God was sitting there thinking to himself, “Okay” so I’ll take all the dead, leftover crap and let it settle deep underground and subject it to geothermal forces. Who will think to look there?”

In other words: is oil God’s way of sweeping some dirt under the carpet that no one was ever supposed to find? And, if not then why do we continue to flog ourselves because we found it and use it? But, I digress. The environment has always been a double-edged sword. It provides for us resources which make our life easier and better.

But, there is no free lunch. Did you know some scientists believe thattrees can communicate with each other through the air using pheromones to warn of dangerous insect attacks? Now, I don’t know how well developed these skills may be but I think we should recognize the potential danger posed by pissed off poplars, plums, and pines. Perfect example: I read a story today about a priest who was trying
to clear a fallen tree off the roadway. While he was doing that a second tree fell down and killed him. I think this is reason enough to process as much paper as we want from our little wooden friends. I’ve never heard of anyone being killed by a ream of copy paper. Turn them into paper and you take away their will.

Plus, trees have a long memory of disdain for us even after we neutralize them. In January, 2009 it was reported that heavy wooden panels, 10 by 10 feet, fell off the walls at a ritzy Boston restaurant and
injured 11 patrons. Even when it’s dead it still keeps coming! Noting all this evidence against trees and their bad attitude, environMental cases still try to guilt us into treating trees differently than other natural resources which God has freely given to humans to enjoy.

Right after the holidays this year I read a story out of Fort Lauderdale urging residents to recycle their Christmas trees at local parks so they wouldn’t end up in landfills. The parks make mulch out of them.

Well, I like mulch as much as the next guy (and honestly, with the way trees behave, I just assume they be chopped down to size for our own safety) but, there’s a hidden message here. What the far-left is saying is: chopping down a Christmas tree “just to look at” for your own enjoyment isn’t enough of an excuse. Don’t just toss it out when you’re done drooling over its pine scent and hanging Star Trek ornaments on it. That’s wasteful and selfish.

Now that you’ve had your “fun” do something meaningful so your tree’s death will not have been in vain. Let the city put it through a wood chipper so they can scatter its remains among other living plants and its last deed will be to encourage the growth of some poison sumac which you will hopefully step in sometime this spring when you visit the park for Earth Day.

Ironically, tossing a Christmas tree into a landfill is probably one of the best things one could do for the landfill. The tree will completely decompose over a relatively short period of time compared to the other
crap in there. But, landfills aren’t good enough burial spots for trees that we cut down just because we like looking at them. Humans. We’re such selfish bastards.

You know it’s only a matter of time before some special interest group comes out and announces that if you really cared about the environment, you’d not turn on your Christmas lights this year. Just think of the wasted electricity.

And, not only do you want to kill a live tree for your morbid celebration but you want to string energy-sucking icicle lights around your house and turn them on for hours simply – because it’s festive!? I repeat: you selfish bastard. We’re docking you 50 carbon credits because you’re such a narcissistic Christian. And you Jews: we’ve got your eyes on you, too. Better make damn sure those Menorah’s hold candles and not real light bulbs – or else.

It’s just a matter of time. That’s why I’m going to call their bluff and eclipse this inevitable action. Announcing: N.O.E.L which stands for: “No Overly Excessive Lights” I’m the founder and President and as such, I’m requesting all holiday lights not be turned on this year. Sure, it’s fine to put them up as long as you keep your scummy little energy-sucking fingers off the ON switches.

Trust me: the holidays will be more fun if you are not destroying the earth’s resources. Sorry kids! I know it’s not as merry but you can just imagine how much all these earth-slaying Christmas light bulbs add to global warming.

Besides: do you really want the polar ice caps to melt and all the polar bears to die just because you wanted to see some bubble lights on your Christmas tree? If you destroy the North Pole, then where will Coca-Cola find animals to depict drinking their product in future holiday ads? (By the way, please see Appendix IV on the relationship between Coke and the far-left.)

As for me, I’ve decided Christmas trees are just so “yesterday pagan” if you know what I mean. I’m a man of the future. That’s why this year my family and I are going to decorate my La-Z-Boy chair with Compact Fluorescent Bulbs.

And just to be on the safe side instead of a tree angel, we’re going to put a Life Alert on top in case there’s an accident and we’re all overcome by mercury vapor Christmas morning.

Copyright 2008 Corey Deitz. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

My Father’s Betrayal
Chapter 1

Father,” I prayed, “You know the darkness I feel
from my parents. Be my light today. Honor this
obedience.” Jerry added his Amen. I massaged my
throbbing forehead. We pulled to a stop at Route
34, just south of Halesburg. It was July 1997.
My husband and I had driven north, through the
cornfields of central Illinois, for our yearly visit
to the family farm. I rummaged through the glove
box, found two Tylenol Extra Strength, and washed
them down.
I leaned my head against the seat back. “My father
thinks I’m stupid because I grow flowers rather
than tomatoes.” I stared at the green cornstalks in
the fields. “And has my mother ever asked me a
question about my life?”
“Yeah, that’s them,” Jerry said. As he glanced at
me, God’s compassion shone in his gray eyes. In our
twenty-five years together, Jerry had often seemed to
me like the incarnation of Jesus. He even looked a
little like I imagined Jesus to look: tall, with strong
features and gentle hands.
“I don’t think I’ve talked to them more than
twice this year. And once was three weeks ago when
I called to set up this visit.” I ran my fingers through
my short brown hair as I gazed at the mobile home
park on the south edge of town, bigger now than I
remembered. Jerry squeezed my shoulder. I smiled
at him.
As the medication worked, the throbbing
lessened. Passing the metal-sided grocery store
downtown, my heart softened as I thought of the
large family—eight children, plus my maternal
grandmother who had lived with us—that my
mother had fed from the proceeds of the small
grain farm. They worked winter jobs, too. My father
butchered beef at the processing plant; my mother
cooked at the steak house. How many headaches
had they endured?
In the last block of the business district, grayed
plywood sheathed the windows of Laughlin’s
restaurant, where I had paid a quarter, handed to me
by my mother every week after mass, for the Sunday
Chicago Tribune. Threading my way through the
tables full of townspeople eating their beef and gravy
hot plates to the back room where the newspapers
were stacked, I had worn my country poverty like
a jacket of shame.
Just past the old restaurant, we turned right,
passing classmates’ houses on our way out of town.
Across a railroad, just beyond a winding creek, the
180-acre farm began. Between the water and the
road, a stand of pine trees grew. When I was in high
school, my father had sheared off the back limbs to
foil thieves who’d been stealing them for Christmas
trees, but they looked full now.
We turned into the farmyard just past the orchard
and pulled up near the old barnyard, where ducks,
geese, and chickens had once pecked, but where
grass and gardens now grew. Along the driveway,
purple clusters of grapes hung heavy against broad
green leaves. In my childhood the vines never bore
fruit because of my father’s herbicide overspray.
Beyond the grapes, my parents, in their eighties,
toiled among the tomatoes.
As we opened the car doors, my petite, whitehaired
mother straightened and waved, a watering
can in her other hand. Such hard workers—I can
respect that, I thought, returning the wave. My
father, resting on a tubular metal kitchen chair that
functioned as a garden bench, eyed us without lifting
a hand. He’s a tired old man—he can’t hurt me.
He leaned over to grasp his gnarled wooden
cane where it had fallen. Despite gripping the
cane’s rounded top with a shaky hand and using the
chair’s vinyl-covered back as a second support, he
nearly stumbled as he stood on his arthritic knees,
breathing heavily.
“Are you still nursing a forty-year hatred?” He
wagged a crooked finger at me, his black eyes bright
and hard behind his glasses. His unexpected rage
felt like a ten-foot tsunami. I planted myself against
the onslaught.
Leaning on her hoe, my mother watched us,
silent. Behind me, Jerry grasped my shoulder. A few
feet away, a cardinal called to its mate in the golden
delicious apple tree. As I glanced at the wet black
soil surrounding the tomatoes, trying to compose
a response, I remembered a day before the time
I started hating my father, a day more than forty
years ago.
~
Was that the supper bell? Behind the red
corncrib, near the field of green stalks that towered
over me, I’d found just the right consistency of black
mud I needed to make a pie for a tea party with my
dollies.
As I turned to run to the house, my foot slipped
in the goop. I sank into the mix of mud and poultry
droppings up to the tops of my shoes. Finally, I
wrestled myself out, but not without lying down
to get some traction. My pants! Tears sprang to my
eyes. Mom had just produced them from her stash
of rummage sale finds that morning, when I had
complained I didn’t have anything to wear. She’d
found another pair, too, but they were patched and
had a big stain on the left leg. I’d whined to wear
these today, even though they were good enough for
a Sunday afternoon drive. “I’ll be good,” I’d said. “I’ll
keep them clean.” Boy, would she be mad now! Our
pigs kept themselves cleaner.
I ran into the kitchen. At the Formica table,
everybody was waiting. Mom stood at the stove with
her back to me, dishing up bean soup out of the deep
well at the back of the stove. That meant they had
already said grace. Grandma, feeding Henry at his
highchair at the end of the table, didn’t notice me,
but my five older brothers and my sister stared. I felt
even smaller than my almost four years. My mother
turned toward the table to serve the soup, balancing
three bowls. She nearly dropped them when she saw
me. “You’ve ruined those good pants! What’s the
matter with you? Go wash up!”
“I got stuck in the mud,” I said, my tears mingling
with the black smears on my face.
“Yuk; you smell terrible,” Fred said, holding his
nose.
I felt dirty, and not just on the outside. I smelled
bad, and I was bad. And my stomach was empty. I
could smell the soup, with its bits of ham. If I went
and washed up, I might lose out. For sure, there’d be
no ham left. I hesitated, one muddy shoe on top of
the other, biting a fingernail. My father, even though
he had his back to me, seemed to sense I was still
there, because he looked over his shoulder at me.
His dark eyes looked tired. He must have seen the
fear in my eyes because he said, “Go get cleaned up.
I’ll make sure there’s enough left for you, Snooks.
I’ll even save a piece of ham.”
I smiled really big at him, and with a little snort
at Fred, turned to go to the bathroom. I heard my
father say to him, “That’s enough, now. She’s just a
little kid.” He said that last part like it was okay to
be little and not know enough to keep out of the
mud. He came in from the fields almost as dirty as
I was, so maybe I was okay, after all.
~
“No. I stopped hating you a long time ago,” I
said to my father. Small purple eggplants shone
in the noonday sun. My parents were legendary
gardeners. Next to the eggplants, the Brandywine
tomatoes were starting to turn. Orange blossoms
and gleaming fruit peeked out of the big zucchini
leaves. A few feet away a bushel of onions awaited
the cellar, and, down the middle of the apple trees,
potato plants were blooming. The golden delicious
apples, like most of the others, were still hard and
bitter. Last week, however, when I phoned to say we
were coming, Mom had said the Wolf River apples,
an early variety, would be ready, and she’d bake a
pie. I loved her pies. For days, I’d been imagining
the taste of her flaky crust, enclosing the cinnamony
richness of soft apples. Dessert on the farm never
disappointed.
Nancy and Joe, my sister and brother-in-law,
were out of town that weekend, or they would
have joined us. They lived a few miles away, and, in
addition to helping Mom and Dad, they raised their
own vegetables at the farm. My other sibling who
might have come for the day was Al, but his wife,
Ann, had had surgery recently and wasn’t able to
travel. Another brother, Harold, lived in Illinois, too,
but he was an institutionalized schizophrenic. My
other brothers—Herb, Craig, Fred, and Henry, along
with their families—were spread across the country.
Today, it was just Dad, Mom, Jerry, and me.
Heart thumping, I forced myself to advance
toward my father. He stiffened as I put my arm
around his shoulders. I couldn’t remember the last
time I’d hugged him. Feeling his heat through the
thin fabric of his dirty shirt took me back to the place
where the hatred had begun.
~
It was an unusually warm October day, again wet
from a rain. After lunch, my little brother, Henry,
and I had been sent outside to play. I’d learned my
lesson, so I was wearing an old stained pair of shorts
that day, with a red flowered shirt. My frizzy brown
hair stuck out at odd angles. We’d picked several
hollyhock flowers and buds, and I was teaching
Henry how to make “ladies.”
“Here,” I said, guiding his stubby fingers, “put
the toothpick through the stem.” I held the bud end
as he jabbed the pick in.
“Now, put this flower on the other end of the
toothpick.” I held the open flower stem up for him
to attach the two pieces. “Isn’t that pretty?”
He just grinned. He didn’t talk much yet. As we
lined up a row of purple dolls, I felt like a real teacher.
That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up, ever since
I’d met Mrs. Carter, the kindergarten teacher, last
Saturday when Mom and I were at the grocery store.
She had made me feel important, squatting down to
my eye level, telling me about the picture books and
toy kitchen area in her classroom.
I was imagining the pleasures of kindergarten
play when Henry swept all our pretty ladies into a
pile, crushing them. As I opened my mouth to yell
at him, my father rounded the corner of the barn
behind us, and his midafternoon shadow engulfed
us both. I turned to tell him how Henry had ruined
my little schoolroom, but I changed my mind when
I saw the firm set of his face. He wasn’t in any mood
to listen to our little squabbles.
“Karen, come with me to the store,” he said,
holding out his hand. Gulping back my tears at
Henry’s destruction of my happy school scenario,
I grabbed his hand and jumped up and down. He
wasn’t in a bad mood, after all. And he wanted to
take me for a ride in the big Nash!
“Me, too!” Henry said.
“No, just Karen. You go inside. Now.”
Henry began to cry, scrunching up his face in
that silly way of his. I scowled at him. I got to do
something he didn’t. He swatted at me, missing
my leg, before he ran toward the house. He’d tell
Grandma how he didn’t get to go with us and she’d
stop sweeping the kitchen floor and read him a book.
But I got to have my daddy all to myself. When
you’re one of eight kids, you don’t get much time
alone with your daddy, so even if you miss getting
a book read to you, it’s okay.
We walked, hand in hand, across the barnyard. I
had to run, practically, to keep up. The chickens and
ducks pecked nearby, but nobody else was around
on this school day. It seemed odd Daddy would go
to the store instead of Mom. If he went to town, it
was to get parts or feed or seed. He’d take one of
the boys for their young muscles. But Daddy knew
what he was doing. I didn’t question him. As if he
could read my thoughts, he said, “It’s too wet to get
the picker in the fields, and Mom needs bread for
supper.”
“Can we get ice cream?” We’d had the treat for
my recent birthday.
“We’ll see.” I knew that meant to be quiet and
good and maybe, even probably, my request would
be granted. “Get your shoes on.”
“Should I change my shorts?”
“No, they’re fine.”
I ran to the garage where I’d left my shoes and
buckled them on quickly. I hopped into the frayed
front seat of the Nash, where I’d never ridden alone.
Mom always rode in the front passenger seat, with
Henry between her and Dad, now that he was the
baby. Today, I had it all to myself. I was the special
one today. The dark interior of the car smelled
like the King Arthur tobacco Daddy smoked in
his wooden pipe. I struggled to close the door as
the engine rumbled. I loved the sound, like a lion
roaring. After I got the heavy door shut, I sat on my
legs to see out the window better. The tires crunched
on the gravel of the driveway as we pulled away.
“Pretty hot for October, isn’t it,” he said.
“Yeah.” I couldn’t remember any other Octobers,
even though it was my birthday month. I remembered
the big chocolate cake Mom had baked, with
my name written in yellow icing. I got to eat a big
piece, even before dinner. Then I got to eat another
piece afterward—even better with the ice cream!
We pulled into a diagonal parking space in front
of Cross’s grocery store. I scrambled across the wide
seat to get out Daddy’s side of the car. He lifted me
up on the high sidewalk and stepped up himself. The
little grocery displayed all kinds of good food, but
Daddy headed right for the bread aisle. Picking up
a Honey Wheat, he turned toward the front of the
store, not stopping at the ice cream freezer.
“Daddy, you said we could get some ice
cream.”
“I said we’d see. I see it’s not on sale.” He frowned
at me as he pulled out some coins from his trousers
and handed them to Mrs. Cross.
“How are you, today, Alice?” he said.
“Pretty hot. Okay, though.” She handed him a
dime change.
“But I’ve been good,” I said, tugging on his
sleeve.
Mrs. Cross smiled at me. “You are a good girl,
aren’t you?”
Daddy unhooked my hand from his sleeve and
pulled me through the door. “We can’t afford it. Now
be quiet about it.” He lifted me into the car.
I was crying by then. “We’ll see” was almost
a promise, and you were supposed to keep
promises.
He sped toward home, but when we approached
our driveway, he kept going.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Out to see if the fields are still wet. Come over
here. You can drive.”
I dried my tears on my faded shirt, scooted onto
his lap, and grasped the big wheel. I was driving.
Wait until Henry hears about this. It’s even better
than ice cream!
When we got to the corner, half a mile north
of our house, I slowly turned the big wheel to the
left. After we crossed the creek flowing out of our
back fields, Daddy helped me turn onto the rough
ground of the half-picked cornfield. He stopped the
big Nash behind the tall stalks. Just over the fence,
a spring bubbled. When my big brothers took me
to play with them at the creek, we usually got a
drink from the spring. Maybe we’d walk down the
farm road that forded the waterway to see whether
there were any fish in the creek. I loved playing in
the water, and I wasn’t allowed to go to the creek by
myself, so that would be fun. Just me and my Daddy.
He never took me out just by myself. We’d probably
get a drink first. I was thirsty. I could almost taste
the fresh water.
But we didn’t drink from the bubbling spring.
Daddy didn’t show me the shiny fish in the water.
Instead, he held me in silence for what seemed like
a long time, his grip on me slowly tightening. What
was he doing? Why weren’t we getting a drink?
Abruptly, he laid me out on the car seat, squashing
the bread on the seat beside us with my head, and
began to touch me in ways that I had never imagined.
I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t
breathe. I stared in horror at his expressionless eyes,
fixed on me—but not in love.
Finally, he let me go. I scrambled to the passenger
door and pressed against it, even though the
armrest dug into my side. I hardly noticed. I stared
out the window at the bubbling spring. I felt dry as
a desert.
He restarted the car. “Now, you get back over
here and sit on my lap, or I’ll do it again.” He grabbed
my arm and yanked me back onto his thigh.
“Don’t tell Mommy. This is our little secret. I did
it so you’ll let your husband play with you, too.”
Play? Not like any play I knew. I never wanted a
husband if that’s what they did to you.
“What about the bread?” I whispered. It lay
half-mashed in the corner.
“We’ll say we dropped it.”
When my father pulled up in front of the garage,
before he even turned off the ignition, I bolted out
the car door.
He hollered after me. “Here, take the bread
in.”
I dared not disobey. Though out of his reach, I
was still inside his authority. I ran back to the driver’s
side and grabbed it out of his hand, careful not to
touch his fingers. The chickens pecked around my
feet as I hurried into the house. My mother, weeding
the garden, waved. I didn’t stop. Dropping the bread
on the kitchen table, I escaped to my bedroom. My
heart raced as I ran up the back stairs, crying. Annie,
my big dolly, was leaning in the corner. Wiping my
nose on my sleeve, I took her over my knees, pulled
down her pants, and hit her bare bottom. “You nasty
girl. You’ve been playing with George again. He’s a
bad boy.”
Throwing Annie aside, I picked up my baby
Cathy doll, and curled on the bed, hugging her to
my chest. I squeezed my legs together and rubbed
my eyes. My father had looked at me through his
bifocals. Maybe rubbing my eyes would get that
image out of my head. My whole body felt empty, as
if he’d gutted my insides. Through the open window,
I could hear the grinder out at the machine shed. He
was probably sharpening hoes to go help Mom in
the garden. Usually I liked to stand at the entrance
to watch the sparks fly, but now I never wanted to
watch the sparks again. The smallest one would set
fire to this wilderness inside me.

Copyright 2008 Karen Rabbitt. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE
Home is a Storage Room

I was born into a traditional Chinese family; both my grandfathers took advantage of the Ching Dynasty law of 1900 that declared a man could have two wives and they could all live together. My fraternal grandfather had been a rich man in China’s Canton Province and could afford to support two wives and fourteen children; my father was his second son by the first wife. When the Communist Party took over China in 1949, the family fled to Hong Kong where grandfather eventually ran a grocery import and export business, which could not support his large family in the same style. My father worked as a manager for this business, but he did not make a regular income.
My mother’s father owned a preserved fruit factory in Hong Kong, but he too had a large family, with two wives and seven children. My mother was the youngest daughter of the second wife. My parents met because their families were friends.
In 1950 when my parents got married, Hong Kong was recovering from World War II, when the Japanese had occupied the island after defeating the British in December 1941. The population of Hong Kong, which was 1.6 million before the war, had shrunk to about 600,000 by 1945, when Great Britain resumed control after the war was over. With the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Chinese immigrants fled persecution and streamed by the thousands into Hong Kong. Corporations in Shanghai and Guangzhou also shifted operations to the city that would for many years be the only place of contact between the Western World and Mainland China.
My twenty-four-year-old father and eighteen-year-old mother started life in a four-hundred-square-foot, windowless storage area with a bare concrete floor, behind my maternal grandfather’s fruit factory. It had no separate bathroom (we used the facilities in the factory) or kitchen, but at one end of the large room, there was a wood-burning stove and a water tap with a basin underneath. A large footbath would be filled with water for bathing. All drinking water, however, had to be boiled, but this was typical of Hong Kong at the time. At the front door of the warehouse, the only door marked this so-called residence as Number 12 Square Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. Just inside the front door were boxes and boxes of prunes and preserved fruit, the fruit factory inventory. The factory nearby had a telephone and a radio, but they were considered luxury items, and my family would wait for years to acquire them.
Our home, which was rent-free, was in the back of the warehouse, on the ground floor of a four-story wooden building that housed ten separate families on the upper floors, also living with minimal accommodations. The residents were mostly adults who worked long hours and paid low rent. With only one kitchen/bathroom per apartment, bathing was a shared activity. The men would take a shower together at the same time, followed shortly after by the women. The building was a firetrap and home at night for countless cockroaches, rats, worms and lizards.
In the Central District of Hong Kong there were many four and five- story wooden buildings; they had been built before the war and jammed together with no thought for landscaping, much less trees or flowers. These buildings were also highly susceptible to fires. My brothers and I were shaken awake one midnight when I was six; there was a fire on the third floor and the black smoke poured out into the night. We watched in fear as firemen brought out the casualties: one of them was a young friend of mine. We escaped everything but water damage from the fire hoses, but there was no insurance to cover our losses.

***

I was born a year after my parents’ marriage and for the next nine years my mother gave birth to five more children. I became the respected “Big Sister.” Fortunately for me, because Chinese parents always wanted sons, my parents were then blessed by four boys before my mother had her last child, also a girl.
Chinese custom designated the fraternal grandfather to name the children, and Ah Kung had a name ready for a male child. When he discovered his new grandchild was a girl, he was so disappointed he turned over the naming to Pa Pa, my father, who responded by naming me a common Chinese name which means “beautiful clouds.” When I was a little older, I was also given the English name Cinderella, shortened later to Cindy. When I was in my twenties, I decided Cindy was too childish and I changed my name to Wendy, which seemed more professional to me.
As a baby, I slept in a rusty old crib beside my parents’ double bed in the makeshift bedroom, but soon graduated to a folding canvas cot when the next baby was born. The cots occupied the space designated as a dining room, which had a table and chairs and a cabinet for dishes. There were crude wooden partitions to divide our home into four small rooms.
I will never forget the horror of waking up one night to find a bloody, black smelly mess at the foot of my cot. It was a large dead mouse, probably killed from the poison my parents used to hide in various parts of our home to keep the rat population in control. Unfortunately, I didn’t easily forget the incident because my mother couldn’t manage to scrub away all the blood.
Soon after, this horrible incident was reinforced by several of the neighborhood children. There was a playground fairly close-by and one day an older boy, who had caught several mice, wanted to experiment with fire. He encouraged other boys to gather around and help him burn these helpless creatures. I was appalled.

***

Since storage space was at a minimum in our tiny abode, a four-foot-wide wardrobe served to hold everyone’s clothing. Even with eight eventual family members, there wasn’t much to store. Because Mother couldn’t sew and we had very little money, each child got one new outfit a year, usually purchased right before the Chinese New Year celebration, and this frugality applied to shoes as well. Even Father, who had control of our meager finances, had only two outfits for the entire year.
British influence had introduced Western food and clothing styles, but except for an important occasion, our manner of dress was traditional. At home, females wore pants and a high-necked top with an angled lapel that fastened with buttons or loops. For a special event, my mother wore the conventional Cheung Sam, a high-collared form-fitting dress with the skirt slit down each side. The dress fastened the same way as her top, but for a special occasion, I would wear a Western-type little girl’s party dress with a fuller skirt and puffy short sleeves. My brothers dressed in short pants and simple t-shirts.
Mother kept busy raising her children and cooking the meals, but if she had spare time, she would work for her father’s factory, packing boxes with preserved prunes to earn much-needed money. As the head of the family, Father played a conservative Chinese male role; he made the income and wasn’t involved in domestic chores or in raising his children. Although I knew my parents loved us, they showed little affection, and our conversations were perfunctory for the most part.
Because my oldest brother performed well in school, my father and mother were willing to invest in my oldest brother’s education, but they did not value me in the same way. They assumed a daughter would not be ambitious, after all, my mother wasn’t. Perhaps I’d finish high school and then probably marry young. As for working, teaching school would be a suitable goal for me.
Their discrimination and lack of support only inspired me to be motivated. They will discover, I said to myself, that I am a phoenix, and I can fly.

***

My mother’s role as the timid housewife influenced me early in life. I could see she was ignorant of life outside her little world and had no desire to widen her horizons. It made me become the opposite: independent and self-confident.
“Can I help you with the shopping, Mother?” I asked when I was about seven. I had heard her complaining that she had always been treated unfairly by her family, and never got any attention since she was the daughter of a second wife.
“I am so busy doing all the work, and nobody helps me out. You are old enough to help your family,” my mother instructed me. “Here is one Hong Kong dollar for you to buy us something for dinner, Sau Chun.”
“What will I buy?” I asked her.
“You’re a smart girl, you figure it out. It must be cheap,” she answered.
I walked along the narrow bumpy roads to the nearby shopping area on West Street, where several butchers had stalls on the same street. I had to push my way among the crowds of pedestrians, bicycles and rickshaws. With the influx of Chinese immigrants, people were desperate to sell all kinds of things. I had to watch out for men carrying long poles with buckets on each end, buckets filled with vegetables, fruits and all sorts of edibles. There was even a man sitting on a sidewalk selling snakes. Chinese favored snake meat and especially the liquid that came from the snake’s gall bladder.
When I checked all the butcher stalls, I’d look for one with six or more pigs’ brains available, then I would bargain. I had often watched women haggle over the price.
“How many do you need?” the butcher would ask.
“Eight,” I would say.
“I’ll sell it to you for two Hong Kong dollars,” the butcher might reply.
“You have so many and no one is buying,” I would retort.
“How much do you have?” he would ask.
“One Hong Kong dollar.”
“I’ll sell it for one dollar and a half,” he replied, “but only for seven.”
“I will buy six if you sell it for a dollar,” I would answer, and he usually agreed.
I was proud of myself that I could get a bargain for my family. I earned the nickname “Pigs’ Brains Girl” from some of the children in my neighborhood.
At home my mother would remove the red nerves from the brains, chop them up, and then add ginger, water and a little wine to make a soup on the wood-burning stove. Hungry as we were, we would choke on the smoke from the wood fire since there was no ventilation and no windows. Mother always added lots of rice to the soup to try to fill us up. The soup was tasty, but there was never enough protein to sustain us, and all of us children were thin and weak from malnutrition.
By age ten, the years of poor eating had affected me the most. My skin and eyes turned yellow and my weight plummeted to thirty-six pounds.
“Look at her, she may be dying,” Mother tearfully said to my father. “Let’s bring her to the hospital.”
“I don’t trust the doctors at the hospital,” Father anxiously replied. “Western medicine is no good; too many people die of jaundice there. We will look for a good Chinese herbalist.”
The next day my maternal grandfather brought a renowned herbalist to visit me. My mother explained the history of my sickness, and the doctor scrutinized my hands and my eyes and then advised, “First, every day you must get a Chinese medicine I will prescribe from the herbal shop. You boil down three bowls of water with this medicine until you have one bowl left for her to drink. But, if you do not find wampee tree roots to add to this mixture, it will not work.”
Luckily, a severe hurricane had toppled many of Hong Kong’s lovely wampee trees. My mother made a tea of the wampee tree roots and the medicine and had me drink it every day. I had been bedridden on my canvas cot for months, but the wampee tea and the Chinese herbs finally cured me.
Recovering from the brink of death, I cherished the value of life. The incident reinforced my sense of hope, and I determined I would create a different and better life for myself than my parents had.

***

As I grew older, I realized that I was a pretty girl; I had been told I looked like my maternal grandmother, who was beautiful and graceful. My oval face and smooth fair complexion was complimented by a warm smile. There were many young women who worked in my grandfather’s prune factory, and since they were great fans of the movies, they knew all the Hong Kong film stars.
If any of them spotted me when I walked by the factory, they would scream, “Look, look! Miss Lin Feng is coming now.” Lin Feng was a good-looking and popular star in those days and I was immensely flattered. It reinforced my feelings that I could accomplish what I wanted in life.
We children were excited when an American movie was filmed in Hong Kong in 1960; some of the scenes were shot quite close to our home. I watched one important scene in which Nancy Kwan, who played the main character in “The World of Suzie Wong,” walked up the hundred steps of Ladder Street, steps I would take to school and to play with my baby sister, Doris.
I told myself, “When I grow older, I’ll be as pretty and successful as Nancy Kwan.”
My intelligence was recognized by a fraternal aunt when I was young, and she came to visit with special information.
“I have good news, dear sister. My friend who works as the division chief of the Hong Kong Education Commission can help your daughter to enter the prestigious and famous Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic School.”
“What is the need for that, sister?”
“The students at this school are known for their fluency in English.”
“I am afraid she could not catch up to the English standard. The tuition fee is high too,” my mother answered.
“Think of the opportunities it will give her. She can go to a university and perhaps travel overseas to work. It will enable her to get a better job.”
“Why would she want to leave Hong Kong and her family?”
“She is a smart girl, and perhaps she wants more from life than you expect.”
“Ah, she is only a girl, my sister. She will marry like me and forget all about schooling.  And if she is so smart, she can become a schoolteacher after high school. That will be enough.”
The favor was never acted upon, but I didn’t lose heart. I knew my dreams would eventually come true.

***

Another momentous event happened in 1965, when I was almost fourteen. The government of Hong Kong gave us the money to move.
The old building on Square Street had never been in good shape. Residents complained about the pieces of brick and sand that fell from the ceilings; not only was it annoying, but it was dangerous. After a great deal of negotiation, the government finally condemned it and agreed to pay several thousand dollars for the residents to move.
With this money and the help of my maternal grandmother, my father purchased a new small residential apartment (coincidentally, also four-hundred-square feet) in Kennedy Town, a factory area, for Hong Kong $25,000 (US$5,500). The building was concrete, had eight floors with ten units on each floor, and an elevator. Our new home had three small bedrooms, a sitting room, and a detached kitchen and washroom. We could even afford some new furniture: a dining table, chairs, real beds and a television!
Life was looking up for my family until 1967. Supported by the Chinese Communist Party, a political riot erupted in Hong Kong with the goal of toppling the British government. For several months we endured the turmoil of homemade bombs and nightly curfews until the British arrested the leftists and regained full power. Many residents decided to move elsewhere, but we could not afford to relocate and had to make do with Hong Kong.
Read more about When the Phoenix Rises and Wendy Wong HERE.

Copyright 2008 Wendy Wong. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.