<< May << A Sort of Blog about Neung (August) >>September>>
The Beautiful Game
I have been delinquent in my updates here; I apologise. The summer just went by too fast, and although I half-composed a couple of posts, they did not find their way to completion.
We went back to France in June to embark on another part of Neung's education. On Monday June 12, we took her to Gelsenkirchen, Germany, where she saw her first ever World Cup game. Then, the following week, we went on a trip with Jill's parents and saw two more games, in Kaiserslautern and Nuremberg. In the end, she saw all three first round games of the U.S. team. In between, we took a trip to Karlovy Vary and Prague. Neung already has five visas in her passport: two for the United States, two for Europe, and one for the Czech Republic.
I'll spare the details of our struggles to get to these games, noting merely that contrary to all my stereotypes, the organization in Germany was far inferior to that in France eight years previously. Neung really is a trooper, though: at times she had to do walks that would have had most children twice her age in tears; yet she didn't complain at all. She doesn't quite get the game yet, and so some of the time at the matches she was simply engaging in very expensive drawing and coloring. But she really liked the atmosphere, and the face painting, and the cheering, and the booing of the referees. There was something very endearing indeed about hearing this little Thai kid cheering "U.S.A!, U.S.A!"
We also made a trip to the United States, mainly for us to catch up with some friends in and around Washington D.C. Our very old friends (um, better make that "our longtime friends") Maeve and John were kind enough to host a barbeque for us and other friends that we had not seen for many years. As it turned out, adopted children and step-children abounded: Maeve and John's two girls were in fact the only children there from a traditional family structure (and since their family is pleasingly unconventional in many other ways, we will forgive them that).
Most of the summer, though, was just spent hanging out in France, enjoying the weather and the backyard and the bread and the cheese and the wine. Well, OK, Neung wasn't consuming much of the cheese or wine. And now we are back in Singapore, and Neung has started Year One in her school, and she is about 3 cm taller than when I last posted.
30/8/2006
Taking Stock
Sometimes I feel that the accounts that I write here are sanitized and self-censored. There are certainly some things of which I cannot write, for various reasons. But I sometimes also avoid talking of the ongoing difficulties of managing our relationship with Neung's grandparents.
It is now a little more than a year since Sanam and Panya asked us to take Neung, and almost eight months since she came home with us to Singapore. I honestly think that things are going as well as anybody could have expected at this point. We are of course thrilled, and I think that Sanam and Panya are, as well. Yet the relationship remains stressful. The visits back to Thailand are sometimes difficult: Neung does not always want to go, and when we are there, she sometimes does not want to stay with her grandparents. In part this is because she has now become very attached to us; in part it is because they simply do not give her the same amount of attention that we do. We are working very very hard to minimize the problems that this causes -- but Neung is only five, and it is hard for her to grasp how she might be hurting Sanam and Panya's feelings. (At the same time, Panya and Sanam have communicated that they understand that, now, Neung sees us as her parents.) It is possible that, at some level, Neung also feels rejected by them because they gave her to us, although of course we do everything we can to explain to her that their decision came because they loved her. But she is only five.
When I was there with her in June, Neung did not want to stay overnight with her grandparents. We compromised by having me stay at their house until she fell asleep. At one point during the evening Sanam invited me next door to have some beer with her and two other women from the village. One of these women was badly upset, apparently because her boyfriend had been abusing her. It is hard for me to put into words just how strange it felt, sitting in the middle of this domestic crisis, not quite sure why I was there (had she wanted me to be away from Neung?), understanding only a fraction of what was going on.
We worry about so many things. We worry that Neung will hurt her grandparents by rejecting them. We worry that they will think she is not speaking Thai well enough: something that makes every phone call home a stressful experience. Although we do trust them -- really we do -- there is still occasional residual suspicion or fear on both sides. How could there not be? We worry that, for some reason, they will suddenly decide the arrangement is not working, although there has not been the slightest hint of that. Perhaps they worry that someday we will show up and say we want to give her back, although we would of course never do such a thing. We worry that, at some point, they will try to take advantage of us financially (we think this is very unlikely, actually), and we worry that others are taking advantage of them, knowing their connection to us (much more likely).
I went back to Ban Nam Khem with Neung again last week. As is so often the case, there were several people -- friends, neighbors -- milling around at Khun Sanam's house. She has started a local spa, with massage and the Thai version of a sauna, and several people had come to partake. As often happens, there was someone there who spoke a little English (and by now I speak a very little Thai, though much less than I should), and he was trying to explain something to me. Whenever this happens, my defenses go up: I get scared that there is a problem, that someone is unhappy. I think this goes back to the days in Bangkok, just before we were bringing Neung to Singapore, when we suddenly felt and feared that Sanam and Panya were getting cold feet and might want to cancel all the plans. Yet every time my anxieties prove ungrounded. This time it was someone who had worked with Neung's mother, and who wanted to tell me about her. So every time, following on my fear, is guilt, guilt that I still enter into these interactions with so much instinctive mistrust.
Neung, meanwhile, was very good on this visit. It was clear to me that she still did not want to stay overnight, but this time she was a big girl and a brave girl, and stayed the night without fuss. I am immensely impressed by her: it must be terribly hard to keep making the transition between these two worlds, yet she manages it. For the simple truth is that Sanam and Panya are apart from Jill and myself along almost every dimension you can imagine. We are divided by culture, by religion, by language, by beliefs, by education, by class, by wealth. We are urban, they are rural. We have different ideas of how to educate, comfort, and discipline Neung, different levels of risk tolerance (she still ends up riding on Sanam's motorbike; we are still terrified by this; Sanam still thinks we are crazy farang for worrying).
But despite all of that, we share one terribly, terribly important thing: the love of and our love for an extraordinary little girl. Somehow, in the end, that trumps everything.
30/8/2006