I’m in church. 

The blank walls interrupted  

by the scar of the cross. 

All eyes on me because 

Wasana, my language teacher and former nanny,  

whose name means fate,  

is clucking at me.  

I squeeze into the bars  

on the back of the plastic chair. 

She is telling me to answer a question posed by Pastor Kanokchai,  

something about righteousness.  

Kimberly knows this answer!  

I studied the word with her that week, and now  

she wants me to use it. 

My face is a blank. 

I feel eyes like sucked and shining longan seeds prying. 

I shake my head. Something on my forehead 

wants to buckle. 

Next day I cross the block of hot concrete to eat mama noodles with the nurse aids. The nurse aids, in their dorm, live next to my family’s white townhouse on the clinic compound where my dad is a missionary doctor, my mom a missionary nurse. The nurse aids’ dorm is gray like the mountains around us when covered with harvest smoke. The roof is red tile. It kisses the smooth blue sky. I love walking here, into a room of women who love me and who love to tease me. I like that, with them in their kitchen, I can forget my distance. They let me jump into the clutter of tongues, our noses sweating and sniffing over spicy soups. 

Today, tied outside to a skinny papaya tree, is a scrawny chicken.  

What will you do with it? 

They tell me it is Seng’s chicken. Seng, the gentle, wide-cheekboned lab tech who teaches me and the other kids Sunday School, who helped me suck up swamp water with micropipets and culture it for my eighth-grade science fair project. Seng, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Someone from the village, in thanks for a blood test, had given her this chicken, which she could not bring herself to kill. Wasana can do it for her, though, someone says. Everyone chuckles.  

I feel hot. I excuse myself. 

What Wasana did to me in church was not so very bad, I think. I was her pupil, she had a right to test me. I knew she thought I could answer. I could tell that she didn’t expect what happened or failed to happen, the silence so total you could hear the whirr of the stand-up fan in the corner beating the air until Pastor Kanokchai, with kindness and pity, released me, moved the sermon along. I had shamed her. 

I was so painfully shy back then. It may have had something to do with strange expectations I sensed, eyes on my skin, or the language—my own and not my own—filled with these impossible gaps. Homeschool English but Thai dialects everywhere else. Furloughing with my family back to America every four or so years, we would return to Thailand after months abroad, scary months in which every word I used to own seemed to leak out of my head. I had to grasp back colors, animals, sun and moon, pineapple—no—passionfruit, so close but for one consonant swap. 

After I left the hot dorm kitchen, I found Wasana on the stairs, contemplating Seng's tied-up chicken. She motioned for me to sit.  

I’m sorry I made you lose your face. 

It’s nothing.  

My head between her knees, she combs my tangled hair with capable fingers. Fingers that had tried to teach me how to carve guava and carrot roses, to hold the curled poses of traditional dances, to pluck a guitar. She gave me my everything, I think. Even my first word—gai, chicken—cooed to me sweetly as a baby in her caring limbs.