To The Devil A Daughter (part 3 – the conclusion)
You quickly spot the expat who just can’t adjust to a different way of living – he’s the one going around planning stuff; always trying to make sure things go right. I remember a teacher in my infant school drumming into us, “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” Rubbish – maybe the single most important lesson you can learn in life is that getting things right is vastly over-rated. Just bumble along, don’t make plans, don’t have aspirations – that way you leave yourself open to amazing possibilities. This is what appears to be happening in my personal life. It was never my decision to marry my Cambodian wife – it was entirely hers; I just went along with it with no particular expectations. As a result, rather than dealing with expectations that have been dashed, I’m finding myself in a marriage that is becoming more interesting all the time.
I managed not to stay in a fatherly groove for too long, but developments are a bit on the gushy side. Just to remind you: one Friday my wife broached the subject of a hapless orphan. After listening to her and saying the issue was worth thinking about, within minutes phone calls had been made; the next day visits and decisions were happening quite unknown to me. The following day was supposed to involve a brief visit and then a sensible time-scale to think and plan and stuff. I found myself in possession of a child. Barely four hours later, her future was secured when the director of the orphanage and his wife took her in. That was it: no social workers, no interviews – but there was legal adoption paperwork. The next Sunday we took her back to visit her gran for the day and a scrawled piece of paper with three thumb-prints was delivered. Neither the village chief nor anyone else asked for a penny.
One detail that I could read on the form was her date of birth – it turned out that her birthday was the following day. Two months before, I’d had a very special birthday at the restaurant; now our wee lass had the best (i.e. only) birthday she’d ever had. Although she calls me ‘daddy’, she’s aware that her primary guardians (‘mama’ and ‘papa’) are the couple who run the centre and I feel more comfortable about that. One more detail: she has a strange scar on her chest – her mother inserted something under her skin but nobody is sure exactly what. I’d guess it’s some magic charm, and I’d say its powers are potent – we took her for a medical and she is clear of HIV (which killed her parents) and any other diseases (apart from the standard fare of lice, worms and ringworm).
Over the course of that week the little girl really blossomed. She turns out to be fiercely intelligent, and now that she has food in her stomach is devouring learning at an astonishing rate. Whilst initially a quiet child, she has a most endearing personality; playing, singing and dancing with the rest of the kids as well as going to school and learning English at the centre, she’s quickly settled and is thriving. One thing that moved me is how she kept the dollar we gave her to give to her gran. She’ll ensure that we don’t neglect the old lady. However, she rapidly progressed from terrified little creature to slightly spoiled brat and I realised that our input was causing her to feel superior to the other kids; it isn’t right for a kid to boast about her ‘parents’ in an orphanage. So we disciplined ourselves to keeping a distance and treating her equally to the others; she soon found the balance and is proving to be a very popular and funny character, in addition to being multi-talented.
Sralang Apsara