TRAVERSE

THE WRITER
for me to stay as well. So I continued to pick flowers. Then, in the blink of
an eye, I saw them. There in front of me, they sat on their motorcycles
looking like giant, angry elephants about to stomp over me. The other
children had vanished and I was left alone there.
A million thoughts ran through my mind. What was I going to do?
Would my parents kill me if they found out? Would I end up being a
prostitute? I was scared.
I was not sure if it was the fright in my eyes or that I was young and
innocent or that it was my luck, but one of the guards nodded to me to get
back inside the fence. Without hesitating, I took the chance to rush back
inside. It was better to be a prisoner with my family than to be an abused
prisoner alone.
As I walked away from the fence, a myriad of women and children
stared at me like I had committed a capital offence. I felt embarrassed
and was afraid that one of those people would definitely tell my parents
about what I have done. If they found out, I would absolutely be whipped
by my mother. The trip home that afternoon through rows and rows of
shingle-roofed bungalows took longer than I remembered. But the strenuous
walk to our cramped living quarter had made me decide to keep my
mouth shut of the experience for as long as I could. It was not until many
years later when I gained enough confidence that I finally revealed the
incident to them. My mother laughed about it. However, I knew that it
was definitely not something laughable then.
Since that day, I never dared step past the fence again. Although my
body could not physically travel past the fence, my mind often wondered
beyond it. Sometimes, I leaned on the fence facing the Thai snack shop
and thought about what America was like. Did it lie just beyond the
rusting, brown shingle-roofed barn in the distance where the sun shone
like it never set or was it over the lush hills afar the barn?
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