Gai

When I used to spend a couple nights a week hanging out with Cambodian kids in Bangkok’s red-light districts, my favorite kid was Gai.

Gai was 13 or 14 when I met her, though she could have passed for 10. Unlike some kids, who worked hard to sell their flowers to marks, Gai seemed like she could care less. Her dismissive attitude to that work, and the fact that she liked to draw and color and play tic-tac-toe with me, was all it took. I was hooked.

I think the fact that she wasn’t anyone else’s favorite kid also played a role in it. The woman who was her caretaker on the streets didn’t act like her mother, and didn’t seem to give her the best care. She wasn’t as cute as the younger kids who sold flowers, and didn’t try hard to be liked. And so I liked her. A lot.

I remember the first time Gai got sick. She was off the street for weeks at least. I think that it was months, though my memory might be faulty. I remember when we finally saw her again, when she was brought to the red-lights in a sidecar but couldn’t even get up and go out on the street yet. I was incredibly worried for her. But she seemed to get better over time.

In August 2011, I went out into the red lights of Bangkok for the last time. I don’t even remember which night I saw Gai last.

Three weeks ago, Gai died.



I surprised myself by crying a little when I wrote that sentence. I’ve cried for Gai off and on over the last two weeks, but I expected to be past that by now. It had been a number of days since the last time.

Honestly, I don’t really feel like I have the right to cry. Gai was my favorite, but I hardly knew her. As we were both transplants into Thailand, we didn’t have a lot of common language. We saw each other off and on, played games off and on, and did a tiny bit of schooling, and that was it. Since I left Bangkok in 2011 I hadn’t seen her, and as so many other things came up I honestly didn’t think about her a lot. If a friend hadn’t gotten word to me that she had passed away in that hospital, I never would have known.

But I do know, and as little as I really knew Gai, her death still breaks my heart.

Just a couple days after I found out about Gai's death, a friend of mine played a song that he had written recently. The song has hopeful lyrics, but its melancholy tone makes it quite clear that we yearn for something we have not yet seen. The song made me cry for Gai. I recorded him singing it and sang along with the recording on my computer. I got all the pictures I had of Gai, and mixed them with pictures of her native Cambodia and the red-lights she had to work in, and spent hours late at night making a movie that expressed what I was feeling (no, you can’t see it, only two other people have ever seen it and they both knew Gai). I learned to play the song on guitar, and sang it myself. Somewhere in the song and the pictures and the time making the movie, I processed through my thoughts.

But there’s only so far that processing can take you. Because it still comes down to the fact that a teenage girl died after going through a lot of suffering in her life, and no amount of processing I do is ever going to make that feel right.

In After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken, Kent Annan writes:

If one of my children were diagnosed with a fatal disease, it would reveal nothing new about the world or God. I shuddered while typing that. Friends are going through this now; the most awful things imaginable already happen all the time.

For those who live by some faith, who want that faith to be eyes-wide-open honest, who want to be able to respond to goodness with gratitude, isn’t life itself a kind of continuous crisis of faith?

I believe that God is love, and God is powerful, and that God cares deeply for us. And I also believe that it was really, really wrong that Gai died last month. Unless you’ve completely sheltered yourself in some OC suburb or something, you’ve got to come to terms with a God who exists in a world where little girls are trafficked into the seediest parts of Bangkok and where some of those little girls die. As Annan said in another part of his book, any faith that can’t deal with that ought to die, because that’s reality.

I believe that the world as God intends it to be has not yet come. I believe that God’s Kingdom is already here in some sense, and yet is strikingly absent in the most important sense. I pray for God’s Kingdom to come, for justice to be done and all to be made right. And I know that I better be devoting myself to joining in His work along those lines as long as I’m here. Because to be in a world like this and do nothing is not something my heart could tolerate.

I pray He brings you back Gai.


When the Lord Brings Us Back (unpublished song by Tom Wuest)
Psalms 126, 115, 30

Gracious God bring us back
Captives of our false gods
We have eyes, yet cannot see
We have ears, yet cannot hear

     Those who sow in tears
     Will one day reap with joy
     Restore us O Lord
     Praise God all you saints
     Who plod through the dark of night
     Joy comes with the dawn

When the Lord brings us back
We’ll be like those who dream
Laughter will grace our hearts
Songs will spill off our tongues

     Those who sow in tears
     Will one day reap with joy
     Restore us O Lord
     Praise God all you saints
     Who plod through the dark of night
     Joy comes with the dawn

     Joy comes with
     Joy comes with
     Joy comes with
     the dawn