My parents were constantly bringing strangers into our house. I never knew who would be walking in the door to stay a week, a month or more. My mother either found these people through her job teaching English to foreigners at the community center, or my father through his Southeast Asian contacts. Numerous Vietnamese boat people stayed temporarily beneath our roof. The had names like Lien, Han and Chung.

I remember a Cambodian family that came when I was six. They lived in our basement, which had been recently carpeted. They had a bed down there, and the Cambodian woman cooked soups of cabbage and wet noodles in a big pot on our wood stove. Everything downstairs took on a strange smell when they moved in. They were not prohibited from the upstairs where we lived. The setup in our basement was to allow them privacy. The woman breast fed her little son at our dining room table, as my sister watched with fascination.

The plan was for the Cambodian family to stay at our house until their papers were processed, the man had a steady job and they found somewhere else to live. It was an open time frame. I didn't have any expectations for their departure. Most of our guests left as quickly and unexpectedly as they came, however. The man, in this case, beat his wife one night, spousal abuse being the cultural norm of his country. The police came. They asked a lot of questions. My father said he didn't care if they threw the man in jail or not, but that he wanted him out of our house. The Cambodian woman would not leave the husband, so they all left that night. None of this seemed strange to me. I assumed families all across Elwyn Park had foreigners living in their basements.

Then there was Lien, the twelve year old foster child who, when we met her at the airport, turned out to be seventeen. We took her anyway of course. She had lied about her age to get out of the refugee camp. She didn't want to go back to Vietnam, and the camp had been no real treat either. Who could blame her?

Still, seventeen is not twelve. At Portsmouth High School, she was quickly taken care of by a Vietnamese motorcycle gang. These boys spoke her language. They also had tattoos of dragons on their arms and chests. Lien went to parties at night and didn't return until the next morning. My father was furious. The day after one of her parties, he sat on our front steps all morning waiting for the boys to drop her off. When they arrived, he stood on the steps shaking his fist. The motorcycle gang outnumbered him four to one, but they didn't make any challenges.

Lien left after only a few months. She got pregnant, and my mother didn't want to have to explain to me and Amanda how someone who isn't married can have a baby. At the time, we both believed that babies came all on their own after two people made their vows in a church.