I was seven years old when a flood washed away life, as I knew it. At first, the flood was mysterious and full of adventure. My mom dressed me up in my fishing waders on the third day of the torrential downpour and we waded out into the street with water up to my knees. I brought my fishing pole with me, thinking maybe fish from the nearby river escaped, and were swimming along my street. Then I wanted to get my Spiderman raft out of the garage and float by the houses of my friends, but my mom wouldn’t let me.

Our house stood on a high road. When we walked down a small hill to a lower road, the water rose to my waist and a current started pushing at my legs. My mom let out a scream, grabbed hold of my hand and quickly pulled me back up into the house. I sat inside for three more days and nights and stared out the window to the black sky above, and the violent rains falling onto the earth. Sometimes God threw it down in buckets, sometimes He sprayed it down with His giant hose. I asked my mom if this flood, like Noah’s, was being used by God to wash away all the evil people in the world. “No, God will not punish man with another flood,” she said. But on TV, I saw that the flood was swallowing up people alive.

When the waters finally receded, I learned that they washed away my parents’ import business and all the stuff in it. My dad cried with his arms folded on the kitchen table. I wasn’t supposed to go into the kitchen and see him like that, I scolded myself back in my room. My mom took my child savings account - the one that I deposited change into every week -and emptied it, along with my porcelain piggy bank, all the drawers in the house, all the pockets in the closet and the lucky two-dollar bill our neighbor gave my parents when they started up their business. At school, I asked my teacher where ‘bankrupt’ was located, because that’s where my parents said they were going. The next few weeks, strangers would ring our doorbell and leave food on the porch. Every time my mom took the food into the house, and prepared a meal with it, my dad grew more silent. He didn’t like it, I could tell. It was an invasion into our lives, this food delivered to us by strange hands. And yet, we had to swallow it after my mom said grace at the table. (more…)