Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork

And in a household with three teenage girls — Ruth-Marie and Linda-Lee and David's little sister Margaret, who was twelve going on twenty-two — David was a relief. Sometimes, Norma thought, her head could just explode with the chaos in her household, especially on those hot, steamy tropical days, when she'd think that if she'd stayed in Wheaton, it would be twenty-eight degrees right now with a soft, quiet snow falling. But here she was in Thailand, her husband off in the mountains somewhere charming who-knows-who into doing who-knows-what; Ruth-Marie and Linda-Lee were having another one of their knock-down, drag-out fights; Margaret just bought her first tube of lipstick; little Paul had a fever; Laura wanted to show her once again how to can mangoes — and bedraggled and sweaty, she'd knock on the door of her son's room and say, "David, can I just come in here and close the door behind me?"

Of course, David's room would be a mess; the kid didn't — he couldn't — keep anything neat: heaps of papers from school on the floor, all his old clothes piled up and perhaps a little ripe, puzzles and games in the corner which he had long outgrown but which his grandparents in America still thought were to his taste and sent him, the guitar which he was forever plucking lying on his unmade bed, sheets tangled on the floor. But for Norma, the room was dry land when the good ship SS Walker Family Mission seemed in danger of going under. Five kids in the jungle was easy compared to five adolescents in Chiang Mai. And the nice thing about David was, he got it. He really did. He'd laugh his rumbling not-quite-sure-what-my-voice-box-will-do-next laugh and say, "They're driving you nuts, huh? Come on in, Mom, you can hide out in here."

Just a really good calm kid.

But of course there was another side to things as well. That family was a pressure cooker, like the rice steamer in the kitchen, always on, always hot. Aunt Helena, who is the family's informal psychologist and the only Walker I met who in any way could see things from an outsider's perspective, said that in retrospect the big fight wasn't about those trips to the Kamtoey Theater at all. There was simply so much pressure on David, she said. She told me that I couldn't imagine what it was like to grow up the oldest son of a great preacher, the grandson of another, with so much real achievement on a boy's shoulders, and so many people's hopes. When David was a little boy, nobody ever asked him, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" They asked him, "Are you going to preach the Gospel like your daddy? Are you going to save souls too?" And what could David do but smile his sweet little-boy smile and say, "Yes, when I'm big enough." They told David, "God has chosen you." Somewhere along the way, the people in David's life just started telling him how beautiful it was that he was giving his life to Christ. When all the other kids at school started after-school prep sessions for the SAT, thinking about college back in America, Thomas just said, right in front of David, what his own dad had said a long time ago: "Why bother? It's just tits on a bull." Norma thought maybe David might want to go to Bible college for a couple of years, as she had; she had never regretted her education. But that was the most extreme suggestion anyone in the Walker family offered David for his future.

From the moment David staggered out of the Kamtoey Theater for the first time, he lived a divided life. There was his life as a Walker, in which it was understood that preparing the Dyalo for the Rapture was the absolute and overwhelming goal of his young existence. Then there was his other life, his real life, the life at the Kamtoey Theater, where every Tuesday at five he forgot entirely for two hours to pray. For almost six years David kept his two lives strictly separate. Sometimes when he left the Kamtoey Theater, having seen policemen and lawyers, doctors and politicians, hippies and pimps and gangsters and adventurers and detectives and reporters, sometimes on the way back home to the big pink house with the brass placard that read south china christian mission, he thought he was barreling down a dark tunnel so narrow and confining he could not even lift his arms.

Thomas's sister Sarah was on the subscriber list to a newsletter called Christian Family Alert! , a mishmash of advice on Christian living and snippets of biblical commentary and interpretation, mixed up with stories about cute things the kids and pets did, together with household tips and advice. When she was done reading Christian Family Alert! , Sarah usually passed it along to her sister-in-law Nomie, who, in those few calm quiet moments that she could steal from her household, liked to read the newsletter at the kitchen table, sipping green tea and clipping out the recipes, because the thing she had been meaning to get for the longest time was a good cookbook, in English, filled with the kind of midwestern recipes on which she had been raised, and the recipes in Christian Family Alert! were actually pretty darned good. When Nomie was done, she left Christian Family Alert! in the kitchen, where her husband read it over his morning tea.

Now, the ironic thing was, Thomas tended to dismiss most everything in Christian Family Alert! If people in America would get half as upset about the unconverted masses of the world, half as upset as they seemed to be about what was on the dang television, if they'd get so upset that they'd just get down on their knees for twenty minutes a day and ask the Lord to save the Dyalo and all the other lost peoples of the planet — that, Thomas figured, would achieve something useful. Thomas read Christian Family Alert! more out of sociological interest than anything else, to see what the folks in the Home Country were thinking these days, and having read the magazine, he usually spent a good forty minutes once a month at the dinner table complaining that he didn't see why Nomie read that thing anyway, until Nomie pointed that in the first place, she didn't subscribe, Sarah did; in the second place, he was eating a very fine zucchini casserole thanks to that magazine; and in the third place, she didn't think Christian Family Alert! made its way out of the kitchen, up the stairs, down the hall, and beside the toilet every month all by itself, thank you very much.

On the release of Star Wars, Christian Family Alert! sent out to its subscribers a "Special Action Bulletin" warning Christians of the danger that popular film posed to their children, what with its vaguely messianic slant, its mysterious magical "force," its Manichean battle between good and evil, and its complete omission of any deistic references. The Walkers were all very eager to assure me that the odd thing was, this was precisely the sort of thing about which Thomas usually could not and would not get himself all lathered up. Nobody knew just why that film, which he had never seen and had no intention of seeing, rubbed him so the wrong way. But he had read about Star Wars in Christian Family Alert! , and the movie stuck in his throat like ashes.

"What is going on back home with this Star Wars stuff?" Thomas asked his family over the dinner table. America was always "home" to the Walkers, although of all those at the table, only Nomie had ever spent more than eight consecutive months there. "Can somebody just tell me what people are thinking? Don't they know what is going on over here?"

Long silence at the table. With Dad, sometimes the best strategy was just to stay quiet .

"Do you know what they said in China when we first came with the Word? Linda-Lee, what did they say?"

" ‘Two thousand years,' Dad. They said, ‘Two thousand years we've been waiting for this Word, why didn't you come sooner?' "