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My family consists of 5 people. I am the youngest. I grew up in a small village outside of Surin. When I was 6 years old my mom left us to go work in Bangkok so I stayed with my dad and my brother and sister. My sister is the oldest one of us, about 5 years older than me, and when she was 12 years old she also had to go to Bangkok to work with my mom. My dad did not stay with us much because he had to go away to find work in other places. He stayed with us when it was time to farm the rice but otherwise he was working in sugar plantations in Suphan Buri. Most of the time it was just me and my brother but we had relatives living close who helped us with food and to look after us.

In the rice farming season the older students at school had to help to farm the rice for the school. I started helping when I was about 10 years old. The school I went to taught students up to the age of 12. When my brother was living with me he did everything to help me but when he was 13 years old, I was 11, he had to go away for work and I didn't hear anything from him or about him for a very long time. At this time I stayed with my aunt who lives in the same village but when my dad was home I stayed with him. All this time I only saw my mother maybe 1 time every year and I did not understand why she had to go away and leave us.

When I was 12 years old and finished school my mom came to get me to go to work with her in Bangkok. I didn't want to go. I wanted to continue to go to school and I could not understand why she wouldn't let me. I later found out that my dad likes to play cards and had lost a lot of money and land doing so. He had borrowed money from people using our land titles as security but could not pay them back so they took the land. My mom wanted to pay of the loans on some of our land, so we would at least have something, but needed me to help working to get the money to do so. For Thai people it is important to have some land to pass on to your kids. So when I was 12 I went with my mom to work in the textile industry in Bangkok.

When I first came to Bangkok my feeling was that I hated the city. I wanted to go to school and did not want to be here! I started to work 7.30 am and work until 9 pm every day but Sunday. Sometimes we had to work Sundays also. I was working producing fabrics for the textile factory. It was hard work and I hated it! We didn't even go out to eat because they gave us food inside the factory. I remember thinking "where is the sun" because I never saw it.

After 1 year my sister had to go back to Surin to marry a guy that my aunt had found for her. My sister had never met the guy before and she was very upset to marry someone she did not love, but she had to do it. My sister and the guy divorced after 1.5 years but had one baby together. After that my sister came back to work in Bangkok again.

After I had worked in the factory for one year I tried to go back to school at the same time as I was working. I went every Sunday and I had a lot of friends and I liked it a lot! When I had been in Bangkok for about 2 years I had friends and my feeling was that I now loved Bangkok. I heard that a lot of my friends back in Surin had gotten married and had kids and had gotten divorced already. My feeling was that coming to Bangkok had changed the way I looked on many things and that I had learned a lot of things I would not have learned in Surin. When I look on my friends who had families early I think that if I would have stayed in Surin my life would have been the same as theirs. This is one of the reasons why I love Bangkok.