A Lost Boy, and the Woman Who Sheltered Him

All of the roads in Chutima Vucharatavintara’s life seem to have led her here, into the arms of a little boy with a broken spirit and diseased body who has never known a love like hers.

They couldn’t have met in a colder setting, this giving woman and this needy boy. Their eyes first locked in a stark Immigration and Naturalization Service office where the 3-year-old’s fate had been debated by strangers for 14 days.

He was leaning on the hip of another woman, eating a bowl of rice and sauce, when Vucharatavintara--another stranger invited by INS officials--walked in. She offered him her hand and asked if he wanted to go to her, Vucharatavintara recalls.

The Thai youngster reached out and waved goodbye to the bureaucrats. He was suffering from chickenpox, high fever, an ear infection and a hacking cough. But he was smiling.

“I hugged him, and I started crying,” Vucharatavintara said. “He was so dirty and in terrible shape. I just couldn’t believe it. He just grabbed my neck and put his face on my shoulder and didn’t want to see anyone else.”

The boy is Phanupong Khaisri, who was smuggled into Los Angeles and now finds himself at the center of an international struggle that some have compared to the Elian Gonzalez saga.

Phanupong, nicknamed Got, arrived on April 11 with a couple who had rented him in Thailand for $250 so they could enter the U.S. looking like a family on vacation. Using fraudulent documents, the man was trying to smuggle his companion into a slave-labor ring and apparently intended to return to Thailand with the boy, authorities said. Got’s father, who was HIV-positive, had committed suicide soon after his birth, and his mother is a drug-addicted prostitute in Bangkok who is also HIV-positive.

“When I picked him up, I knew nothing about his background,” said Vucharatavintara, 45. “The Thai Consulate told us they needed [temporary] shelter for a boy who had been kidnapped. That was it.”

Since April 25, Got has been living with Vucharatavintara, her husband and two sons, and a destitute mother and baby she has also volunteered to shelter in her Highland Park home. Despite an HIV-positive diagnosis and recurrent nightmares, Got is thriving: He has gained 3 pounds, is learning English in preschool, sings to anyone who will listen and likes to pick strawberries from his temporary guardian’s garden.

This is no surprise to those who best know Vucharatavintara--a soft-spoken but no-nonsense community activist who, as a young woman, went on a pilgrimage through the Thai countryside to spread the teachings of Buddha. Later, she became a lawyer and, inspired by Gandhi, helped people so poor they paid her with rice, coconuts and bananas.

Eventually she grew so disenchanted with government corruption and her first marriage that she moved to Los Angeles with her son and in 1988 was ordained as the first U.S. nun in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.

“Throughout her life, she’s always been on a spiritual journey,” said Chanchanit Martorell, executive director of the Koreatown-based Thai Community Development Center, where Vucharatavintara heads the parent education program. “She is still on that spiritual track. Whether as a nun, a lawyer, an activist, or a staff member here, I tell her she doesn’t need to go . . . close to Tibet to be close to God.”

Dubbed “Her Holiness” by her colleagues, Vucharatavintara was an easy choice when the Thai Consulate called the Thai community center looking for a volunteer to shelter a Thai boy who was stranded in Los Angeles. “She was a natural fit,” Martorell said.

Vucharatavintara already had an 11-year record of opening her door and her heart to newly arrived Thai immigrants, often sick or elderly--even when she and her family lived in one-bedroom apartments in Los Angeles and Eagle Rock.

“Chutima’s home has become a form of respite, a sanctuary for the dispossessed and the downtrodden,” Martorell, 32, said, wiping tears from her cheeks. “She has a remarkable way; it’s not serendipity.

“She always manages to run into people who are the most distressed, the most in need and who have nowhere else to go. And they end up at her house.”

Martorell’s agency, open six years, assists hundreds of indigent Thai immigrants each year. During the last decade, large numbers of uneducated and unskilled Thais have migrated to Southern California, where they are often exploited by employers seeking cheap labor, Martorell said.

Unlike other Asian ethnic groups with long histories in Southern California, Thais consider themselves “the minor minority” because their migration to the region began only three decades ago, Martorell said. An estimated 80,000 Thais now live here, with recent immigrants settling mainly in East Hollywood and established community members moving out to the San Fernando Valley and other suburbs.

A Heritage of Service

Vucharatavintara’s deep well of generosity and her open-door policy are rooted in her upbringing. She grew up in the small village of Sawankhalok, where her mother, Pratin Vucharatavintara, is a middle school principal and her father a forest ranger. Her only sister died at age 4.

“My mom helped everybody,” Vucharatavintara said. “When people didn’t have food or milk, my mother gave it to them. She loves taking care of kids and has adopted a lot of them. She will do anything for her students. I think that’s where I first got the idea of helping. By watching her.”

Even now, while on vacation in L.A., her mother does not rest. Pratin Vucharatavintara is helping care for the homeless souls staying in the three-bedroom house Vucharatavintara and her family rent. While Vucharatavintara concentrates on Got, her mother cooks for the household and helps care for the mother and 11-month-old boy who have been staying there for the last six months. “My mother says I put my whole family to work for the [Thai community center],” Vucharatavintara says, and laughs.

In reality, this is only half a joke. On a recent Sunday morning, it is apparent Vucharatavintara is able to give all she has in large part because of her family.

As Vucharatavintara feeds Got a breakfast of noodles, and her mother gives milk to the other baby, her British-born husband, Leigh Chalkley, plans his day with sons Anya, 9, and Trailak, 17. When the meal is over, Trailak takes turns playing with the two little boys, holding one in his arms and giving candy to the other.

Until Pratin Vucharatavintara brings out her sawdoung, a loud and screeching instrument that looks like a small violin but is played like a cello. Got delightedly sits on her lap, memories of home obviously rushing through him. “The first time she played that, he was so drawn to it,” Chalkley says. “He was transfixed.”

The house has been buzzing this way since 6 a.m., when Got and Vucharatavintara woke up. The boy won’t go anywhere without his favorite caretaker, even insisting on waiting inside the bathroom as she showers. He loves the music, but as soon as she walks out to her garden to pick eggplants for tonight’s dinner, Got is by her side.

“Having a lot of children here is business as usual for us,” says Chalkley, who married Vucharatavintara in 1989. “This particular time we went through an adjustment period because he was so traumatized and needy. But it’s not as difficult as you’d think because everyone is so understanding. Everyone helps out, even the children.”

Chalkley, who runs a copy and print center at UCLA, says his wife’s vocation caused strife in the beginning of their marriage because her community work took precedence. “But they come to ask for our help,” Vucharatavintara says when she hears her husband explain he felt their family was not the top priority. “Where do we send them? They have nowhere to go.”

Chalkley, himself a former Buddhist monk, smiles and says he still is struck by the degree of her selflessness. “She has an unusual drive,” he says. “I used to think she was trying to keep busy to run away from other things because I couldn’t believe anyone would have that energy and passion. But she does.”

Embracing Her Destiny in Childhood

Vucharatavintara herself does not completely understand the spirit that moves her to take in strangers, to help Thai women deliver their babies and to assist newly arrived Thais in many other ways.

But she thinks it may have something to do with a book she was given when she was 11, after her parents sent her to a Bangkok boarding school hoping she would forget her dream of becoming an ordained Buddhist nun, a practice that is illegal in Thailand.

At school, her bedroom window fronted a cemetery, and Vucharatavintara spent hours observing people crying by the graves. This confused her because her grandfather, a Buddhist monk, had taught her that death was supposed to be celebrated. To understand why people were suffering, she went to a nearby temple and demanded answers from another monk.

“He gave me a book on meditation, and I read all night, and it was so exciting,” she said. “I didn’t sleep at all. I knew then I really wanted to be a nun. It made so much sense to me that we should not be greedy or selfish, that we should help each other.”

But her father, Pawat Vucharatavintara, wanted her to become a nurse; her mother a teacher; and she got sidetracked. She married and became a lawyer, a rare feat for a woman in her country’s lower class, and she defended the poor against corrupt officials. After her life was threatened and her first marriage ended, she moved in 1987 to Los Angeles with her son.

With no English skills, she took a job sewing clothes for $10 a day and found shelter at the Dharma Vijaya Buddhist Vihara temple on Crenshaw Boulevard. There, she met the Venerable Walpola Piyananda, who agreed to ordain her in 1988 even though she was a divorced mother. She lived as a nun for a year before deciding that her calling to service could be better fulfilled as a layperson.

“Nuns have a lot of restrictions,” she said. “A nun shouldn’t just be chanting and meditating in the temple. I think a nun should be allowed to do social work. But nuns can’t ask for money or food or shelter for the needy. I thought I could help more people in this life than that one.”

As Vucharatavintara’s spiritual teacher, the Rev. Karuna Dharma of the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Koreatown was impressed with her student’s knowledge of Buddhism and sense of compassion. “She’s never lost that,” Dharma said. “I understood why she left. You don’t have to wear a robe to have a strong sense of spirituality. And I think she’s had that all of her life.”

It is precisely why Martorell hired her on the spot two years ago at the community center. Vucharatavintara, she said, has surpassed all expectations, increasing attendance at the parenting classes from eight to 40 in one year, adding a survival skills class for mothers, balancing home visitations with her teaching--all the while volunteering to put up homeless immigrants.

A Boy in the Eye of a Legal Storm

Got’s future is now in the hands of a federal judge, who, at the request of the community center, granted him a political asylum hearing, which has not yet been scheduled. The Thai Consul general wants Phanupong to return home with his paternal grandparents, who arrived in Los Angeles on May 22. But community activists want the boy to stay, at least until they have assurances of his welfare back in Thailand.

Boonlue and Sumalee Khaisri visit with their grandson five days a week in an apartment building in Hollywood owned by the Thai CDC, which paid their air fare to California. The couple ride three buses for an hour each way to see Got for three hours, according to their attorney, Dorothea Kraeger.

Middle-class by Thai standards, the grandparents are being sponsored by the Thai Seventh Day Adventist Group, which is paying for their meals and housing in a hospital dormitory.

Although Got lived with his maternal grandparents in Chiang Rai in northern Thailand, his father’s family supported him financially. The Thai government has preliminarily approved the grandparents’ adoption of Got, but the judge has expressed concern over granting them guardianship here because the grandmother was once convicted of selling drugs in Thailand.

“Everyone agrees that the child is doing extremely well,” Kraeger said. “But the grandparents are concerned because he is not with his family. It’s very difficult on them because they haven’t been able to go out and do normal things with him, like take him to a park or a restaurant, or stay with him at night. There’s a lot of sadness on the part of the grandparents.”

Vucharatavintara says Got can stay at her home as long as he needs to, even though she knows from past experience she will be heartbroken when he leaves. “I don’t think of it as work,” she said. “This is what I like to do. And you yourself get hurt sometimes doing this kind of work. I know I will cry a lot. For at least three months.”

Humble and shy, Vucharatavintara does not take sole credit for her good deeds. She cites the help of people such as Dr. Victor Coronado, of Huntington Park, who provides free medical care for her clients, businesses that donate to the Thai community center, and the Thai temples that provide meals or locations for her classes. Most important, she cites her husband, mother and children.

“It’s not just me,” she says, fighting tears. “My husband says I never want anything for myself. But I tell him that we have our family, our jobs, and money. We’re not rich, but it’s enough for us. These people, they have nothing. If we don’t help them, where would they go?”