tilburg law review 19 (2014) 248-260 brill.com/tilr A Personal Story about Statelessness Srinuan Soakhamnuan info@thethailandproject.org Abstract Srinuan Saokhamnuan recounts her life as a stateless person growing up in Thailand, her fight to receive an education and her journey to obtain Thai citizenship. Keywords stateless – statelessness – Thailand – Southeast Asia – Thai identification card – Thai citizenship – The Thailand Project 1 Family History My mother never told me much about her story when I was a child. If I hadn’t worked on my Thai citizenship case, I probably wouldn’t know anything. My mother and biological father grew up on the border of China and Burma and met there. They were both Shan – an ethnic minority in Southeast Asia. My maternal grandmother is Chinese Shan and my maternal grandfather is Burmese Shan. My mother’s family crossed the border between China and Burma all of the time – sometimes her family lived in China, sometimes they lived in Burma. There were a lot of wars, fighting and killing while she was growing up in Burma. If you had a daughter, the Burmese army could take you to be their wife or housemaid, and, whatever they asked you to do, you had to do it without pay. Boys were forced into the army. There were a lot of drugs in the community at that time also, so when my parents began to have children they decided to move to Thailand. Both of my parents didn’t have paperwork from the Burmese or Chinese governments when they came to Thailand. They crossed the river into Mae Sai, the northern-most city in Thailand, by boat. The border has police and army to check your paperwork, but for 150 baht to 300 baht, a boat will take you across the border. It is not a secret. The boat is not far from the border police, but I think that they pay the police to ignore that people are crossing. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/22112596-01902024