A Personal Story About Statelessness 10 257 A Different Kind of Education Every year, when I went back to Thailand to renew my travel document and U.S. Student Visa, I felt like I was re-entering a nightmare. I would be reminded of all of the opportunities that I didn’t have in Thailand and all of the corruption – how much stateless people are taken advantage of. Stateless people know that it is wrong, but we do not have the right to fight the injustices. On my way home in 2010, a policeman stopped the bus I was on, looked at my travel document and started to ask questions. He asked me to get off of the bus and the bus left. I had just travelled halfway around the world, but I could not pass a checkpoint 40 minutes from my village. I showed him letters from the Thai government in Bangkok, my U.S. Student Visa, my I-20, my student I.D., and all of my paperwork but he didn’t believe me that I had permission to travel or that I was studying in the United States. I stayed in the police station for five hours. I called DEPDC, lawyers from Bangkok, everyone I could think of. He didn’t want to talk to them. He just wanted me to give him money. He said I had to give him 5,000 baht or I would have to go to jail. I wanted to cry and scream at that time. I didn’t want to give him money because I had done nothing wrong. I told him, ‘I want to talk to your boss before you send me to jail.’ He drove me to the main police station and I talked to his boss. The boss said that he believed me and he would let me go, but he wanted me to take a shower at the police station first. I knew what he was asking. I said ‘No. I just want to go home.’ I was lucky because he let me go. When I was in the U.S., people treated me like an equal. Even if I told them I was stateless they still wanted to be friends with me. They didn’t think about how much money I had or where I was from. I could travel freely in the U.S. When I was in the U.S., I felt like I was not the same person that I was in Thailand. At the same time that I was experiencing all of these things, I would think, why can’t I feel the same way in my home country? Why can’t I do something like this in my own country? 11 Thai Citizenship Not having Thai citizenship was the last thing in my life that made me feel like I was still in a cage. I knew if I got Thai citizenship, my life would have freedom. So, when I returned to Thailand to renew my travel documents, Joseph, Susan and I also worked on my Thai citizenship case. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 248-260