A Personal Story About Statelessness 251 Both my mother and stepfather worked at my stepfather’s family’s rice farm. His family bought the land for the farm, but they couldn’t own it because they are stateless; they had to have a Thai person sign the paperwork for them, so it’s legally not theirs. Sometimes we didn’t get to see my mom for a week because she went to work early in the morning and came back home really late when we were sleeping. In the beginning, it was so hard for her when she moved to Thailand. We were very poor, but the longer we stayed it got better. 3 Grade School My mother never went to school. She doesn’t know how to read or write any language. I don’t know if she really knew how important it was to go to school, but she thought that if you went to school, you would be smart and learn how to read and write. My brother Jack is ten years older than me. Jack went to school until high school. He studied with the monks in the temple. If you didn’t have a lot of money, you didn’t have to pay anything for your son to study at the temple. My oldest sister, Wan is 7 years older than me. She never went to school. My mother didn’t have money to send all of us to go to school. She was the oldest sister so she had to help my mom work and take care of us. My sister Bow is 4 years older than me. She tried to go to high school three times, but I don’t think she ever graduated and Kik, who is 2 years older than me went to school until sixth grade, but she never went to high school. I started kindergarten in Thailand, but I was one year older than all of the other children. I went to a Thai government school from kindergarten until sixth grade. The head of my village paid for my schoolbooks and my uniform. He also signed paperwork for me that I would be a good student, he would take care of me if I caused trouble and that I would go to school every day. Some stateless children missed a lot of school because they had to go back to Burma or because their family got arrested, so if anything happened, he said that he would be responsible for me and take care of me. I loved going to school. I always participated in sports and every activity that I could attend. I just didn’t like it when some classmates were mean to me. They would say, ‘You are stateless, you come from nowhere.’ That hurt me. The thing that hurt me even more was that there were competitions at school in sports and reading and, even if I won, I never got a chance to go to compete at other schools because I was stateless. The Thai government sponsored the competitions for reading and writing. If you won, they awarded you a scholarship and you got a chance to continue to compete. One time, I won a listening tilburg law review 19 (2014) 248-260