Petite is a tiny one, she is the smallest one in her whole family and yet the oldest child. Her grandparents used to call her petite sense she was so beloved and tiny. She often talks about how she’s gonna go back to Thailand and help building a house for them. I first met her at a vocational training we both participated in. She had a big smile on her face and seemed genuinely happy and that has been her everyday persona ever sense. One would never even be close to guessing the kind of baggage she runs around with.

At the moment she runs her own company together with a few other people. They just started up but she has high hopes and dreams about it becoming really successful. She says she hasn’t always wanted to run a business or have a high position or to “be her own boss”: I just never got the opportunity! But lately she can’t see herself as anything else but a successful business woman. As she speaks about her career plans, she mentions that she doesn’t think about love, she wants a new apartment and she says: I want to move either with both my husband and son or just with my son. It doesn’t really seem to matter to her that much, either way is fine. She seems to have given up on love long time ago, or at least stopped thinking about it.

She has told me about her plans about opening her own Thai restaurant, a kind that doesn’t really exist in Sweden, with entertainers and chefs from Thailand. She dreams away about it as she speaks of it. One wouldn’t think she would be interested in the show business, but as she starts to tell me about her dreams I realize more and more that she wished to be singer or dancer of some kind: I would wanna do something of my own, maybe a project or a musical or something. I wanna be on the top! Maybe a millionaire? I wanna be able to help people that are in need and provide safety for my son. I want a house in Thailand.

She wanders back to Thailand while she speaks and goes back to her childhood memories: my parents used to fight a lot when I was a child, it disrupted my family: I just didn’t know where I would end up. Moving to Sweden wasn’t as easy as it sounds at first: My mom is very Thai while my stepfather was Swedish. All the sudden it was two different languages and two different cultures. I just felt left out among Swedish people and being a teenager was the hardest part of my life. She tells me she lost her identity and felt confused about who she was and how she was supposed to act and behave. She was raised in a Thai way, where she learned to be a Thai girl but that didn’t fit in to the Swedish society and culture: The Swedish social norms confused me about my way of being. Here in Sweden everything stays within the four walls of the house she says and she didn’t know how to get any help, and the fact that there was help being offered: I just wanna help the ones in the same situation, because I know how it feels. It’s important to have similar people around you that are in the same situation.