the letter on the site as of now: -- The Real Mekong Boy Hello, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may dwell. This is Michael's daughte

the letter on the site as of now: -- The Real Mekong Boy Hello, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may dwell. This is Michael's daughter, Nina. I've managed to bypass his security measures to most effectively deliver the following information. I have just discovered for that for many years, my father, under the guise of his many business trips, has had a secret family hidden in Thailand. I learned that I have a half-brother, who I only know is of school age. To the best of my knowledge, only his close friends, Christopher Brown, and Paul Rogers, who were also close to my mother, knew. What you don’t know is that all this was going on when my brother was sick with a yet undiagnosed medical condition, so debilitating that he could not attend school, was in the hospital for days on end on and off. This same year, I hardly saw my father. I was told he was in Thailand, on business, as usual. Meanwhile, my brother was sick and getting sicker. He was in and out of the hospital while my father was carrying on his affair. With my brother so ill and unable to move to our next posting in India, at his doctors’ urgings, we moved to Seattle, where my mother had grown up, where her parents remain, and where there are excellent hospitals for my brother's increasingly poor health. I know not why my father did not follow, though I have vague explanations from the both of them. I suspect now that it was because he could not rejoin his first family (still ignorant to the existence of his second) very easily when they were in Thailand and we in the USA. My father has been an alcoholic, a cruel one at that, even when sober, in my early years (though those memories are fuzzy), and my later years. He has been excessively absent from my life from a young age, and the times he has returned home, he has taken more care and given more affection to his dog than to his wife. When we left Hanoi, my father did not accompany us, nor planned to stay at least in the very country his children were. He did not fight for custody, nor make any suggestion that he was to attempt it. He lived halfway across the world as his children were adjusting to an entirely different culture, a continent, visiting on rare occasions to blame my mother for my brother's increasingly worsening illness and to criticize her parenting skills in front of the both of us. My father accuses my mother of having broken up the family, of stealing his children away from him, of whisking them away to a land where he could not follow. But what you don’t know is that he made her life intolerable; he pushed her away and then blamed it all on her. Those of you who know my mother must know that she has never deserved the least bit of cruelty. She waited for him in Seattle, hoping he would follow, and that eventually he would be less angry, that we could be a family again. I suspect now that he was merely throwing a temper tantrum about how much time he would have to spend in flight hopping to one family from another. My father accuses my mother of breaking his heart, of sending him into a very deep, dark place in his mind and heart. I am sure he has told many of you the same thing. But I ask you this, to those who have never met my mother, and only my father, are you going to trust this man's judgment, his assessment of the circumstances governing our lives for the last half a decade, maybe more? Are you going to trust the man who hid his infidelity, his newborn son, from his wife and children for years? Are you going to trust the man who blames my mother for the divorce, when he was cheating on her? Or are you going to stand by my mother, who has been with me my entire life, who has trusted my father for her entire life, even though she married a man with an occupation that perfectly warranted suspicion? Are you going to stand by my father, the man who, like a child, tossed his old playthings away for some new shiny toys, a new shiny family. My father is a liar, a coward, and a pig. His position as a rich, middle-aged white man I assume allowed him to ensnare any Thai woman pitiful enough to take a man with an unsuspecting, trusting wife and two young children of his own. Whether my father's mistress knew of my existence, of my mother's and my brother's, I cannot say, but if she did, I have no respect for her, and if she didn't, I hope that my father lies to her far less than he has lied to us. My father does not deserve a do-over, a new family, a new wife. He does not even deserve his first. My grandfather, my father's father, also engaged in this kind of behavior, though surely not to this extent, which is curious, because my father vowed never to become like his abusive, pitiful excuses for parents, which is what he has now become. I can only hope that this warped sense of self-worth that allowed him to justify cheating on his wife, leaving his children, lying for years, and engaging in a relationship with another woman, does not pass down to my brother, in his adulthood, nor my new half-brother in his. To anyone who has known of my father's deceit longer than I have, longer than my mother has, I hope that your conscience weighs on you far more than my father's does on him. Thank you for taking the time to read this. From, Nina Sullivan