THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 47
it. If she made tea too hot or too cold,
or put oil in the frying pan before salt,
her in-laws shouted at her, and her hus-
band slapped her hard on the face.
She wanted desperately to win their
affection. Her goal was to have one day
when she was not blamed for anything,
but there was never a day like that, so
she came to believe that she was a very
stupid and useless person who could not
do anything right. Sometimes she would
cry, and her husband would scold her
that it was her fault the family was un-
happy. She wanted to save her marriage.
She knew that, if she divorced, it would
be so shameful that she could never go
back to China. And because she was
not allowed to leave the house by her-
self, and barely spoke English, and had
no money, and was constantly yelled at,
she became convinced that she would
have no way of surviving in America on
her own. It was one thing to die on the
streets by herself, but she could never
do that to her daughter. So she stayed.
Then, one day, when she was at her
elderly neighbor’s house, she broke down
crying, and told her what was going on.
The neighbor connected her with a local
organization, the Asian Task Force
Against Domestic Violence. Grace had
never heard of domestic violence, but
now she learned that she was a victim
of it. The Task Force suggested that she
tell her husband she wanted to take an
English class and carry her own I.D.,
and wasn’t ready to have a second baby,
and she did. This made her husband fu-
rious, and he went on a hunger strike
for two months, which made his par-
ents blame her even more. He punched
the wall so hard that his fist bled.
He started threatening to divorce her,
and she thought, He does not love me.
Her in-laws accused her of being a bad
mother, and she thought, They are try-
ing to build a case against me so that, if
we divorce, they can keep the child. She
thought, I was trying to save my family
but they don’t want me at all, they only
want the baby. The Asian Task Force
told her that if she left her husband she
would be able to find a place to live and
was entitled to child support. Finally,
she took her daughter and fled. For four
years, they were homeless, moving from
shelter to shelter—five or six altogether.
Later, she understood that, in America,
if you wanted help you had to ask for it,
but she had been told to be quiet for so
long that she said nothing. Later, she
learned that American therapists ex-
pected you to cry, but she had been for-
bidden to cry so many times by her hus-
band that she had trained herself not to.
One of the shelters she stayed in was
Transition House. Its staff helped her
to get a full scholarship to a community
college, and found her a temporary apart-
ment that she and her daughter shared
for two years with another woman—by
that time the shelter itself was only one
part of Transition House’s work. At last,
she got a government voucher to rent
an apartment of her own.A
s the years went on, housing in
Cambridge grew scarcer and more
expensive, and the idea that a woman
could be expected to find a place to rent
within a couple of months, which had
been reasonable in the seventies, became
completely unrealistic. Women started
staying at Transition House for many
months, sometimes more than a year,
and often they came from some other
shelter. As a result, it became almost im-
possible to find an emergency bed. Tran-
sition House worked with the city to
provide transitional shared apartments
that people could live in for a couple of
years, but there weren’t enough of those,
either. All these difficulties were com-
pounded for immigrant women, who
might not speak English and might not
have documents. Women in the shelter
had to ask for extensions
of their stay. “They had
to come to us and beg,”
Nanette Veilleux says.
“The power differences
became very clear.”
In the mid-nineties,
Transition House offi-
cially abandoned collec-
tive decision-making: res-
idents, volunteers, and
staff would no longer have
equal say. There would be
a board and an executive director—real
ones this time, not fake ones on paper.
“The killing of the collective—in the
end, nobody fought that, because it had
already happened,” Veilleux says. “The
separation between staff and residents
had already changed.” The staff also de-
cided that, in order to attract good can-
didates for the executive-director posi-tion, they needed to pay according to
the industry standard, and so they re-
tired Transition House’s commitment
to similar pay for everyone.
As more professional therapists came
to Transition House, the staff began to
think more psychologically. At first, it
had seemed so clear that, once a woman
found her way to the shelter and discov-
ered that she could make it by herself,
she would be free of her batterer forever.
But women kept going back. Some
women went back because leaving meant
becoming homeless, or for some other
practical reason, but often they went back
just because they loved their partners and
wanted to give them another chance.
At some point in the two-thousands,
the staff settled on a new approach. If a
woman wanted to stay with her partner,
they might suggest a safety plan. They
might buy her a TracFone that her bat-
terer couldn’t monitor, or suggest a code
word that she could use to signal to some-
one on the phone that she was in dan-
ger. They might offer one-on-one coun-
selling for her or her children. “It’s about
having conversations with people who
want to stay with their partner so they
don’t feel judged,” Ronit Barkai, Tran-
sition House’s assistant director, says.
“That’s our plan for the future—not de-
monizing. There is no bad or good choice.
You’re losing so many people when you’re
saying to them, This is a monster.”
Eventually, even the founding rule
about keeping the shelter’s location a se-
cret—the rule everyone had
agreed on—was called into
question. When Risa Med-
nick joined the board, in the
early two-thousands, she re-
alized that secrecy in the old
sense was no longer possi-
ble. “We had to reckon with
the fact that in a couple of
keystrokes you’re there,” she
says. “We had a staff person
who was cyber-stalked by
her boyfriend, and he knew
where she was in the building all the
time.” When Mednick later became
Transition House’s director, she and the
staff did what they could to make the
shelter secure, installing cameras at the
doors, and advising residents to disable
geo-tracking on their phones and to be
careful what they posted on Facebook.
But she also realized that a little less