Imagine you’re driving home from work one night around 8 pm. It’s cold. It’s raining. And there’s a dirty, slushy, melting snow on the ground. You glance out the car window and you see a young girl huddled up on the side of the road. She looks cold, scared, alone, and injured.

You pull over and invite her into your warm car, and take her to a diner for a meal.

She doesn’t speak to you the entire time. She just sits there, staring down into her plate while eating, dripping gray water all over the seat. Your mind races though all of the unthinkable possibilities for what might have lead her to this place in life.

When she finishes eating, still not having said a word, she peels herself off of the plastic seat, gets up, and heads toward the exit. You watch as her frail little back walks away from you. In two more seconds, she’ll be through the door and gone from your life forever.

At that moment, what do you do?

Emily Chang doesn’t have to imagine. She knows. Because this happened to her. At that moment what she decided to do was yell out,

“Where are you going to sleep tonight”?

The girl stopped. Her shoulders quivered a bit. And Emily continued, “I have a spare room.”

That girl became the first of sixteen people over the last 25 years to have been blessed to spend some of the darkest times of their lives in the respite of Emily Chang’s spare room.

An abused child bride. An unwanted boy with hydrocephalus. A girl raised in a brothel. And over a dozen other young people whose lives were changed for the better in Emily’s spare room.

Emily documents their stories in her new book, Th...

The Spare Room

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