The Road of Lost Innocence (10 page)

Pierre had just found a temporary job as a lab technician, which made paying the rent easier. We rented a one-room studio on the ground floor of an apartment building, with a little garden outside. The first night I had a nightmare: the garden was squirming with slugs, like the maggots Aunty Peuve’s guards used to throw on my face and body. I screamed uncontrollably. Pierre was horrified, but I spent the rest of the night wearing socks, several pairs of pajama bottoms, gloves, and a hat. I didn’t want any of those slugs to touch me.

But those nightmares were growing rare. The Central Market in Phnom Penh was far away, and I was starting to get used to a new life. One afternoon I left work early and decided to explore the city of Nice, which I barely knew. I took the bus. I got off at a bus stop at random and walked around in an area I didn’t know. I got lost and phoned Pierre, but he told me to work it out myself, like a big girl—if I’d gotten there, I could always get back.

Since the place where we lived was close to the sea, I told myself that if I walked along the coast I’d manage to find my way home. I walked until my feet ached, and when I looked up I saw a sign written in Khmer.
Ku tieu Phnom Penh
—Noodle soup, Phnom Penh style. I thought I was dreaming. I went in and started speaking to the people in Khmer. They responded. I was overwhelmed and tears came to my eyes. I sat down and drank two bowls of good, spicy soup. Then I had a coffee with condensed milk poured onto ice cubes, the way we drink it in Cambodia.

This is how I made contact with the Khmer community in Nice. The owners of the restaurant said they had a Khmer group and were planning a small festival with Cambodian Apsara dances to celebrate the New Year in April. I had learned those dances as a child in Thlok Chhrov, and they asked me to join the performance.

Then Pierre’s contract as a lab technician ended—it was only temporary, and it wasn’t renewed. I was earning about 3,000 francs a month at the hotel, but our one-room apartment alone cost us 2,500. Pierre had met someone who wanted to start up a medical analysis laboratory in Cambodia, but the negotiations were dragging out. I needed to find work and now knew that there were a lot of Asian restaurants along the coast.

I knocked on all kinds of doors. A Chinese man from Cambodia agreed to give me a job in his restaurant, washing up. He even said that I could eat rice there before starting work. I wouldn’t be working officially—he didn’t want to pay employee charges to the state—but I was just glad to have the money.

Sometimes I got paid, sometimes I didn’t. I used to leave the apartment at six in the morning, walk six miles to the hotel and work there till three in the afternoon, come home at four, then leave at six to go to the restaurant. Pierre would come and get me at one or two in the morning. He always complained that I smelled of the kitchen, and finally I told him I’d walk home alone.

Pierre was never a comforting man—he’s no good at tenderness. He’s straightforward, and his angles are sharp and sometimes cut. There were advantages to this. Pierre taught me to fend for myself, and he made me speak up—he hated it when I was mute.

One summer day at the hotel, I fainted. The doctor said it was overwork and told me to take a two-week break. But I don’t know how to do nothing, and two days later, I was back. The truth is, I enjoyed working at the hotel. I liked looking after elderly people—they seemed to care for me.

After the summer rush was over, the hotel informed me that it was my turn to take a vacation. I had worked for a year, and according to my pay stubs I had accrued four weeks of leave. I had never gone on “vacation” before—I had no idea you had a right to such a thing, and I couldn’t imagine doing what the French people did in Nice. They mostly walked around in colorful clothes and spent money, it seemed to me. We didn’t have any, so that wasn’t an option.

A cousin of my mother-in-law’s suggested we could get temporary work doing the
vendange
—the grape harvest. He told us he knew a man who could give us work in Ville-franche, harvesting Beaujolais grapes for a month. Pierre thought it would give us some fresh air and a change of scenery, so we went.

Monsieur Marcel was nice enough about it, but when he saw me he said, “She’ll never make it.” I was just a little thing—I weighed about ninety pounds, and he was at least double that. But I told Pierre, “He’ll see.” I was used to physical work.

Pierre couldn’t bear the cold, the humidity, the earth that stuck to his feet. He just couldn’t do the work, but I loved it. It was beautiful to be outdoors and smell the earth, feel grapes in my hand, and I thought cutting grapes was a lot easier than harvesting rice. Pierre was proud of me, and so was Monsieur Marcel. He used to call me “our little Chink,” but he meant it in the nicest possible way.

At set hours, we all stopped to take a break and eat. That’s where I learned to eat cheese and cold sausage—in other words, to become altogether French. I discovered really good country cooking, soups and tasty dishes far better than the plastic sachets of rice I’d had in Paris. Monsieur Marcel and his family were really good people. After the harvest was done there, I wanted to continue, so we went to Gevrey-Chambertin in Burgundy. The manager there was so pleased with me that he gave me a bottle of wine to take home.

But in spite of this good work, we had decided to leave France and return to Cambodia. Pierre had found another job there, with another humanitarian agency. This time he would be working for Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders. Pierre had concluded that he wasn’t made for life in France—it just didn’t agree with him. He wanted adventure, something less settled than a small medical analysis lab in Nice.

I was proud to be going back home. I knew that I had changed a lot during the eighteen months we’d been living in France. I had worked honest jobs. I had learned to look people in the eye and communicate with them directly, as an equal. I knew that when I went back to Cambodia people would no longer look down on me as a white man’s whore. They would see me as a white man’s
wife.
I was like the people we call Khmers de France—Cambodians who live in France and come back on holiday with money and power and with the white person’s sense of self-assurance. I might have dark skin and I might still look like a savage, but I had proved that I wasn’t stupid, and I no longer felt worthless.

.9.

Kratie

Pierre’s new job was in Kratie, an old colonial town on a bend of the Mekong River, about two hundred miles northeast of Phnom Penh. In November of 1994 we moved into a room in a big house near the river that was rented by several people who worked for Médecins Sans Frontières. Almost all the white MSF team members lived together—it was cheaper that way, and they paid a Cambodian woman to come in to clean and cook.

Pierre didn’t want to pay the extra for the cook—he said it was too expensive, and anyway, he didn’t want to spend all his time talking to other French people. This was what Pierre was like: if we were in Cambodia, he wanted to live like a local. I liked that attitude. He would rather eat rice at roadside stalls with the Cambodian staff members of MSF than share roast chicken with the doctors.

Still, there was a good atmosphere at the MSF house. I used to help the cook clean up. She was an older woman, about fifty, and her name was Veasna, but everyone called her Yvonne because that was easier. At first she was surprised that I helped her. She thought that because I was a Khmer de France I would think I was superior. I told her I wasn’t really a Khmer de France, but I didn’t tell her anything about my past.

I went to see my adoptive parents soon after we arrived. We met in Kampong Cham, which was not too far away; my sister Sochenda was living there, and I wanted to see her and her new baby. Sochenda had married a man of her own choice. After she got her graduation certificate she went to a training college in Kampong Cham and she married a fellow student there. I had heard that both of them were now working in the agriculture ministry.

I was shocked by their living conditions. The house Sochenda and her husband lived in with their two children, and now a third, was pitiful. They were really poor—Sochenda had recently stopped working, because their salaries hadn’t been paid for so long—and they had just been burglarized and had lost most of the things they owned.

Then Phanna arrived, and I was shocked again when I saw her—she was thin and old, not pretty and young anymore. She had brought her five-year-old son with her and her daughter, Ning, a beautiful little girl who was three and a half.

Then my parents arrived, both of them on the back of an ancient motorcycle taxi, looking thin and shriveled. They all looked so sad, and when they saw one another everyone began crying. I felt a rush of love and pity for them—they had never complained when they had written to me in France. They had always said everything at home was fine and never once asked me for money as most families would.

I thought to myself, I know why I’m back, it is to look after these people. This family had held out its hand to me and taken me in, these people were everything I had, and I would never abandon them again.

Sochenda had nothing in the house to eat, not even rice—just a couple of sweet potatoes—and her boys were thin. I went out and bought a hundred-pound sack of rice and all kinds of food: chicken, and fish to make fish soup. I bought a lot, but they ate it all. They were so hungry they could hardly restrain themselves.

I stayed two nights. The first night Father asked me if I wanted to go to a hotel and I said no. I might have been to France, but I was still the same person—I told him my name was still Somaly, the name he gave me when I was a child in Thlok Chhrov. But the truth is I was shocked at how dirty everything was. I was no longer used to washing under a sarong using the outside shower, and the bed was unbelievably uncomfortable. I had changed.

When I got back to Kratie, I told Pierre I wanted to help my family. He said, “It’s your money, do what you want.” I gave them money to buy supplies, to set up a business selling things. My parents had lived for a long time off the hundred dollars in school supplies that I had given them. Long before it became a saying, my father always used to tell us in Thlok Chhrov, “It is better to give a fishing net than a fish.”

During the day I often went to the government clinic where Médecins Sans Frontières had set up operations. I helped out with translation, because most of the MSF team didn’t speak any Khmer. One day a traditional healer was brought in. He was protesting—he didn’t want to go to the government hospital—but two younger-looking people had brought him in, and he was too weak to resist. The doctors called me because he needed treatment but didn’t want to take it.

When I asked if I could help, the old man began talking to me in his own language.

I realized that he recognized me in some way and I also realized that I could more or less understand the gist of what he was saying. Maybe his language resembled the one spoken in my forest, I don’t know. But I started thinking about my childhood again for the first time in a long time—remembering what it was like. I had forgotten Phnong. That night I couldn’t sleep. I realized I had forgotten where I came from and who I was.

Now that we were back in Cambodia, I had to decide what to do. Money didn’t matter to me—we had enough. I asked Pierre’s boss at the Médecins Sans Frontières clinic if I could work as a volunteer there every morning. After all, I had been more or less trained as a midwife in Chup—as trained as anyone was, in those days, in Cambodian hospitals. And I could speak French and Khmer, which in and of itself was useful.

I began working in the clinic every morning as an assistant, in the team that treated sexually transmitted diseases. I worked with a fat nurse whom I didn’t like much. Behind the doctors’ backs, she was always telling the patients that they had to pay her for the medical care, even though it wasn’t true. I applied treatments, washed wounds, and helped clients understand how to look after themselves. They had gonorrhea, chancres, genital warts.

Most of the people who came to the clinic were men. Some of them looked shamefaced, but most of them just seemed angry. I hated them. I knew they got these diseases by buying and raping prostitutes. But I wanted them healed, because I knew they were also infecting those prostitutes and their wives, so I looked after them.

One day a girl came in. She was about eighteen years old, and I saw immediately that she was a prostitute—you could tell right away. I also knew that she would lie about it. What “broken woman” could go to a respectable hospital in Cambodia and be treated properly?

I saw how my colleague dealt with her, hostile and scornful, and I took her aside and spoke to her very gently. I explained the treatment and talked to her about sexually transmitted disease. I said she should try to keep clean and use condoms and I told her about HIV infection. AIDS had been around in Europe for over a decade, but in 1994 the epidemic had only recently begun in Cambodia. (Today, we have one of the highest rates of AIDS infection in Asia.)

I told that girl to tell the others that, if they needed treatment, they could come to the clinic any morning. I would be there, and I would see that they were treated well. After that, girls from the brothels began coming into the clinic in small groups. They were sixteen, seventeen, twenty-one years old. They weren’t children, but they were young. Some of them looked at me with sweetness and a kind of hope, but most of them looked at me with resignation and a great deal of pain.

I knew these girls: they were me. I knew exactly what their lives were like. I found it was no longer possible for me to sleep at night back in the Médecins Sans Frontières house by the river. Every night I thought about those girls leaving the hospital, sick, going back to the places where that same evening they would be beaten and raped by clients.

I felt I didn’t have a choice: I needed to help them get out of the life they were imprisoned in, just streets away from me. This was something I could do that few other people could.

I knew where the girls would be because I knew my way around their world, and I knew how to communicate with them. The words themselves weren’t as important as the bond between us. When a victim meets another victim, there’s a look of understanding that is very powerful. I was connected to these girls, and they trusted me. I had to help them.

Most of them told me they had no soap to wash with, and I knew that was true: I had never had soap. They told me that if their clients did use condoms, they were cheap Thai ones in all kinds of strange shapes that used to tear all the time. So I started there. I talked to Pierre’s boss at MSF and asked him to give me a stock of condoms that I could distribute to prostitutes, and I asked for dozens of bars of soap. I argued that they might not be medical supplies, but they were important for preventing illness too.

He sighed—it was difficult for MSF to do this kind of thing, because it’s an organization that focuses on emergency humanitarian relief, not preventive work for sexually transmitted disease. Still, I don’t know how, but he got me a supply of condoms and an information pack about preventing HIV. He said he drew the line at buying me bars of soap—I would just have to manage on my own.

I went out to the market and bought soap. Then, rather than distributing the condoms and soap only at the hospital, to girls who were already sick, I began to go to the brothels and give them out there, to everybody. I thought this made more sense.

The brothels in Kratie were not like the brothels in Phnom Penh. They weren’t in clapped-out buildings near the marketplace: these were little shanties, on stilts, in the muddy garbage by the river, on the outskirts of town. But in every other respect they were just as dirty and just as brutal as the brothels I’d known. Walking toward them I would start to sweat, but I kept going, even though being there made me want to vomit.

I used to pretend to be a nurse from Médecins Sans Frontières. I dressed like a Khmer de France and came in with an official air and a box of condoms. I told the
meebons
that I wanted to help keep the girls healthy, and that it was for the best that the girls be free of disease. They could only agree. Also, I think they were a little afraid of me: a Khmer de France, the wife of a white foreigner. They didn’t dare prevent me from coming in.

The first morning I found one girl who was so small I thought she must be aged about twelve, though she said she was sixteen. A client had torn off her nipple, and the wound was infected. I told the
meebon
she should let me take the girl to the hospital to be treated. That turned out to be easy: it was in the
meebon
’s interest to keep her slaves in good condition, and this way she didn’t have to spend a cent.

I sat with the girl in the clinic and made sure the nurses treated her properly. She was cheerful and grateful, and my heart ached that evening when I had to take her back.

That happened a few more times, and I realized that I could do this more often. You can’t look at a girl who’s badly hurt and not want to get her help. If I managed to get the girls back to the brothels by evening, in time for work, the
meebons
would let me bring them to the hospital in a taxi.

I asked Médecins Sans Frontières to let me have a car and driver so I could bring some of the sickest girls to the clinic every morning. In frustration, when it looked as though MSF wouldn’t help me, I took the wife of Pierre’s boss to the brothels so she could see the situation for herself. Her name was Marie-Louise. She was a doctor too and a really good woman. She saw the battered girls in scummy places, their wounds and scars, and she was horrified. She couldn’t believe how people treated other human beings. By the time we came back to the MSF office, she was speechless. From that point on Marie-Louise made sure that I’d have the use of a car.

France had changed me. I was not afraid of people anymore. I began spending most of the day in the brothel neighborhoods of Kratie. It wasn’t just about distributing condoms and information about HIV or about ferrying girls to the hospital. It was about being close to these girls and connecting with them in a deeper way.

When I was in Aunty Peuve’s brothel, there were many times I needed someone to help me—even just someone who would put her arms around me when I cried. For me there had been no one, though I was lucky in other ways. Now I needed to be that person for others.

The girls in Kratie were mostly debt slaves, as I once was. They were paying back a loan taken out by their parents or relatives. Some of them had agreed to do it. This is Cambodia: If you are a girl, you owe obedience to your parents. If your family requires you to sell your body on the side of the road so that your younger brother can go to school—or so your mother can gamble—that is what you do. You don’t feel like you have a choice.

A few of the girls had been sold outright. Those were the ones who lived in the nastiest places, where the owners were more hostile and the brothel more heavily guarded, and many of the girls were very young. They were captives, and I couldn’t take them out to the hospital. But other brothels were not as heavily guarded.

The pimps know their livestock won’t try to escape. A girl’s will is easily broken and she quickly learns she has nowhere to run. They couldn’t go back to their homes because they were no longer welcome there. They were broken. They had no skills, no way to support themselves on their own. They were condemned to sell themselves more or less forever. I felt the panic of it, the echo of my own experience.