The Road of Lost Innocence (11 page)

The first girl I helped escape was dark skinned, like me. She had straight hair all the way down her back. She was sixteen, and she had been a prostitute for over a year. She was guarded, but I had to help her.

I found a tailor in Sambo, a village about ten miles up the river from Kratie. It wasn’t far, but I hoped it would be far enough. This woman was willing to take girls in and train them as seamstresses for one hundred dollars each. I asked Pierre for the money, and he gave it to me. To his great credit, Pierre almost never complained about this kind of thing, no matter how much I spent.

I went back to the brothel and told the
meebon
this girl had to come to the clinic the next day for more treatment. But when we were alone together, I told the girl not to come. I didn’t trust the fat nurse, my colleague—she liked money too much. I said we should meet at my house and I would take her to the village. When the
meebon
and her guards came to the clinic looking for her, nobody had seen her, and my fat colleague told the guards she must have escaped—this happens sometimes. They went away.

Sambo was far enough away to escape their notice. I paid for two more girls, then another two—I sent them to learn sewing from this seamstress and I gave them a small living allowance. I wasn’t buying them out of prostitution, because I didn’t have that kind of money. But I was giving them a way out, if they could manage to leave.

I had been doing this for a couple of months when one of the pimps in the neighborhood put a gun to my head. I knew him. He was an old man called Mr. Eng. The prostitutes in this old man’s brothel were heavily guarded, and he never let them out. I hadn’t encouraged any of his girls to leave.

I was going to Mr. Eng’s brothel to give out condoms and talk, but before I’d begun climbing up the ladder to his stilt house, he stepped out of the chair where he’d been dozing in his undershirt, a gun in his hand. He held it against my head and told me to get out or he would shoot me.

I just looked at him. I don’t know where I got the courage, but I said, “If you kill me, then your wife, your children—all of you will go to prison, because I am protected. You know who I am. All of you will be killed.”

I was a Khmer de France and a white man’s wife. He put the gun down.

When I told Pierre about it later, he said I should go to the police station to file a proper complaint, like a foreigner would do. I discovered that the provincial police chief was the brother of Yvonne, the woman who cooked and cleaned at the MSF team’s house. Mr. Eng was taken into custody very quickly after that, and I had no more trouble for a while.

I knew that what was needed was a place for prostitutes to live and be looked after once they managed to escape. Pierre’s salary wasn’t limitless, and I knew just how many more girls there were. I also thought that, with money, there might be some way to rescue the girls who were captives. They would need somewhere safe to live—somewhere the pimps wouldn’t get them. They needed training. I started to write down notes, in Khmer, about what I thought this should look like—I was thinking of some kind of charity that could collect funds.

Then I began feeling ill. It never occurred to me that I might be pregnant. To be safe, I was also taking birth control pills. When I realized why I had been feeling so terrible, I panicked.

I didn’t want children. They are so vulnerable. They feel so much pain, and it is impossible to protect them. I felt I would never know how to look after a child properly, because I had never had a mother. But Pierre was delighted. He told me, “Nature will look after you.” It was a little unrealistic, but sweet.

Pierre began helping me with my idea for a charity to help prostitutes. He and his Dutch friend Eric Merman, who worked with MSF, started writing the organization’s charter. Then Pierre landed a new job in Phnom Penh, with an American relief agency. He would be earning a lot more money and he told me he’d decided to accept.

.10.

New Beginnings

I found us a two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, in a neighborhood called Tuol Kok. Houses were cheaper there and they had yards, but it wasn’t one of the places the white foreigners had started moving to—it was a Cambodian neighborhood. I had no idea it was a center for brothels, but I realized soon enough. Right near our house was a brothel they called the “Broken Coconut”—“coconut,” in Khmer, is another word for a woman’s secret place. The
meebon
stood outside it, shouting at the girls if they didn’t look lively enough. They were so young. I didn’t see a girl older than about nineteen; many were as young as twelve.

All along the main road heading toward the city, for almost a mile, were filthy shacks where girls with painted faces beckoned men on the roadside. These girls were mostly for local use: they were for
motodup
drivers, construction workers, laborers. But there were also a number of brothels on that road that were more specialized. They offered younger children. Cambodians called it Antenna Street after the tall radio-transmitter tower, but foreigners had begun calling it
“la rue des petites fleurs”
—the street of little flowers—because there were so many young girls for sale.

A few days after we moved in to Tuol Kok, a young policeman came by to register us as new residents. This was still the system in those days, and since Pierre was foreign, I suppose we merited a special home visit. The policeman, named Srena, was a young boy, about nineteen, and he looked hungry. I served him tea and some fish soup, and he told me a little about himself.

I was about six months pregnant, but I couldn’t just sit at home doing nothing. I’m not that kind of person. And it was impossible to ignore the misery of the brothels that were all around me. I began distributing condoms, just as I had in Kratie, and taking girls to the clinic—I pretended to be a health worker from Médecins Sans Frontières, which was not a great idea, but I didn’t have a better one.

I had to steel myself to go back into the dank, filthy alleyways behind the Central Market where I used to work. I never did manage to force myself to go back to the place where Aunty Peuve’s brothel had been. It was too alive with memories—it made me feel ill to go near it.

I don’t know if people recognized me on the street. Probably not. I was dressed differently, and I had a completely different air about me. Who would connect a self-assured, well-dressed pregnant woman to the dismal, scrawny ghost called
“khmao”
? I didn’t go looking for anyone I knew—I was pretty sure everyone was gone.

Phnom Penh had changed enormously in just two and a half years. It was far richer, far more crowded. There were building sites everywhere. The brothels had changed too. Aunty Peuve’s brothel had been hidden, like the other establishments, in alleyways behind the main street; now they were right out front. They were official.

The worst places, without question, were in Svay Pak. We had a car—a rattling pale-blue Camry that Pierre had bought for eight hundred dollars—and I used to drive there. Six miles out of the city, it was a whole neighborhood of brothels, clustered around the main road. In Svay Pak there were shacks, but there were also other brothels in concrete houses with high gates and walls. They looked like fortresses, and it was obvious that the people inside were armed: every business in Phnom Penh had a weapon. Most of these places wouldn’t let me in. Many of the girls inside were captives and some of them were very young children. Svay Pak specialized in ethnic-Vietnamese girls, pale and beautiful, virgins.

Some of the children were ten years old, sometimes younger. I had never seen that before, and it shook me. They were often badly hurt. I began my daily routine: going out to the brothels every day and bringing girls for treatment to the MSF clinic or to the hospital where Pierre worked.

Phanna’s daughter, Ning, was very sick. She was about five years old, and since they’d moved to Phnom Penh she’d been ill. Pierre and I took her to the hospital, and she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She was hospitalized. She came out of the hospital, but she was still convalescing when Phanna came to see me one day, white as a sheet.

She told me her husband was planning to give Ning to a neighbor, a woman who had offered to take Ning in, since she had no children—she had even offered him money. He said that since Ning was always sick anyway, this was a good solution. Phanna came and begged me to find a way out, and so, when I was eight months pregnant, Pierre and I decided to have Ning come and live with us. She was the sweetest child in the world, a truly endearing little girl, and we already adored her anyway.

The time was coming for me to give birth, but I was still uneasy at the idea of having a child. There was a creature growing inside me who moved and kicked and soon would need me, but I felt paralyzed by the thought of being a mother to someone. I had never had a mother and I painfully felt that hole in my life. To be a mother myself felt impossible. Pierre didn’t help a lot—he said I looked grotesque and called me “Truck” because I was so big.

I’d been having nightmares for months with horrific images of the women I had “helped” through labor when I was a nurse in Chup. I told Pierre I didn’t want to have anything to do with the obstetrics in any Cambodian hospital. Cambodia had become a place where everything was for sale, even doctors’ diplomas. He told me it was no problem; I could give birth in the Thai capital, Bangkok.

I flew to Bangkok for a routine visit two weeks before the birth date. Pierre’s mother met me there. She was much nicer to me now, and eventually we would grow quite close. The hospital was very clean, very crisp, and very technical, but the whole visit didn’t make me feel any better about having a child. I couldn’t understand the doctor—he spoke only Thai and English, and in those days I didn’t speak English.

The doctor told me my contractions had already begun. It was all over very quickly—I gave birth before Pierre even arrived. After it was over, they handed me the baby. The room was dark. I held this warm, beautiful little creature whose name we had already decided on. After much discussion, we had opened a dictionary and fallen upon the name of a Turkish town between Cambodia and France—Adana. She looked very peacefully into my eyes.

Something happened to me that night. It was almost like my life began again, a whole new life. This was my baby, my child, who’d come out of my body, like I came out of my mother’s body, the mother I can’t remember and never will. I looked at her all night long, crying, “My little baby, I don’t want you to have a life like me.” I told her, “I will never leave you,” and promised that I would keep her safe.

We went back to Phnom Penh. My mother-in-law was enchanted by baby Adana. It seemed now that everything was forgiven because I had produced a grandchild. Pierre too was delighted. When we went for a walk with our little girls, Ning and Adana, he told me I was beautiful. I was happy.

When baby Adana was about a month old, an American man, Robert Deutsch, contacted me. He said it was urgent. Robert had a group called PADEK that worked with squatters—and he told me there was a woman with him who said her daughter had been sold into a brothel. She wanted her daughter back, and Robert thought perhaps I could help her.

The girl was about thirteen and her name was Srey. Her mother told me she suspected her sister-in-law’s friend had sold her. I went back to the neighborhood where they lived, and it seemed this woman was suspect: she didn’t work, but she sometimes had large sums of money, the neighbors said. And her brother was a policeman.

When I got home, I went over to the police station near my house and found Srena, the young policeman who’d registered me. I explained what we were up to and I asked him to keep an eye on this woman, to follow her around for a little while and keep his mouth shut about it. He agreed unreservedly—he was a very decent man, and the idea of a child in a brothel against her will sickened him.

Srena came back and told me he had watched the woman go to a brothel in Tuol Kok, right near my house. I told him to go back there the next day and pretend to be a client. He would ask if there were any new girls, and try to find out if one was called Srey. He did, and the
meebon
told him, “She’s too sick to see clients right now.”

I talked about it with Robert, and he said we should both go to the police. Srey’s mother was just a poor woman, and the police would never do anything about her complaint if she acted alone. But if Robert and I made formal complaints on behalf of our legal organizations, the police might feel obligated to take action—that was our only hope of getting Srey out.

We made so much fuss that the police agreed to raid the brothel. I think they didn’t want to lose face. In those days, not many policemen supported our work. Too many of them were involved in the sex trade themselves—they worked as brothel guards or came as clients. Many of them were even investors.

That first raid was a farce. There were half a dozen policemen, Robert, the girl’s mother, and me. As we went in the front door, the pimps and most of the girls were already fleeing out the back. But Srey, the girl we had come for, was still inside. She was white as a sheet and sweating on a filthy little bed on the floor. She was feverish, almost unconscious. In the space of a few weeks, the pimps had addicted her to some kind of drug—methamphetamines, I think.

We took Srey to the police station to tell her story and file charges. She was pale; she could hardly stand. Then she left with her mother. I visited her the next day and got her some medicine. But she was going through withdrawal, pissing on the floor, and it was clear her mother couldn’t deal with her—she was trying to hide her from the neighbors. A few days later she asked me to take Srey—she didn’t want her own daughter anymore.

Srey was the first victim who came to live with us. We had nowhere to take the girls and no money to set up a center, but we had two bedrooms and a living room. It wasn’t large, but there was space enough.

In the beginning of 1996, Pierre, Eric, and I finalized our project to create a charity to fund a proper center to help prostitutes. We decided to call it something mild—we knew we had to avoid attracting a stigma to the girls who would be living there. We settled on AFESIP, which translates from French as: Acting for Women in Distressing Situations. This could mean anyone; it carried no label of prostitution.

We took our project to the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office in Phnom Penh, looking for funds. Three months later we still had had no response and when we called the secretary said our papers couldn’t be traced. When we went back to submit the paperwork again, the EU representative was there. She asked, “What is it that you actually want?”

We explained the project to her and she said, “But there are no prostitutes in Cambodia.” She had been in the country for at least a year.

I’m not a diplomat. “Madam,” I said, “you’re living in a world of air-conditioned hotels and offices. This isn’t an air-conditioned country. Go outdoors and take a look around.”

We didn’t get any money from the EU. We didn’t get any money from anyone. All the big international organizations that were in Cambodia to fund grassroots projects like ours knew about our mission, but helping prostitutes didn’t seem like a priority to them, and they weren’t giving us money. Sometimes, if a journalist wanted to write about the traffic in sex slaves in Cambodia, these organizations would send the reporter to me. But AFESIP was never quoted in the article—the big organizations would take all the credit.

Pierre’s salary had once seemed princely, but his monthly three-thousand-dollar paycheck was now completely absorbed by our daily needs and my work. I began working for a real-estate agent, trying to make a little extra money by finding houses for the foreigners who were now flooding into Cambodia with nongovernmental aid organizations. What we needed was a lot more money—enough to start up a proper center where former prostitutes could live and learn to stand on their own two feet again. But at least this new job would give me a little extra, enough to fund the girls in our house and get them sewing instruction.

My job was to find houses for foreigners. I looked for places with charm and with gardens—not the featureless concrete villas that developers were slapping up all over town. I understood what foreigners wanted, because in some ways I was now partly foreign myself.

One afternoon I knocked on the door of a small house that lay behind a beautiful Cambodian garden, with orchids hanging in a banyan tree. An old man lived there. Renting his house out was the last thing he wanted to do, but we started talking anyway, and he asked me in for tea.

He was an intellectual and he’d been through every kind of revolution and change and suffering too—it was marked on his face. He said, “In Cambodia we’re like frogs in front of the king. When the king orders it, we poke our heads above water and sing. When he signals, we go back into the water. But if we poke our heads out without having been invited to, the king cuts them off with his sword.