In a Brothel Atop Street 63
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Nobody knows the numbers. Slaves, unlike guns or drugs, are hard to see and count. Is this boy on your fishing boat an employee? Is this girl a willing prostitute? Is your maid free to leave the house? No one tells the truth. The United Nations claims that every year 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked as slaves across international boundaries and millions more are sold as slaves within their own countries, but experts in the field say these numbers are inflated to gather public awareness. None of the experts, however, deny that there is a serious problem. And many, if not most, have gone past the point of believing in a solution.
When I spoke with Cambodians about slavery, they very often didn’t know what I was talking about. They answered questions I didn’t ask, and I asked questions they didn’t understand, back and forth. It was very frustrating. Then I found out that in Khmer there is no word for “slavery.” No word for slavery, but there is a word for “slave”—khiom, an old word from back in the days of Angkor Wat and the God/Kingdom. Now the word has a new meaning: It means “I.” A young Cambodian art historian told me this. Maybe he was stretching an etymology, but it seemed to make sense to me. We think of slavery as the practice of depriving people of their individual rights and liberties, turning them into objects that can be bought and sold. But Cambodians have never had a concept of individual rights and liberties, so how can they be deprived of them? To them it’s like, “Of course people can be bought and sold. It happens all the time. What’s your problem?” They think of slavery as cheating, a business deal gone bad—one person lies and tricks another into bondage or work with no pay. And cheating they know very well. They’ll talk about being cheated all day long—out of houses, food, cars, children. But I didn’t want to know about cheating. I wanted to know about slavery. I’d try to make the point that human beings are different from used cars. “To buy and sell people—isn’t this a bad thing?” And they’d say, “Yes, sometimes, when the person is cheated.”
An example of how it happens: A 14-year-old girl is bored with living on the farm in the countryside. She has an older sister who left and went to Phnom Penh and hasn’t been heard from since, but the girl believes if she can get to Phnom Penh, she can find her sister and live with her and maybe get a job in a garment factory. So she sneaks away and gets on a bus and meets a woman who says she can help. She knows a restaurant that needs a dishwasher, and she’ll take her there. The girl thinks, great, what good fortune. But the restaurant turns out to be a brothel, and the woman sells the girl for $300 and walks away. The girl, being from a poor farm village and knowing virtually nothing of the world, believes this is a debt she has to pay back. It was just a woman on a bus, and the girl to her was like a wallet found on the street.
Up until recently, experts in the field of human trafficking believed that members of crime organizations came to the villages and recruited young bodies with deceits and lies. They called it “stranger danger.” But now they are starting to believe that most of the time the young people are tricked into slavery by people they know—an aunt, a boyfriend, even their own mother. It’s more like everybody knows how to do it, and usually people are betrayed by those whom they trust.
Another example: There’s a family of Vietnamese immigrants living in a wooden shack next to abandoned railroad tracks on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The mother, who says she is 70, though I peg her as closer to 50, has 13 children, none of whom have an income except for her two youngest daughters, whom she periodically sells into debt bondage as prostitutes. With this many kids and lots of grandkids and cousins, somebody is always getting sick or hurt and needing medical attention. So the mother borrows money from her neighbors at the going rate of interest—20 percent a month. Soon she is way over her head in debt and has no way to pay it off except by selling her daughters again. She’s been doing it since they were about 10. She recently sold the older one, her name is Nee, now 17 years old, to a brothel in Taiwan for $1,000, and was getting ready to sell the youngest one, Auk, now 15 years old, in the same way for the same amount, but Auk ran away. Now, the mother says, she is worried sick about her. Auk, hidden away in a house on the other side of town, is also worried and scared. If she refuses to do her mother’s bidding, she will risk breaking her “mother-daughter relationship,” essentially cutting herself off from her family forever, meaning she will live and die alone and then spend many rebirths in pain and suffering. Nee was a good girl and willingly left home to work in Taiwan. She calls Auk on her cell phone and says she doesn’t know what city she’s in and has to sleep with six or seven men a night and that her stomach hurts, but she’s not going to come home until the $1,000 is paid back because their mother needs her help. The mother says she cries for her daughter in Taiwan every night, but what can she do? She owes money that must be paid back, and there is no other way.
It’s like a soap opera, and it gets worse. Enter Mark, an American, early 50s, living in Phnom Penh. Five years ago, he was living in Florida and had arthritis so bad he couldn’t walk one block. So he quit his job and flew to Thailand, where he exercised every day, drank lots of tea, and had a lot of sex with young prostitutes. He cured himself in a few months. He says, “Everybody should have a regular sex life. Jesus, when I was living in the States, I couldn’t get nothing. I might go six months without getting laid.”
