All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  Still, there were more than 600,000 HIV/AIDS sufferers in Thailand, along with ominous signs that the virus was about to make a comeback. Prevention and education program funding quickly ran dry. A new generation of young people who didn’t remember the earlier campaigns was coming of age. PSI decided to open up shop in Thailand in 2003 to help revive and supplement the programs that once worked so well. It might have been just in time: A recent survey sponsored by the United Nations had shown that 95 percent of Thais polled believed that AIDS remains a big problem in Thailand, but 75 percent of those polled—and 80 percent of people aged fifteen to twenty-four—felt that they were not personally at risk.

  PSI was launching a new brand of condom called “One.” After months of careful and precise social marketing research, they determined that young Thais want to be independent, different from their parents, take what they like from the West, and create individual personalities. The upbeat campaign spoke to that. I loved the television spot that showed the One condom packet pulsing like an eager little heart in the back pockets of jeans and purses of hip young people in shops and discos, ending with the tagline: “Got Your ID?” (We have other campaigns that target businessmen whose nights out invariably end with them purchasing sex.)

  Afterward we stopped for lunch at a beautiful, quiet seaside restaurant, a calm moment in the center of the storm. While we ate, a banana tree smiled at my soul. I excused myself and climbed up onto one of her graciously curved branches and turned my back on people for a moment, looking up in her crown of leaves and out at the indigo Gulf of Thailand. I stretched myself out, fully supported by her nurturing branches. “Rest, O beloved, rest in me.” Then it was time for the two-hour drive south to the prostitution capital of Asia.

  Compared with the more discreet and ambiguous storefront brothels of Cambodia’s Svay Pak district, the raucous neon bars that line the streets of Pattaya look like a postapocalyptic Vegas strip for sex tourists. The resort city was a notorious destination during the Vietnam War, where U.S. Navy ships would anchor offshore and spill thousands of troops onto the beach for “rest and relaxation”—nothing more than gross sexual entitlement and exploitation. Although prostitution was and is illegal in Thailand, hundreds of bars sprouted in Pattaya, stocked with cheap liquor and “bar girls” to satisfy the demands of paying customers. After the war ended, the sex trade remained, switching gears effortlessly to service a steady stream of men, mainly from Europe and America, with a preference for young Asian flesh.

  Pattaya was among the first places where HIV established a beachhead in Asia. At one point it was estimated that more than 40 percent of the prostitutes here and throughout Thailand were HIV positive. After a concerted effort by the Thai government in the 1990s to contain the epidemic (which was, after all, bad for tourism), the rate went down to less than 12 percent. But with a constant stream of new girls and boys coming in from the rural areas and neighboring countries, public health groups like one of PSI’s partners, had to remain vigilant in supplying condoms to the brothels and teaching the prostitutes why and how they had to use them.

  We were permitted access to the brothel district, which was blocked off with a wooden sawhorse by a police officer who literally “looked the other way.” I became increasingly aghast as we progressed along the streets, where women in hot pants and glittery halter tops sat outside the bars in cheap plastic chairs, legs crossed, or stood posed sadly in postures that approximated provocation against the garish wall, as if they were living prizes in a carnival game. We parked in front of a bar, one of so many crammed onto the manic street where we had arranged to meet with a gaggle of women trapped in prostitution. Papa Jack, Kate, and a PSI staff member who would translate for me were welcomed cheerfully inside by a madam stationed behind the bar.

  The women greeted me as their “big sister,” so I called them my “little sisters.” We nestled like a litter of puppies on the plastic-covered sofas (I tried not to think about why they were wipeable) as they told me about their lives. Their stories were remarkably similar to those we had heard in Cambodia. They all had married at eighteen or nineteen; all were divorced by their husbands soon after. The money they earned having exploited sex was supporting young children, elderly parents, and even a brother’s children. Several stood out. One was in full possession of a brazen personality; she seemed to be a ringleader. Another, snuggled on my right, was at the other end of the spectrum, stoic, subdued. She seemed vulnerable. Unlike the others, she wore no makeup and her hair wasn’t fixed up, just in a simple ponytail. She held my hand in hers. When I went to hold someone else’s hand, trying to spread myself around, she gripped the side seam of my pants.

  She told me she grew up on a farm in a province far away, in the northeast, and came to Pattaya desperate for work to support her thirteen-year-old son (her husband had abandoned them, her in-laws disowned her, her own family could not support her and was disgraced by her divorced status). She had no education, no skills, no safety net. For two weeks she wandered the district, approaching businesses, resorts, homes, offering her services as a maid. She found no employment. She earned nothing to send home. Her son, whom she had left on his own in their hut, was running out of food. (The story bluntly demonstrated the cycle of vulnerability that poverty creates. I grieved for her; but, oh, who was grieving for him?)

  A woman she didn’t know, sensing her plight, suggested she try the bars. She did not know what this meant. However, once told, and seeing scores of other women working in this way, she succumbed to what sociologists call “economically forced prostitution.” She endured one hellish month of paid sex with tourists and Thai men before returning home to her son, a small pocket full of money. Denying reality, hoping against hope, she stayed with her child until they were inevitably in the same position once more: penniless, meager rations, no prospects. Today, the very day I was there, was her first day back in the brothel. That was the difference I perceived in her. She was fresh. She could still emotionally articulate her regrets. I could smell the countryside, which lingered on her. I began to call her my “farm friend.” The layers of loneliness within her transcended language. She brimmed with quiet despair.

  We talked about her first time, the lying down with an alcohol-soaked stranger for money. One of her peers interrupted at this point and said, “You just smile and realize it’s business, and do what you have to do.” My farm friend smiled at me sadly.

  Another of the women told us that she was a very young girl when she was first brought to the brothel. They sold her virginity to a German tourist who had taken Viagra to prolong his erection. In a chilling monotone, she described how he raped her so many times that her vagina was torn apart and she had to be hospitalized immediately after he left. Now, she slept upstairs with the other girls and women on mats on the floor. Each was forced to take as many clients as possible, day and night, and were given one day off a month. I picked up the strong alliances they were able to forge behind the scenes, even in this setting: a woman, for example, giving up her precious day of relief for another who needed it more.

  Kate asked, “If you didn’t do this job, what job would you like?” It turned out they’d all had dreams, like any other young women. This was what they wanted to be: a policewoman, teacher, singer, doctor, flight attendant. And my farm friend? When I asked her she said, “I want to be like you.”

  I weep, as if she were still whispering this in my ear.

  My new friends wanted to show me their living conditions upstairs, which sounded like hog pens—no furnishings, eight to ten in a room, one bathroom shared by all. But the madam fiercely drew the line when they asked to take us upstairs. She went from the gregarious greeter behind the bar to dangerous disciplinarian in a flash.

  It was time to go. As we hugged goodbye, my farm friend clung to me especially. She graced me with kisses on the neck that in local custom signifies respect and deference. Her desperate tears mixed with my own sweat. We clasped our hands in prayer and bade our farewells.
I was filled with a nearly debilitating grief and guilt, swooning with panic as we walked out, leaving them behind. I had felt the same toxic emotional cocktail in Svay Pak and in the orphanages. I thought: I can’t leave my sisters in this bar. I am going to get them out.

  I knew I couldn’t rescue every woman and child from every bar, karaoke club, beer garden, brothel, and other place of slavery. I couldn’t take in every orphan. Yes, I could advocate for them, I could cry out their stories from the mountaintops, I could help protect them from HIV/AIDS, unintended pregnancy, help them make water safe for drinking, prevent and treat other health disasters, and I could agitate for change, but I couldn’t personally rescue, educate, and provide for every sex slave, every child at risk of being trafficked.

  These six, however, I could. And I would.

  On the sidewalk outside, I realized Papa Jack had prevented men from entering the bar so we could visit in a relatively quiet space, devoid of customers. However, outside, men were queuing. The tableau I saw on the sidewalk seared into my brain: A white man was towering over a frightened girl. He seemed to fancy himself James Dean, arm coolly cocked against the wall. She sat under this false wing in a plastic chair. His hair was greasy. He looked down on her. I hated him. Only Papa Jack’s presence prevented me from confronting him. I wanted his name. I had a rapid fantasy about shaming him publicly in his home country. I wanted to hurt him.

  I quickly made a plan to ask Dario to help me. It could not possibly cost that much to send these women back to their homes, to send the one to Denmark who had a cousin there, and pay for them to go to school. We would make a deal with them: We would provide housing, food, and educational funds plus a little petty cash until they graduated and had a way to generate income; PSI could check up on them, make sure they were okay.

  I would be the avenging angel of the sisterhood, setting my sisters free.

  I told my plan to Kate as we began our drive back to Bangkok. She immediately started talking me down.

  “I’m sorry, Ashley,” she said. “I understand the urge to rescue everybody, but that’s not how it works. PSI is not a rescue organization. We are a public health organization. That is our core competency, and we do it well. We have to stay clear of rescuing, or we would lose all access to slaves and prostitutes.”

  I felt as if I were in the proverbial rabbit hole as Kate unleashed a bewildering profusion of information. She explained what I had already witnessed: that we could not do our work without the cooperation and, yes, trust of brothel owners. The hard, painful truth was that if the pimps and madams thought we were impeding their business or had other agendas and motives, they would shut down the programs and kick us out.

  She explained that we had to walk a fine line to operate within the existing system, as abhorrent as the system was, in order to have privileged access to an underground population. She had to remind me that what we do in brothels is but a thin slice of PSI’s work. We are much more: malaria prevention and treatment. Safe drinking water. Child survival. Maternal health. Reproductive health. Family planning. In sixty-five countries worldwide.

  “In this setting, we do public health triage, if you will, to protect enslaved prostitutes from disease,” said Kate. “However demented it sounds, it is a portal of grace to help people no other organization has the chance to get to. Slaves would have no health care providers at all without PSI.”

  By now I was curled in a ball on the backseat, whimpering. We had reached the end of the brothel district, and the police moved aside saw-horses to let us pass. I realized the police were not there to keep the peace or enforce the law; they simply decided who had access. We pulled onto the main road north and left the world of Pattaya behind, as if it hadn’t existed. I couldn’t let that happen.

  “But Kate, if we don’t help them, who will?”

  “There are rescue organizations and churches that specialize in this work, Ashley,” said Kate. “They could be tipped off based on what we see on our visits, especially when we see and hear about children used in prostitution.” She assured me that there were dozens of rescue groups in Thailand and across Southeast Asia that provide shelter, legal counseling, and, most important, education and training for slaves and prostituted sex workers who wanted the chance of a better life. Kate told me about the incredible Somaly Mam, a former sex slave who opened three rehabilitation shelters in Cambodia and has rescued hundreds if not thousands of slaves through her NGO.

  “We can ally ourselves with extraordinary partners whose core competency complements our own,” said Kate. “And as individuals, we can of course fight like hell with the NGOs that have expertise in the abolition of the modern slave trade.”

  PSI also has a long-term plan to empower women by providing the structure and the tools they needed to improve their lives within their existing circumstances. (“God will meet me where I am,” I began to repeat to myself. “Come as you are,” the old hymn says.) We are able to help many prostituted women supplement their incomes, training them as peer educators, allowing them to reduce the number of “clients” they are forced to take. One woman’s reproductive health empowerment helps her educate scores of others. We offer them English lessons because so many clients are North American and European tourists and they need our language to insist on condom use, to speak up for themselves in a dynamic in which they are powerless (and to stick to their guns on the condom; men will often pay more for condomless sex). We give them medical checkups, often on the premises (many are not allowed to leave the brothels, others are too ashamed or psychologically disabled to leave), tests, and the medicines to stay healthy and treat disease.

  “We’re looking out for them in every way short of dragging them away in the middle of the night,” said Kate.

  By the time we reached the hotel, I was more or less talked out of my naive rescue plan. But rage still roiled inside of me. As I had so many times in my life, I escaped into my imagination. Soaking in the bath, I wrote the avenging angel script in my head. In the satisfying climax, God would descend on those streets of Pattaya and with a great wind of loving rage wipe out the despicable, heinous practice of humans selling humans. Those plastic chairs, charming icons of front porch America, on which hundreds of poor, uneducated, exploited women sit waiting for strange men to defile them, would be picked up and churned through the air, their ugly stories turned into mere songs on a distant wind. The men who trawl, the men who rape, the men who believe they have a gross entitlement to women’s sexuality, who privilege their interests and violate over and over our bodily integrity and sexual autonomy, would be washed into the indigo gulf to have their violence and their lust and their hate and their ignorance beaten out of them by turbulent waves. Then they will be left back on shore, desperate not to make the same mistakes again, and again, and again.

  What remained would be joyous and at peace, a gentle mirth in the universe.

  I toweled myself off and called Dario. I think I talked the entire time. Later, I would realize he had done all sorts of interesting things while I was away, but I never asked.

  The next day, I met another sister when we were joined by Coco Lee, a young pop superstar from Hong Kong. Kate Roberts had scored a major coup by signing up Coco to join the YouthAIDS campaign. That was her genius: Instead of imposing an American idea of what was hip and sexy, and presuming how people would respond to healthy products and messages, YouthAIDS analyzed what worked in each culture and designed the campaign around it. Coco and I hit it off right away. She was sunny and open, and she was traveling with her sister, something that certainly resonated with me.

  We drove a few hours north of Bangkok into some low, verdant mountains to reach our first destination, Wat Phra Bat Nam Phu, an AIDS hospice run by Buddhist monks in the village of Lopburi. As we arrived, I saw a Buddha rising through the trees above a hillside monastery, radiant in his loving, benevolent smile. I figured he must be delighted with the monks who lived and worked in the whitewashed buildings below, because they were t
he embodiment of kindness, compassion, sympathy, and equanimity—the four tenets of Therevada Buddhism.

  We entered through a spired archway and were greeted by the abbot, an energetic, round-faced, middle-aged man in saffron robes whose ordained name is Alongkot Dikkapanyo. His warm, scholarly manner made me think of him as “Professor Monk,” and indeed, he was highly educated, with a master’s in engineering. Along with him was Father Michael Bassano, a Maryknoll priest from upstate New York who volunteered at the hospice. In 1992, while visiting a local hospital to comfort the sick, the abbot met a man in the last stages of AIDS who had been abandoned by his family. He held the man’s hand as he died and in that moment decided to establish a hospice for AIDS victims at his monastery. There was so much need. In Thailand, the stigma of the virus was so great that as soon as a person was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, he or she was shunned by the whole family and cast into the street. Many made arduous treks across Thailand, hoping to arrive in time not to die alone. Some were so frail and exhausted from the journey, they literally crawled the final mile up the hill to the temple.

  The original hospice had eight beds for full-blown AIDS patients. Now it was a four-hundred-bed complex with four floors of patients and a waiting list thousands of names long. The hospice had never received funding from the government. It relied on donations from tourists, corporations, and NGOs like PSI. By 2004, the understanding of AIDS had improved, but the stigma had not abated. Father Michael presided over the cremations of those who died in their care. Afterward, the ashes were scooped into small plastic sacks and marked with the names and dates of death. If they were rejected by the families—and almost all were—the ash sacks were placed alongside an enormous Buddha in an open-air temple on the grounds. I was deeply moved to be invited to sit in prayer and meditation with the monks and Father Michael as we joined in perfect ecumenical observance to pray for the souls of the dead, each of us according to our faith. I placed my hands in prayer at my heart, as I had been taught as a small child in Sunday school, chin lowered. Thousands of sacks of human remains towered before me, a monument to the heartbreak of AIDS.