by Somaly Mam
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 to
rn 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.
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 ma
ny 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.