The Road of Lost Innocence

by Somaly Mam

  One of the girls Sampère filmed was Sokha. She was from a refugee family. Her parents had tried to leave Cambodia for a better life, but they were sent to a refugee camp in Thailand that was run by the Khmer Rouge. When they came back to Cambodia, they had nothing. They were beggars in Phnom Penh when Sokha’s stepfather raped her and then sold her to a brothel. She was nine years old, and by the time we rescued her from the brothel, she was twelve. It was very hard for her to talk to a man about what had happened to her, but Claude was very careful, very respectful.

  Another girl Claude Sampère interviewed was Tom Dy. She was a girl I found in the road one afternoon, in a neighborhood south of the Royal Palace. She was dirty, with her hair clumped with mud, and frighteningly thin. People were throwing stones at her. Her head was bleeding, she had sarcomas on her skin from AIDS—she looked half dead. I thought she was about thirty or thirty-five. I asked the driver to stop and I put my arms around her and took her into the car.

  The driver said, “Are you mad? She’s filthy, she has lice, AIDS—don’t touch her.” He was disgusted by the smell. But I took her to our shelter and washed her myself—I didn’t want anyone else to look after her. I tried to bring her to the hospital, but the nurses glared at her. She told me she was just seventeen.

  I brought her back to the shelter and talked to Pierre. He used his contacts to get her tuberculosis medication and other expensive drugs. Every morning I washed Tom Dy and dressed her wounds with antiseptic. She told me she had been a prostitute since the age of nine. The pimps put her out on the street and threw stones at her when she became too sick to work. With our care, she put on weight and became like the chief of the whole center. Tom Dy was a naturally positive person and became an enormous help around the center—cooking and cleaning and bustling everyone along, looking after the younger girls if they didn’t want to eat or became depressed.

  Tom Dy told Claude that her dream was to work with AFESIP, to help the other girls. But she knew she wouldn’t make it. She knew she had AIDS. I knew it too, of course, and I knew that it meant she was going to die, though I didn’t care to think about it. Claude seemed deeply affected by their conversation.

  He and his crew also accompanied us on a police raid. We were looking for the daughter of Mrs. Ly, a Vietnamese woman. Because she was Vietnamese, the police wouldn’t help her—the Khmer hate the Vietnamese even more than they hate the Chinese, and anyway, she had no money. Mrs. Ly told us that her daughter Loan had left the village where they lived to become a waitress, but now she feared that she had been sold into prostitution. She had heard she was working in Svay Pak.

  Because the police wouldn’t help her, Mrs. Ly went to Svay Pak herself. She walked around the street waving a small black-and-white photo of her fourteen-year-old daughter. One young man pointed to one of the brothels. She knocked, and the meebon threw her out.

  After Mrs. Ly came to us, we went to the police to ask for an authorization for Claude Sampère’s crew to film in Svay Pak. It was a Saturday, which was probably a mistake, because the police don’t like to work on Saturdays. Also, it gave them plenty of time to warn the brothel owners. When we finally managed to get a permit for a raid on Monday evening, there was nobody at the brothel. No girls, no pimps. Svay Pak was clean.

  Pierre and I were furious with the police, and we threatened to hold a press conference to expose their double dealing. They rallied and arrested one of the brothel owners. Somehow, they forced him to confess where little Loan had been taken. But when we got there, that house was closed up—these people too had been forewarned. How were we to work with the police under these conditions?

  Despite the locked door, we refused to leave. Finally we saw some girls coming out of another house down the street, trying to run away, which made sense—many of the brothels in Svay Pak are connected by tunnels. Loan was among the girls. She was in shock. When she saw her mother, they both wept. We filed charges at the police station.

  Before they left, Claude’s team gave Loan and her mother a little money, so they could go back to Vietnam. They traveled discreetly, without any passports—Mrs. Ly knew a place where they could sneak across the border. We were still new to these matters in those days, and there seemed no better way to do it.

  I began receiving threats. Men would phone our house in the middle of the night and threaten me or my family if I didn’t stay at home. I received letters that said, “Leave Phnom Penh or you will die.” One day when I was in the neighborhood around the Central Market, a man drove alongside me on a big black motorbike, the kind we call dog bikes. He held a pistol against my side and said, “Leave. Because I won’t kill you, but somebody else will.”

  I suppose he was a contract killer who had been hired to eliminate me, but for some reason, he didn’t want to do it. Perhaps I had helped his sister or some other girl he knew. So he warned me instead.

  I took that warning seriously. It felt different from the other threats. The cold, metal feel of the gun against my skin was very real. That evening, I locked the windows and doors. I began pacing around the house every night, waiting for the sounds of a gunman outside. I was most afraid for my family—for Ning and Adana. I didn’t know what those people might do to my two little girls. I was becoming a little unhinged.

  Pierre said it was time to take a break. He took me and the children to Laos, where he had friends who would lend me a house. He said it was just for a while, until the trouble blew over. In those days Cambodians couldn’t travel easily, because they needed visas, which were almost impossible to get. But because I was married to a Frenchman, I was French and could therefore get a visa easily. I left the AFESIP shelter in the hands of my mother, and she and my adoptive father came to the airport to wave good-bye.

  The night before I left I wrote a letter to the Cambodian prime minister, Hun Sen. It was like throwing a needle into a pile of dried rice stalks, but I was angry and I needed to tell someone in authority. I said the traffickers had threatened to roast my baby like an ordinary chicken and that I should not be driven out of my country in fear of my life because I wanted to improve the lives of women who were being kept and traded as slaves.

  The night we arrived in Laos, I had a dream. I saw my adoptive parents’ house in Thlok Chhrov burning. I woke Pierre and told him, “We have to go home.” He was irritated. He told me to stop behaving like a superstitious old Khmer witch. “Try to live in reality,” he snapped. Still, he promised that when he got back to Cambodia, he would find out whether anything had happened.

  My adoptive mother was at the airport when Pierre arrived, and he could see that she was distraught. He said, “What’s going on—has the house burned down or something?” She started to cry. She said, “How do you know?”

  The evening I left Phnom Penh, someone had gone to Thlok Chhrov and put gasoline all round the house where my adoptive parents lived. I suppose they assumed that if I wasn’t in Phnom Penh, I had gone there for safety. Perhaps someone watched my car drive away from my house, with the children and the luggage, and figured that must be where we had fled.

  It took just ten minutes for my parents’ house and everything in it to burn to nothing. It was only made of dried leaves and bamboo. Because they had gone to the airport to see me off, my adoptive parents weren’t inside. However, there was an elderly man there, looking after the house while my father was gone, because of course it didn’t have a proper lock. The neighbors pulled him out of the blaze. He was hospitalized, and he never fully recovered.

  I knew then that the threats against me were real. But I couldn’t stop my work. I was in danger, but so were the thousands of girls in the brothels. I was safe in Laos, but they were not.

  Then I received a response to my letter from the prime minister. A little black girl from a tiny village had written to the prime minister of the kingdom, and this man actually wrote back. Hun Sen wrote that the police were investigating the arson of my parents’ house. He asked me to continue my work.

  I felt p
roud to receive such an acknowledgment. It’s true that although many Cambodian officials are shockingly corrupt, and some are simply evil, I have also received support for my work from certain people in the Cambodian government. Without them, none of what we do would be possible.

  I decided to return to Phnom Penh. The holiday in Laos had done me good. It had calmed me down. I vowed to be more careful in the future and hired a driver who was a former policeman to be my bodyguard.

  When Claude Sampère’s program aired in 1998, he invited me to France to talk on the air about my work. Pierre and the children came along—little Ning, who was seven and a half, and Adana. Before we left, Tom Dy asked me not to go. She hung on to me and cried. She begged me, “Don’t go. If you’re not here, I’ll die and I don’t want to die without you.”

  She didn’t seem very sick—in fact, she had just begun to put on weight. I told her she wasn’t dying and that we wouldn’t be gone for long. I promised to buy her a present. She asked for something pretty to wear in her hair.

  Then the day before we left, Tom Dy was hospitalized. She had some kind of galloping infection and a high fever. When I took her to the hospital, she asked me if I loved her and cried in my arms. She kissed me and begged me again not to go.

  I thought about her every day during our trip to Paris. Phone calls were expensive, and I had no news of her for two weeks. One afternoon Claude offered to take me out to find something for Tom Dy. We were in a department store when my phone rang: Tom Dy was dead. She died alone, in the hospital.

  I raged and wept. This sweet teenage girl, who was sold by her parents into prostitution, who had been beaten and raped for years, had now died from her ill treatment at the hands of people who had no compassion, no human feeling for anyone but themselves.

  There is nothing that can excuse the sex slave industry in Cambodia. I am no big thinker, but I think even Pol Pot cannot be seen as an excuse.

  After Claude’s program aired, congratulatory phone calls started coming in from everywhere. But in spite of the good press, the funding situation at AFESIP was becoming critical. Claude took me to see Emma Bonino, who was then the European commissioner for humanitarian affairs, running the European Union’s massively wealthy aid agency, ECHO. Emma Bonino was a world-class politician and she happened to be in Paris that week.

  When we arrived at her Paris office, Emma Bonino was shouting into the phone—a blond Italian woman, tiny but with ferocious energy. I shrank back, but Claude said, “Don’t worry. She’s like that—she shouts. But her heart is in the right place.”

  Emma Bonino already knew about our work. She spoke to me briefly and made a couple more phone calls in Italian, furiously chain-smoking throughout. Then after barking orders at some underling, she turned to me again and put her arm around my shoulder. She said, “You’ll be all right.”

  I was astonished by the energy that emanated from this small, smiling woman who could shout down the line and at the same time show me such kindness. She is a rock.

  Of course that one visit wasn’t the end of our struggle. We had to go to Brussels to talk to the bureaucrats in the European Commission. It was my first visit to Brussels, and Pierre came with me. We looked like scruffy refugees, dragging our luggage around in the rain. I didn’t have a sweater and I was cold; I was wearing two pairs of socks in my cheap shoes, and my feet were bleeding.

  The bureaucrats looked down on us with barely disguised disdain—me with my twisted shoes, Pierre with his lopsided grin, our worn suitcases in the corner. Apparently we didn’t have proper appointments. We were shunted from office to office. Finally we managed to get a commitment of subsidies from the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office, but the funding stopped after a year or two—we never learned why.

  .12.

  The Prince of Asturias and the Village of Thlok Chhrov

  When funds began coming in from the European Union and from UNICEF, the first thing we did was start building a new shelter about ten miles outside Phnom Penh. By this time we had more than thirty women and girls sleeping in one room, and AFESIP’s wooden house in Phnom Penh was much too small. They were young, almost all of them under twenty-two, and some of them were children. They had very different levels of schooling—many of them couldn’t read or write. They were also traumatized. They had nightmares and suffered from drug withdrawal. They were suicidal, depressed, mute, or uncontrollably angry.

  We began building the new center in 1998, and planned to name it after Tom Dy. We wanted to put up a series of buildings on a piece of land AFESIP had bought, near a village about ten miles southwest of the city. I wanted to have a large covered room for the sewing classes and a separate room where a full-time schoolteacher could hold small classes in literacy and basic math, according to the girls’ different educational levels. We planned several spacious bedrooms, each with room for ten women’s mats, and separate cupboards for every person and her personal effects.

  Then, in June 1998, while we were building the Tom Dy Center, I was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award. Pierre took the phone call. He told me that the heir to the throne of Spain had chosen me to receive a special award for promoting humanitarian values. Neither of us had ever heard of this prize and we had no idea how they had heard of us, but we quickly learned that it was an enormously prestigious award and carried with it the almost unimaginable sum of five million pesetas, about forty thousand dollars.

  To collect the prize, we went to Spain, with five-year-old Adana. Ning was in school, and my adoptive mother looked after her while we were gone. We traveled first class, which I had never done before. We were treated like kings, even though we looked just as scruffy as ever. When we got to Oviedo, the capital of the Spanish principality of Asturias, we were told that I would be making a speech that night. I hadn’t prepared anything and I’ve always been terrified by intellectuals and any well-dressed crowd.

  We were welcomed into a grand reception hall where TV crews and photographers were waiting. The Prince of Spain introduced us. The beautiful African woman standing near me was Graça Machel, the wife of Nelson Mandela and a great woman in her own right. Behind me was Rigoberta Menchú, who had already won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in Guatemala—even I had heard of her. Emma Bonino was there too—she waved at me and sent me an encouraging smile. There were seven women who were receiving awards for their work to promote the rights of women and children. I felt smaller and smaller.

  I was so nervous I could barely understand what the prince was saying, but what I heard was very moving. He talked about the indifference of Western countries to the horrible cruelty of life in other parts of the world, where there is such pitiless abuse of women and children. When it was my turn to take the stage, I closed my eyes and just began talking about the situation of women in Cambodia.

  I talked about my own life and about the girls imprisoned in brothels as slaves. I talked about how badly they are treated, the violence that they must endure. I talked about the gentle smile of Cambodian girls, and how that smile isn’t genuine.

  I had no idea I could talk in front of a crowd for that long. When I finished there was thunderous applause. The lights came on slowly and I could see that some of the people in the audience were crying. I felt exhausted, but I also felt that I had achieved something important.

  The next day was the prize-giving ceremony. All of us had been asked to wear the traditional dress of our homelands, and a crowd gathered in the street to watch our procession. The Asturians were also wearing their traditional clothes. For me, it was as if the world had turned upside down. In my universe I’m nothing, a mere woman who works for imprisoned, penniless girls. Here I was being treated like a queen. I felt like Cinderella, from Adana’s French storybooks.

  All seven of us moved forward, holding hands. There was the roar of applause. Then we had to pay our respects to the prince. I had been dreading this. I thought that meant that we would have to get down on our knees and bow our heads to the ground, like Cambod
ians have to do, to show we are mere dust beneath the feet of royalty.

  I don’t like to kneel. I’m no longer a slave. I hope I will never have to abase myself and go down on my knees in front of anyone again—I’ve done that much too much.

  But the prince arrived in front of me very simply and said hello. He held out his hand for me to shake. He talked to me naturally—he spoke in French. In Cambodia there is a special archaic language in which the king is addressed and no one speaks it outside the royal palace. But the Prince of Spain was friendly and seemed sincerely interested in me.

  Then I met his mother, Queen Sofia. She is a wonderful woman, firm and caring, and truly dedicated to the cause of helping women around the world. Emma Bonino translated for us. The queen picked up Adana and played with her. I could sense that she was kind and good and I liked her immediately.

  I was fascinated by the casual charm of this amazing family. These people were the monarchs of a powerful country, and yet they behaved as though I was their equal. I felt that I had spoken from deep inside me. They knew what I had done, and what had been done to me, and yet they respected me anyway—a little Phnong girl, a dirty prostitute.

  Afterward we were asked to sign autographs, and there were photographers and a huge banquet with a crowd of people. My feet were bleeding from the high-heeled shoes I had bought for the occasion. I wasn’t used to high heels, so I surreptitiously stashed them in my bag. I spent the rest of the evening shaking hands, dazed and barefoot.

  The warm welcome of the Spanish made me think for the first time that our campaign had found real support and that we would no longer have to go begging. Until then, almost every time we’d gone to big Western donors for money, we were looked down at with cold superiority. The money came in dribbles, never when they said it would, and often less than we’d expected. But when I returned to Cambodia from Spain, I had enough money to undertake something really significant. But almost more importantly, I felt people finally understood what we were doing and how important it was to help us. I felt we were no longer alone. Until then, everything I had done had been spontaneous, instinctive, a little disorganized. Now I felt that AFESIP could begin to plan for the future.