by Matt Gross
There was one problem left to deal with: Douglas and I were sharing a hotel room, and he was not going back there alone. Ali got up, walked over to the dance floor, and returned with a baby-faced girl for Douglas.
“How old is she?” Douglas asked.
Ali spoke to the girl in Khmer, then turned to us: “She says she’s eighteen.”
Thirty minutes later, Douglas and I and our dates, Ali and Baby Face, walked into the lobby of the Morakat Hotel, where the night clerk and the shirtless, gun-wielding security guard were watching a porno starring a black guy and a white girl.
Upstairs, we got down to business right away, no drinks, no TV, no lights. Ali was not much for kissing or foreplay, and while I wasn’t sure where to begin, I also had no clue how to ask Ali to help me out. Luckily, we were interrupted by Douglas and his girl in the next bed.
“I can’t do this,” Douglas whispered to me, turning on the bedside lamp. “She’s too young. There’s no way she’s eighteen. Ali, how old is she?”
“She says she’s eighteen.” Ali’s voice was suggestively neutral.
“Tell her she can go home. I can’t do this. She’s just lying there doing nothing.”
Ali relayed the message, Douglas handed over $10, and Baby Face left.
“It’s too bad. She’s going to think it’s easy to make money now,” Douglas said. He turned out the light. “You two can carry on.”
We carried on. Ali put a condom on me, I got inside her, and soon I was done.
“Did you come?” she asked me quietly.
As I curled up with Ali that night, I couldn’t help noticing how relaxed she’d become, how soft her skin felt against mine as we spooned. Was this the brazen mango-sucker?
The next morning, Ali put her blazer back on, accepted my $20, and left, her face once again hard and proud.
This is where I’m supposed to talk about the rightness or wrongness of what I did that night, and yet I find that a really difficult thing to do. Obviously, prostitution is bad. Except in supposedly enlightened places like Amsterdam or San Francisco, no one ever really aspires to the world’s oldest profession. Most prostitutes have no choice—they’re trafficked by mafias far from their homes to places where they have little recourse to legal help or nongovernmental support. African women wind up in Italy, Vietnamese girls in Cambodia, Moldovan women just about everywhere. Many of them are taken against their will, some are sold by their families, and a sickening number are children. When men take advantage of the sex industry, especially in the developing world, they perpetuate a system that ruins lives and keeps countries hobbled and poor. It is bad.
At the same time, I find it hard to condemn the younger me for his behavior. Knowing what I know now about the evil depths of the business, knowing that the experience would be less than good, I think I might still have done the exact same thing. For all his naïve ambitions and literary pretensions, the younger Matt Gross was trying to figure out, on a very basic level, how to relate to other people, people whose lives and experiences were light-years from his own. But to do so, he first had to find his own limits, to see what kind of person he actually was, or could become. An insensitive brute? A sucker? A timid aesthete? Or—and maybe this is what he learned from the whole episode—a confused young man whose capacity and desire for empathy could be dangerous.
Two and a half years later, I was back in Cambodia, biding my time in Phnom Penh before heading to Angkor Wat for the millennium. The capital felt different already: Since I’d left, a power struggle between the first prime minister, a royalist prince, and the second prime minister, a one-eyed ex-communist, had erupted in violence that left the latter prime minister, Hun Sen, the clear victor. Few Cambodians, and fewer foreigners, thought Hun Sen would be anything over than a kleptocratic dictator, but many were relieved nonetheless: For the first time in decades, one person (and one party) had firm control over the entire country. I saw fewer armed guards in the streets. Peace was in the air.
It was therefore only appropriate that I spent my first few evenings at the Café Santepheap—the Peace Café. Unlike almost every other Phnom Penh bar, it wasn’t fast or wild, hookers didn’t congregate there, the wayward teenage children of Cambodia’s ruling class didn’t start fights and leave without paying. People went for an Angkor beer and a basket of fries and a chat with the British owner, Dave, whose Cambodian wife had recently given birth to their son.
At the Santepheap I met Cambodians from the emerging middle class, like Pepsi, whose income level and English ability allowed him to drink and talk about sports, politics, and the weather as, essentially, an equal to the foreigners like me who surrounded him. So when Lina walked in one night, climbed onto the barstool next to mine, ordered a Bailey’s on the rocks, and complained about her long, tiring day, I figured her for a regular, albeit a young-looking one. We made small talk. I left, impressed at the clientele the bar had managed to attract. This was the new Cambodia!
A few days later, however, I ran into Lina at Martini’s, and all became clear. At Martini’s, guys could be there for sex, or just for a drink (and an ogle), but women, especially Cambodian women, were there for one thing only: work. On the dance floor, the bass excruciating, I told Lina I’d met her at the Café Santepheap. She didn’t seem to remember, but at the same time, I think, she could tell she’d made an impression on me.
I began to see her everywhere: at Heart of Darkness, where I played pool, or back at Martini’s. Always we talked a little, and I learned a little about her. Her father lived in Bangkok, and she missed him terribly. She sent him money. I listened to one of their phone calls: She spoke Thai fluently, and insisted to me she wasn’t Khmer at all. (“What are you talking about?” Mark said later. “She’s completely Cambodian.”) She was sweet and energetic—she may have been a prostitute, but she didn’t let that demean her. Like Pepsi, she considered herself my equal. She may have needed a cell phone, but she didn’t ask me for one, and I didn’t buy one for her. She wasn’t my responsibility, and I liked it that we could speak without her demanding I fuck her for money, and while I wasn’t naïve or romantic enough to think she had a heart of gold, I started to think maybe she wasn’t like all the other working girls—that she remained capable of having relationships that weren’t predicated on sex and cash.
Until that night she offered to buy me out. Until I stammered in shame. Until I wrecked the evening even further by failing to play along with a linguistic game started by Lina’s friend Quyen, whose difficult accent had me constantly asking, “What?” To which Quyen would reply, “Wat Phnom.” At which point Lina would chime in with “Phnom Da.”
As Mark explained to me, Wat Phnom was the temple on the hill near the river, and Phnom Da was a big hill near Takeo, to the south. “They’re trying to help you save face,” he said, “so it doesn’t look like you don’t understand them.”
But I didn’t understand them, and I understood even less why I was clinging to my virtue. I was halfway around the world with people I’d most likely never see again, and I could lie. I’m good at that. People want to believe me. They really do.
Afterward, I didn’t bump into Lina for a while. She had vanished into the limbo prostitutes vanish into whenever you don’t want to find them. But I did want to see her again, if only to take her picture. This was the compromise I made with myself, and I considered myself very clever for having made it: I would see Lina before I left, and I would invite her to my sublet apartment, where I’d ask her to undress for my camera. I’d pay her whatever she asked. I wouldn’t touch her—that would be cheating on my girlfriend. Still, it was dirty, so I felt obligated to pay her something. After all, that was her job, to accede to the filthy wishes of the rich-by-comparison. Denying her altogether would be like refusing a Michelin-starred chef’s offer to cook you dinner, provided you pay for the groceries.
Of course, I did nothing at all to make my tepid fantasy a reality. I left Phnom Penh for Angkor Wat, where I caught the flu and missed out o
n all the fun, then returned to the capital for a twelve-hour stopover before catching my flight home to New York. Twelve hours—my last chance to find and photograph Lina. But instead of tracking her down at Martini’s, I spent the afternoon hanging around the Foreign Correspondents Club of Cambodia—probably the least sordid bar in the country. It was full of brown leather club chairs and burnished wood, and diplomats and businessmen met here to relax and gaze out across the Tonle Sap River, their pints of Angkor beer covered with their coasters to keep out flying green bugs.
Three tourists of the high-class variety sat down in the chairs near me. They were in their forties and dressed fairly well: khaki pants, not shorts; shirts buttoned up and tucked in; no visible cameras or backpacks. They had just come from Ho Chi Minh City, and we traded intel: I asked about places I used to frequent there, they asked about the tourist attractions and political situation in Cambodia. I’d only been there a month, but I knew about the shaky government, the corruption, the crazy stories about cheated-on spouses of high officials who threw acid in the faces of their younger rivals. As I told these stories, I gave off—possibly intentionally—the image of being a bright young man, an adventurer in the dangerous zones of the world, eager to put things in literate perspective for my fellow Americans. I could see these tourists were hanging on my words, impressed.
And then Lina walked in, looking more like a prostitute than she ever had before. It wasn’t anything she was wearing, not a miniskirt or too much eyeliner or cheap, Chinese-made high heels. She was simply young and local and brazen, with alert eyes always seeking something, or someone. Girls like her didn’t come in here, ever.
Within seconds, Lina and I had greeted each other and brusquely left the tourists behind. For a few minutes, we stood at the balcony, watching the wide, muddy river below, the awkward encounter of a week earlier forgotten, or at least unmentioned. This was my chance.
“I’m leaving tonight,” I told her. “Come back to my place—I want to take your picture.” As we walked out, I could feel the tourists watching me, no doubt horrified.
The apartment, around the corner and down an alley, belonged to a reporter for a Spanish news service, and Lina regarded everything inside with a detached air. Why should she care? She’d surely seen its equal, and she’d probably see this place again, especially since Buckminster, her benefactor that one night, had lately been crashing here as well.
“Take off your clothes,” I said, but not out loud. “Take them off right now.”
Instead, she spoke first. “Tell me about your girlfriend,” she said.
I gave Lina the bare facts—I was dating a pretty fashion student from Taiwan who had a lovely smile and a great appetite—while telling myself that what I really wanted bared was Lina’s body. But telling myself and telling Lina were two vastly different things, as distant from one another as America and Cambodia, honesty and betrayal, wealth and poverty. If only she would ask . . . but she didn’t, not even when I led her up to the airy, lofted sleeping area and showed her my mosquito-netted bed. It was as if by refusing her that other night, I had exempted myself from the world of sex, and that by so strenuously insisting—against all common sense—that she and I relate as human beings, as equals, I had actually succeeded. I had gotten what I wanted, even if what I wanted was changing.
Finally, meekly, I told Lina I wanted to take her picture, and she followed me out to the deck. Beyond us was the river at dusk, and beyond that a Muslim neighborhood whose landless inhabitants worked the local slaughterhouses, and beyond that fields of rice and land mines, and I took a few long-exposure shots of her face. She looked defiant in them, but then again, with her fierce eyes and upturned nose, she always looked defiant. Then I walked her downstairs to the street.
Before we parted, Lina said: “Don’t show the pictures to your girlfriend.”
“I won’t,” I told her. “I promise.” I wasn’t lying.
Five years later, I was back in Phnom Penh to research my novel. Much of the city’s anarchic quality had been tamped down, restrained by Cambodia’s expanding economy, not to mention the dictator in charge of the country. Martini’s, Sharky’s, the Heart of Darkness, and all the other hooker bars still existed, but I avoided them. They didn’t fascinate me any more. They were real, I knew, and their reality was too much for me to handle. My life would be, for a few weeks, regular and calm.
But I did make it back to the Café Santepheap. Since I’d last been there, Dave’s wife had been killed in a grenade attack (the accidental result of a dispute at a neighboring karaoke bar), and he’d moved the bar across town, down to where all the NGOs he loved to bitch about had their offices. He’d remarried, his son was now five, and he remained as intense and gregarious as before, railing on about Cambodian corruption in light of the Stalin biography he was reading.
“The hooker with a heart of gold?” he said when, inevitably, I asked after Lina. “She’s in Kompong Som”—a backpacker-filled beach town better known as Sihanoukville. “She hooked up with the Starfish Project, you know them?”
I nodded. The group took street kids in and taught them useful skills: baking, handicrafts, restaurant work. Starfish were good people; at least, they didn’t receive the whiskey-and-Coke-fueled abuse that Dave heaped on World Vision, UNICEF, the Assemblies of God, the Mormons . . .
“Well,” Dave continued, “she went down there and adopted a few of the Starfish kids. Lovely girl. Works in a couple of the bars down there as a waitress. Lovely girl. Of course, she was always a problem at the bar. Would drink too much and puke. You puke on my bar, I give you a bucket and you clean it up yourself. That was her. She had a boyfriend for a while named Mark. She’d get drunk and nostalgic about him and then puke all over my bar . . . She’s older now, and maybe not as cute. She doesn’t want to be a hooker anymore. ’Course, who wants to be a hooker?”
This was good news. Amazing news, really. A prostitute of unusual verve and spirit had, on her own initiative, gotten out of the business and was now keeping kids from following the path she’d followed. My own path was now clear—I had to find her, hear the story from its source and offer any help she might require.
Sihanoukville was not an impressive place. Like many Cambodian towns, it felt haphazard and unorganized, encompassing a series of beach areas of varying quality: the backpacker-friendly Victory Beach; the private, guarded area at the five-star Sokha Beach Resort; the long, long stretch of sand at Ochheuteal Beach, where everyone from tourists and expats to street vendors and middle-class Cambodians would hang out. To the north was Cambodia’s main shipping port. Inland was an uninspiring downtown and a bunch of cheap guesthouses on a hill above Victory Beach. I’d been through here before, and while I didn’t mind soaking in the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand, I found Sihanoukville dull—a beach town that existed solely because Cambodia felt it should have a beach town. But I’d come this time only partly to sunbathe, and as soon as I had a chance I made my way to the Starfish Project’s café in downtown Sihanoukville to ask after Lina.
She wasn’t around, the Cambodian employees said. They seemed wary as well, reluctant to talk, and suggested only that she might be down at Ochheuteal Beach. A Scandinavian woman working for Starfish asked me if I was sure Lina was Cambodian. “It doesn’t sound like a Khmer name,” she said.
At Occheuteal, I asked anyone I could find if they’d heard of Lina. A woman selling snacks seemed to recognize the name, but said she hadn’t seen Lina in a few weeks. Maybe she’d gone back to Phnom Penh?
I wasn’t sure what to make of this. If she’d adopted children, wouldn’t she be here with them? Or was the Cambodian sense of “adoption” something different? Or had Dave been wrong?
No, people here at Ochheuteal knew Lina—or at least knew a Lina. At the Sea Dragon restaurant, a foreign bartender reacted strongly and happily to the name. “Oh, sure, Lina,” he said. “Tall girl? Light-skinned? Works with Starfish?”
Now I was in a quandary. Were there two Lina
s in Sihanoukville, both of whom had turned their lives around to help street kids? Dave had definitely known who I meant, but this bartender seemed fairly certain himself. Well, I thought, whichever Lina I find, I’ll be happy.
But no Lina turned up that day or that evening. The next day I tried asking at Victory Beach, whose vendors and bartenders sent me up to Weather Station Hill, where the town’s crummier backpacker hotels and bars were located, to see the owner of a guesthouse, who might know. The owner pointed us to a room in the compound where, he said, a friend of Lina’s was staying. Lina herself might be there, too—he didn’t know.
I approached the flimsy door and knocked. A young woman who looked Vietnamese answered. “Lina not here,” she said. Behind her I could see a man with his shirt off. Quickly, so as not to interrupt further, I apologized and backed away.
Again, I asked at the front desk for help, and finally the owner lit up. He led me out of the hotel and down the street, to a small, low concrete house with a portable sandwich cart out front. The guesthouse owner pointed at the old woman running the cart and said, with evident pride, “Lina mama!”
Could this be Lina’s mother? She certainly resembled Lina with her dark skin, kinky hair and slightly upturned nose. In my beginner’s Khmer, I began to explain: “I’m an old friend of Lina. I knew her five years ago. I am trying to find her. Please, do you know where she is?”
“She’s gone back to Phnom Penh,” the old woman said, hardly looking up from her cart to answer.
“Do you know, was she working with Starfish? Was she helping kids? What is she doing in Phnom Penh now?” I could feel my questions getting more desperate, and the woman growing more indifferent. She’d told me Lina—some Lina—was in Phnom Penh, and that was all.
