by Somaly Mam
Mom’s mother accused Mom of being lazy and she used to beat her a lot—there was never enough money to make her happy. She still rented a room from Aunty Nop, just a few streets away from where we’d all lived. Sometimes Aunty Nop would be in when we visited and she’d give me tea or something to drink. I hated her—I never liked that woman—and I didn’t like being there, but she pretended to like me. So I sat and answered her if she asked me something.
It must have been sometime in 1987 when Aunty Nop told me that Grandfather was sick. Apparently he had been coming to see her regularly, to get more money. I suppose he was extending my stay with Aunty Peuve, though in those days I had no idea what the system was—I didn’t know I was working off an ever-swelling loan. Now, Aunty Nop said, Grandfather was ill and he was asking for me.
I didn’t go back to Thlok Chhrov to see him. I was seventeen years old by now and I had been a prostitute for almost two years. I had watched Li shoot my friend Sry Roat. I was full of anger and I wasn’t afraid of Grandfather anymore. I also had no desire to return to the village. If people had been nasty to me before, when I was just a child, they would be truly evil to me now that I was a prostitute.
Aunty Nop didn’t make any comment when I told her I would stay in Phnom Penh instead of visiting Grandfather. She neither approved nor disapproved—she had done her duty. Several months later, when she told me Grandfather was dead, it was the first time in years I felt happy. I had often dreamed of killing him.
But his death didn’t mean I was free. Aunty Nop said I must now repay all of Grandfather’s debts. After he died, all kinds of people claimed he owed them money, and I had to pay them. I don’t know how to explain this, but that was just the way it was. He had looked after me, I was his “grandchild,” and I was his indentured servant, so his debts became mine.
I didn’t try to protest. I just lived from one day to the next. I had never received money from any client—they just paid Aunty Peuve—so it made no difference to my life. My body was nothing, of no value.
By now I understood that I was actually paying back a fixed sum of money and that one day that sum would be paid. I don’t know if it was Mom who explained it to me or whether it was Aunty Peuve who showed me the account. She trusted me now; she talked to me and dealt with me more like an equal. I was eighteen by now and more of an adult.
Aunty Peuve’s business wasn’t doing very well—she was down to about four girls. Li used to gamble a lot, and maybe that was why things were going downhill. I had also been sick for a while with a high fever. This meant that I was just a cost to her—my food can’t have been very expensive, but there were fewer clients, and I wasn’t earning much.
I had been working for Aunty Peuve for three years when she let me know I could go. It was about eight months after I heard that Grandfather had died. She didn’t say it outright—she told me one of the clients had offered to marry me and advised me to accept.
This man drove a motodup, a motorcycle taxi, and he was a really nasty piece of work, and dirty too. There was something about him that I’d always disliked and I always tried to avoid going with him. He was a regular client of one of the older girls, Heung. After being with him, Heung always came back bruised and hit—though that wasn’t unusual.
Perhaps it was out of kindness that Aunty Peuve suggested I marry this man, because I’m sure that by then I had paid back Grandfather’s debt many times over. But I have to doubt it was a pure expression of friendship. Maybe I was becoming less profitable to her. Actually, I wondered whether the motodup driver had offered to purchase me and Aunty Peuve was trying to trick me into leaving.
I turned down the offer. I didn’t think I would be safer or better off with the motodup driver—he wasn’t even rich. I knew by then that on the streets of Phnom Penh a girl is a commercial product. Even if I left Aunty Peuve, if I were poor someone would just sell me again. And that would be okay because it would make him rich.
I told Aunty Peuve I would stay. But this experience made me realize that there might be some way out of the brothel for me. There was nothing else I knew how to do, and nowhere else that I could go except another brothel, but I began to suspect there was a way to get out, like Mom had done, and I longed for it.
About a month after the motodup driver offered to buy me, another man came along. His name was Min. He was an itinerant businessman, involved in different kinds of trade—an ordinary client, though he wasn’t as brutal as most of them.
I felt nothing at all for Min: I saw only a staircase I could climb, a way out. When he asked me to come and stay at his place, I started spending nights there. His shack was on the roof of a building near the riverfront, in a neighborhood we call “Four Rivers,” where the Tonle Sap meets the Mekong. It was like a shed, made of random pieces of wood and metal sheeting, like a lot of other shacks all over the city. Min fed me and looked after me for two days, and then he told me he had no money left and I would have to go out and earn some for us both. He said he was starting a business, a shop we could both work in—he was vague about it, and I didn’t think it was true.
We didn’t have a formal arrangement. I hadn’t officially left Aunty Peuve, but I began to work for Min. He used to watch out for me on his motorbike while I waited for a client to come by. I worked for Aunty Peuve too. For a couple of weeks I worked out of Aunty Peuve’s apartment most evenings and for Min during the day, to make money “for us both.” Then I realized that he was lying to me just like everyone else and I stopped.
Eventually I went back to Aunty Peuve’s place. Min was really angry about it. Months later, he was still hassling me for money. And I became even more convinced that there was only one way I could get out of prostitution. I would have to find a man who was rich.
.6.
Foreigners
Sometimes—very occasionally—I would go into a rage. Maybe it was the Phnong in me: I would suddenly crack and rebel. The first time was when I let the two girls go and got so badly punished. The next time it happened was at the end of my years with Aunty Peuve. I shot a client.
It might have been New Year’s Day in 1989, because the white people were all celebrating something. There were suddenly a lot more white people around in 1988 and 1989, and they weren’t Russians and East Germans, as they’d always been. They were French and Italian and English people, and they had come to Cambodia because the Vietnamese soldiers were leaving. There were peace talks taking place in Paris, and the new white people were mostly humanitarian workers from organizations like the Red Cross. Anyway, on that night when I shot the man there was a lot of shouting and laughing from drunken white people in the street—it was some kind of special day.
The client who had hired us was a man who always used to pick Mom and me. We would try to slip away from him when he came to Aunty Peuve’s but it was always us he chose, though sometimes he chose other girls to come along too. He would always take us to a room where there were ten or fifteen men and they were always drunk. One time they drugged us. They gave us something to drink, and when we woke up we were covered in bruises. This man was always complaining about us to Li, so we’d be beaten. He was a big man, a brute who liked to use his fists.
Mom was back at Aunty Peuve’s by that time, because her soldier friend, Roen, was away, and her mother had run out of money. That night, the client chose just the two of us. He drove us all the way to Ken Svay, a village outside Phnom Penh—maybe it was where he was from. He was drunk and it was late, and there didn’t seem to be any other men with him. He took us to a room above a bar and he kept drinking.
It was very late and he’d been drinking steadily for hours when he began to yell at us and shoot at Mom. He wasn’t shooting wildly—he was sitting at the table with a gun and shooting around her, just to scare her, like my husband used to do to me when I lived with him in Chup. He was angry, but he was enjoying it. Then he went to the toilet—he was so drunk he left his gun on the table. I picked it up.
Mom said, “Do you
know how to shoot?” and I looked at her and went into the bathroom. The client was frightened—he said, “Don’t do that, khmao”—and I shot at him. I was just so angry.
The bullet hit his leg. He was yelling but probably nobody could hear him, because of the noise in the street. I really wanted to kill him, but I thought about his wife—of course this man had a wife, and probably daughters too. So we tied his mouth up with his scarf and left him there and ran. He was really scared, and so were we. We ran as far as we could, and at dawn we found a motodup to take us back to the brothel.
That man did come back to Aunty Peuve’s to complain eventually, but it wasn’t for weeks—I think he was too frightened to do it before or maybe he was in the hospital. By that time I was already protected; I had found Dietrich.
Dietrich was a humanitarian worker with one of the big relief agencies in Phnom Penh, and one night he picked me up on the street. I saw the Toyota Land Cruiser with the humanitarian agency’s logo on it drive slowly past me as I stood on the sidewalk, and then it circled around the block and came back and stopped.
Aunty Peuve was watching, as usual, and she handled the negotiations and took the money. It was the first time I had ever had a white client, and I thought he looked strange. He was about twenty-eight, much taller than any Khmer, and his hair was a long stripe down the middle of his head and short everywhere else.
Dietrich didn’t just take me to a room of some kind, either. He took me to a street stall first, because he was hungry and wanted to eat. He didn’t speak more than eight words of Khmer, and I certainly spoke no Swiss German, but he bought me dinner, which no client had ever done, and he tried to talk to me. He clowned around, mimicking things, and he tried to make me laugh. He pushed at the corners of my mouth so I would smile. When he took me to the guesthouse room he’d rented, it was the first time I’d ever seen a mattress. I was very unsure of myself. I didn’t know what this foreigner was going to do to me. I thought maybe white people were different from Khmer. He sat down on the bed and patted it, for me to sit beside him, but when I sat down it felt soft—as if something were swallowing me—and I leaped up, frightened. This client laughed again and motioned for me to go in the bathroom and wash myself.
I was glad to have a reprieve from the mattress, which was genuinely scary, but the bathroom was strange too. It was very clean, but I had to look everywhere for the basin of water to wash myself. The only water I could see amid the shiny taps and empty white containers was a tiny amount at the bottom of the toilet. I had never seen a toilet like that, so I thought it must be the washing bowl. I splashed the water on my face, thinking, That’s all the white people use to wash in?
When I went back into the room, Dietrich said to me with gestures, “Did you shower?” and I shook my head. He came back into the bathroom and turned on a shiny thing, like a snake, and it flashed to life, spitting at me. I jumped back, certain that thing was evil and would hurt me. I was frightened, thinking it might be a phantom of some kind, and I ran out screaming. Dietrich had to explain running water to me—the pipes, and the showerhead. It was another world. I was scared that the water would flood everything and I would drown. Despite my fear, I tried to have a shower, all wrapped up in a towel and leaving the door open so that I could run out if the phantom came back. That was the first time I ever used proper soap, and I remember how good it smelled, like a flower. Soap is expensive, and the only thing we ever used was soapflakes, the kind you wash clothes with.
After my shower Dietrich did pretty much what all the clients did, although he didn’t hit me. He also drove me back to Aunty Peuve’s place and gave me extra money, which no client had ever done before. It was a lot. He paid fifty U.S. cents to Aunty Peuve for me, but he gave me twenty dollars.
Dietrich used to come looking for me at Aunty Peuve’s brothel, but I could tell he didn’t like doing that. Sometimes he’d send his translator for me—a Cambodian man who worked in the office of Dietrich’s relief agency. When I was with Dietrich, I would spend all night with him in a nice room in a small hotel or at one of his friends’ apartments. In the morning, he would always drive me back, with money for Aunty Peuve and money for me.
Sometimes Dietrich gave me enough money so that I didn’t have to work for Aunty Peuve at all for a few weeks. I’d give most of it to her and then leave and spend a couple of nights with other girls I knew. One of them was Heung, who was living on her own now. Aunty Peuve had thrown her out—she was at least twenty-eight, which is old for a prostitute, and she was sick, so she wasn’t earning much money. But Heung was still selling herself on the street, though she didn’t have many clients. She could barely pay for the shack she rented from another woman, Phaly, who was also a prostitute. Their shack was on a rooftop, and it was falling apart, barely even a shelter.
I used to bring Heung presents and stay with her for a few nights. Or I’d visit Chettra, a girl who had left Aunty Peuve to be the live-in mistress of a Khmer shopkeeper. Chettra was from an ethnic minority, like me. She was Stieng, from the hills about eighty miles south of the village where I grew up. She and I liked to eat the same food, and I loved to go to her place, when her shopkeeper was out, to cook spicy chili dishes.
After a few weeks had gone by, Dietrich stopped renting hotel rooms and started taking me back to his house. He lived in a big villa near the Calmette Hospital, with a gate and a guard to open it. There was a porch with French columns and silk cushions on the sofa and a cleaning woman. When I first saw it I could not believe it. I was used to clients who took me to moldly rope beds on the street.
I didn’t “love” Dietrich. He was nice, though. He was kind, he didn’t hit me, and he did his best to communicate, although he never learned much Khmer. We spoke in gestures. I was nineteen years old and I learned a lot from him. The first time Dietrich took me to a restaurant for white people, I made a fool of myself. It was at the Thailan Pailin, a really nice hotel now. I could smell chicken—it smelled unbelievably good. I had a pretty, shiny pink dress on—I had recently had it made, but I could tell my date didn’t like it.
And when I asked for chicken, it came roasted—a whole thigh in one huge piece, with a knife and fork on either side. How would I know how to eat with a knife and fork? In Cambodia, we cut meat into tiny pieces and we eat with a spoon or with our fingers. I knew that if I ate Cambodian style here, people would take me for a savage.
So I bravely wielded my utensils, but at each attempt to cut the chicken, it wandered off to one side of the plate or another. The more I tried, the more difficult it became. While I waited to capture it, I swallowed my rice. I couldn’t ask Dietrich to help, because we could hardly speak to each other and he seemed to notice nothing. My frustration grew from one minute to the next. Dietrich made a sign asking me, “Aren’t you going to eat your chicken?” I shook my head. Time passed and at last the waiter took away the dish, which was literally making me salivate. That night, I dreamed of the poor chicken I hadn’t managed to eat.
One night when I was with Dietrich in his Land Cruiser, I caught sight of my adoptive father, the schoolteacher, and one of his young sons. They were riding on a motorbike beside Dietrich’s car and gesturing to me. Father looked wrinkled, exhausted, and really poor. I asked Dietrich to stop the car and I got out. Father told me he’d been looking for me—he had heard I was in a brothel. He said he had sold his fishing nets and his boat so he could come to Phnom Penh and search for me. He wanted to take me back to the village with him, where I’d be safe.
I was flooded with shame. I was dressed indecently, in a foreigner’s car—I looked like a whore and I was one. I couldn’t go back to Thlok Chhrov with this good man, whom I had shamed, and face the villagers there as a Phnom Penh prostitute. I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t face Father. I got back in the car as fast as I could and told Dietrich to drive away. I was so ashamed, I didn’t even think to give my adoptive father any money—I didn’t even say a word to him. As we drove off I was crying.
Dietri
ch gave me money, and I enjoyed the freedom it gave me and the clothes I bought with it. They were just trousers and T-shirts, but they were clothes that didn’t say “whore”—the kinds of clothes a nice person might wear. Still, Dietrich was just another client, and I couldn’t count on him. He never said when we might see each other again, and he was often away for weeks at a time working for his humanitarian agency. When I had to, I still worked for Aunty Peuve.
But now, instead of standing by the side of the road around the Central Market, I went out to a hotel called the Samaki, which today is called Hotel Le Royal—Cambodia’s most luxurious establishment. There were many foreign men there, and I began waiting for them at the bar. Cambodians thought my dark skin was ugly, but foreigners seemed to like the color, and my hair, which fell all the way down my back. Foreign men didn’t seem to beat girls as much as Khmer clients did. They took you to nicer places. And they paid more.
Dietrich suggested I become his “special friend.” (He had to explain this through the translator, so I would really understand.) Under this arrangement I would live with him, and he would give me spending money. He handed me a key to his house. I didn’t even go back to Aunty Peuve’s place to pick up my things.
I liked the luxury and the comfort of living at Dietrich’s house. It never felt like I really lived there, though. I never learned how to cook properly in his kitchen, which always frightened me, and he always ate out anyway—often with his friend Guillaume, and always European food, in restaurants for foreigners, never rice and prahoc sauce and spices.
