by Somaly Mam
Still, Dietrich was a good man. He didn’t like that I cried when we had sex, but we mostly did it in the dark, so he didn’t always notice. He was also rich—for Cambodia, anyway—and he was white, which meant he had power, and because of this, nobody could bother me anymore. When Min, the man I’d lived with briefly in the rooftop shack, tracked me down and yelled at me for money, the guard at Dietrich’s gate sent him away. That felt good.
But Dietrich’s contract in Cambodia was drawing to a close, and he had to go back to Switzerland. About six months after I first met him, he brought his translator to the house to talk to me because he wanted to be sure I would understand. He said he was leaving forever, but that he would be glad to take me with him if I wanted to go to Switzerland.
It didn’t seem real to me. I knew nothing about Switzerland and nothing, really, about Dietrich, though I’d lived with him for several months. My friends, Chettra and Mom, thought that perhaps he planned to sell me once we got to Europe. I too distrusted Dietrich in a way—I couldn’t understand him, could never figure out why he did things. I thought that if I left Cambodia for a place where I would understand nothing, not even the language, I might find myself a lot worse off.
Before he left, Dietrich gave me a thousand dollars. (In Cambodia we use U.S. dollars for large sums; the national currency, the riel, is only for small sums of money.) It was an unimaginable amount of money to me, something like a hundred thousand dollars today. He had his translator tell me that with this money he wanted me to buy a motorbike, go to school, and maybe start up a business—he said that I should use it to make a new life for myself. Dietrich didn’t want me to have to go back into prostitution. He was a decent man.
After he left I went back to Aunty Peuve’s and I gave her a hundred dollars. I don’t know why I did that, but it’s what I did. I suppose that, like an idiot, I thought she had feelings for me. I also gave a hundred dollars each to Mom and Chettra. I couldn’t find Heung—she had left her shack, and nobody knew where she’d gone. But I gave all the girls at Aunty Peuve’s house fifty dollars each. I bought them their freedom, if they wanted to take it, and that is something I’ve never regretted.
I think that was the last time I went to Aunty Peuve’s brothel. I have avoided that street ever since. When I go near it my skin crawls and I begin sweating. I don’t have the strength—I always take another route.
Now I had to figure out what to do next. Before leaving, Dietrich asked his friend Guillaume to look after me. Guillaume was Swiss too, and I owe him as much gratitude as I owe anyone in this world. He let me stay at his villa and he found me work, cleaning house for his friend Liana, who was Italian. I earned twenty dollars a month. It was enough.
Guillaume took me to the Alliance Française building downtown and had me sign up for French lessons. I didn’t have enough money left to pay, so Guillaume paid for it himself. He never tried to touch me, never took any advantage; he was only being kind to another person. He is still my good friend.
I liked going to the Alliance Française. There was no uniform, of course, but I bought a dark blue skirt and a white shirt and ironed them carefully before every lesson. They meant something to me, something clean and honest, like a mask over the filth that was underneath. I had a deep desire to pretend to be a nice young student at the Alliance Française, with books under my arm.
I didn’t learn much—French was hard. When Grandfather sold me to my husband in Chup, I was just finishing primary school. I could read and write curly Khmer letters, but the straight letters of the Roman alphabet were very different. It was just one class a week, but little by little I began to understand some words. I loved trying to learn something—and I worked hard at it.
Sometimes I used to go out with Chettra and Mom to the nightclubs that Dietrich had taken me to, where there were a lot of foreign men. Mom was working for Aunty Peuve again, and when we went dancing she would pick up clients. I met some men too. Hendrik, an American who worked in Singapore. Dino, an Italian. It wasn’t like prostitution, because these were longer relationships than just one night, but it felt close to it.
I had been a prostitute in Phnom Penh for four years, and I didn’t know how to get out of the whole system. I wanted to, but in my mind I was trapped. I wasn’t worth anything. I was srey kouc, broken and unmendable. I was dirty and I could never hope to become clean again.
Guillaume knew a lot of people and he had parties. All his friends claimed to fall in love with me, which meant, of course, that they wanted to have sex. These were rich white people who worked for embassies and cultural centers and big businesses. They came to Cambodia for a year or two and rarely spoke much Khmer, just like they didn’t eat local food.
But one night I met Pierre. It must have been in 1991. He was tall and nice looking in a raggedy kind of way. He was French, about twenty-five, and he worked for a French humanitarian agency doing lab analysis. I was twenty-one and I had never met a foreigner who spoke such perfect Khmer.
Pierre asked me questions about myself. Dietrich had tried to make me laugh and then had sex with me, but Pierre asked me a thousand questions. He asked where I came from, how I had come to be a prostitute, why I was doing it, and whether I wanted to get out. He listened. And I, who had always been silent, began to find that I was talking.
We talked from the early evening till 1:00 a.m., and I think that first night we didn’t even have sex. Pierre respected me, and I respected that. A white man who spoke Khmer—that was really something. I may not have loved Pierre, but I thought I could live with this man. He was simple, like a Cambodian. He ate rice and prahoc sauce. He lived like a Cambodian—he had a room with some other foreigners in a large wooden house, where the electricity often went off and the kitchen had a charcoal fire and a cold-water tap. Pierre wasn’t rich, but of all the people I had ever met, he was the only one who was attentive to me—not to my body, but to me.
I told Pierre I wanted to get out of prostitution. I wanted to be clean, and decent. I hated selling my body to strangers. But I had no skills and very little money. He asked if I wanted him to help me set up a business, and the next morning he gave me a hundred dollars. He told me he wanted me to use it as a kind of start-up fund, to get a business going. He genuinely wanted to help me, and I was deeply touched by that.
I was also still shaken up from our conversation that first night. Talking to Pierre brought back a lot of memories and a flood of emotion. I had told him about my adoptive family—how Father had tried to look after me in the village of Thlok Chhrov, how he’d registered me in school and how kind and good he was. When Pierre gave me the money, I suddenly thought again about how poor and tired Father had looked the day he caught sight of me riding in Dietrich’s Land Cruiser. I decided to do something good for him.
I went out to the old Russian Market downtown and bought a stock of notebooks and pencils—small supplies that you could use to start a little shop. For a schoolteacher’s family, it made sense to buy school supplies. But how could I get the supplies to my family? I would have to gather all my courage and go back.
In my memory, Thlok Chhrov was a place where people had always looked down on me. They hated me because I was just a savage. There were a few good people, and those are the ones I want to remember, but most of the villagers had only hard blows and insults for the dark-skinned kid who fetched them heavy pails of water every morning and worked for them in the fields. I knew that these people must now know I was a prostitute, for if Father had heard it, others most certainly had too. I knew they would look down on me, perhaps even throw stones. I didn’t want to go back.
But I got onto a ferryboat that was headed for Kampong Cham. It wasn’t very far—the trip took perhaps five hours—but all the way I was tense with nerves. I made sure I would arrive in Thlok Chhrov in the evening, when most people would be eating, so I wouldn’t have to see anyone.
I hadn’t been back since Phanna’s wedding, in 1985, when I was a fifteen-year-old nurse in the rubb
er plantations of Chup. Now, over five years later, the village seemed somehow smaller, but richer too. Several houses had new shutters on their windows. There were even one or two big new houses made of solid wood planks. There was a second little shop standing beside the Chinese merchant’s shop, where I’d first been raped. I felt a wave of hatred as I walked past.
The beaten-earth paths through the village were still the same, but Father’s house was pitiful. The woven palm walls hadn’t been changed for a long time. When we were children we were always having to weave new walls or new pieces of roof out of the long, dried coconut-palm leaves, but nobody had done that for a while. The house looked stained, worn, and black where insects and rot had eaten holes in the walls. It was sinking to one side, because the stilts were rotting. I felt a stab of guilt and pity.
They were home, the mother and father I had chosen for myself, or who had chosen me. They looked old and thin, and much smaller, like shriveled versions of themselves. When I came in they were eating from a small bowl of rice soup with a bit of dried fish in it, and I saw the surprise in their faces. But they didn’t say very much. Father smiled and said, “Good to see you, Daughter.”
I gave them the big bag of school supplies that I had bought with Pierre’s money and explained clumsily what I had in mind. Mother smiled. I could see how relieved she was—it wasn’t easy, living on a schoolteacher’s meager pension. Unlike other schoolteachers in Cambodia, Mam Khon never demanded that his students pay him for the right to attend school or to pass exams. And because he was an honest man, he had very little money.
Mother made a fuss over me and apologized for not having more food. She offered to go out to the merchant to buy something, but I didn’t want to embarrass her—I could see she had no money. And I didn’t offer to go out to the merchant’s shop myself.
Father had tears in his eyes, and Mother and I did too. We cried but we couldn’t find any words. Memories were swirling around inside me—painful ones, and sweet. I couldn’t tell these good people about my life in Phnom Penh, about being pawed and beaten and raped by a long succession of dirty and contemptuous men. My life was dishonorable and ugly, and I felt I was too.
They gave me news of Sochenda. She was living in Kampong Cham, the big local town, and working for the agriculture ministry in an office there.
Then Phanna came in. She was living in a shelter outside my parents’ house—just a shack, really; it wasn’t even on stilts. She worked as a schoolteacher in a nearby village. Her husband was out, but I gathered that he earned no money. All he did was feed the pigs and lie around the house. Phanna looked thin. She had somehow lost her looks—her pretty little mouth looked drawn and her eyes had lost their joy. She seemed far older.
Seeing how poor they had become made me want to help my family so much. Despite their poverty Father asked me again to come and live in the village with them. He said he wanted me to be “safe”—that was all that he said, but I understood what he meant and hung my head in shame. But I knew I couldn’t come back to Thlok Chhrov. There was nothing there for me. It was a hateful little village, where very few people had been kind to me before; how much worse would they be to an ex-prostitute with no money? I shook my head.
I told Father I had met a man, a foreigner, who lived in Phnom Penh. I said he seemed good and that he had given me the money to buy the school supplies. I knew that Father wouldn’t like it, but I thought perhaps he would understand. A Khmer man would beat me and abuse me because I had been in a brothel. In Cambodia, I was forever stained. A foreigner might not mind so much about my past.
Father just asked me again to stay in the village. He said, “I don’t want you to go back to the city. I’m afraid people will hurt you. Please stay here, at home.”
I thought perhaps Father would force me to stay. The next morning, before daylight, I dressed and walked to the riverside in my city shoes and I took the dawn ferryboat back to Phnom Penh.
.7.
The French Embassy
When I returned to Guillaume’s place in Phnom Penh I found a Cambodian man there waiting for me. He was the caretaker of the building where Pierre lived and he told me that Pierre was looking for me everywhere. I learned later that Pierre had even told a friend that he’d found the woman he was going to marry, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and he wasn’t going to lose her so easily. He was crazy about me.
When I went to see him, Pierre asked me if I would like to move into his room in the large wooden house he shared in Phnom Penh with some other foreigners from humanitarian agencies. I was nervous about this. Pierre was poor and shabby—he wasn’t the rich foreigner I’d had in mind. He wasn’t like Hendrik, the rich American who lived in Singapore who had once given me a hundred dollars just to spend on clothes. But Pierre spoke Khmer, and that really meant something to me. He was different from the other foreigners.
I asked Guillaume what he thought I should do, and he advised me to find somebody else. He said none of the foreigners much liked Pierre, that he was an arrogant loud-mouth and I should bide my time. It wasn’t much of a recommendation. Personally, I rather liked the fact that Pierre had a big personality, but I decided to do as Guillaume suggested.
Sometimes, when we were about to make love, Pierre would stop. He said he didn’t want to force me. But I couldn’t get the image of violence out of my mind. There was nothing I could do to annihilate my past. Coming back to life, to some kind of innocence, felt impossible. I didn’t know where my youth was, where to dig to look—if not for happiness, then at least for a kind of peace. Pierre was kind, but for me, our nights together were always difficult.
Then Pierre left town, to go on vacation in Vietnam with some of his friends. I knew that these friends didn’t think much of me. They thought I was unworthy trash he’d found on the street. One day, while Pierre was gone, I met a man I knew, a cousin of my adoptive mother. He was a big shot who worked in a government ministry and he asked me what I was doing in Phnom Penh.
I responded that I was a student—I was still attending the Alliance Française, so it wasn’t quite a lie. My uncle invited me to have lunch with him, which I could hardly refuse. As we came out of the restaurant I saw a friend of Pierre’s staring at me, so I stared back.
Pierre got back a few days later, and when I returned to his place I found a pile of my things on the floor. He was throwing me out. He told me I would always be a whore—he said that I had lied to him, that I didn’t want to stop selling my body. He accused me of seeing clients while he was away.
It wasn’t true. Since I’d met Pierre I hadn’t slept with any other man. At that point, I still hadn’t yet made up my mind about staying with him, but I wanted to show him that I respected him, as he showed respect for me.
When you’re a whore, people always think you’re dishonest. They assume you’re a liar and a thief, and I always hated that. I would have left if Pierre had grown tired of me—that I would have accepted. But I hated that he could share the same opinion of me as everyone else—that he would think I was just a whore, a thief, a liar, a typical Phnong savage. I wanted him to see the kind of person I was trying to become, straight and honest.
I cried. I refused to leave. I told Pierre I had no ulterior motive in staying with him. I said I wasn’t sleeping with him for money; there were plenty of wealthier men at Guillaume’s house. And I hadn’t chosen to be a prostitute. There was nothing at all voluntary in what I had done. I shouldn’t be accused of sleeping with men when it wasn’t the case. I asked him to give me the chance to prove I was not a liar.
It was while I was pleading with Pierre that I realized how much I wanted this. I wanted so badly to leave the world of prostitution behind me. Pierre was scruffy and sometimes strange and he got angry a lot, but he was different from anyone else. He spoke my language, and I thought that he understood me.
I vowed to myself that if Pierre took me back, I would stay with him and I would prove that I was more than just a prostitute.
> We began living together. I didn’t “love” Pierre. Sometimes I’m not even sure what the word means. But because Pierre spoke Khmer, it felt like we were a real couple—not like it was with Dietrich, strangers who nodded at each other and had sex when the male required it. I stopped going to the Alliance Française. We didn’t have much money, and Pierre was teaching me a little French anyway.
In 1991 Pierre’s contract with his humanitarian agency ended. He wanted to go back to France. I told him that if he left I wouldn’t go to Europe with him, but that if he wanted to remain in Cambodia for a while, I would stay with him. He said he would stay—he would go back to France just for two weeks to do some business but he’d be back.
Pierre left me twenty dollars to tide me over. That was okay—it was enough for food. I spent a lot of time with the neighbors, a Cambodian family with two sweet little children. I didn’t like sleeping alone with the whole apartment to myself, so at night the children used to come and stay over.
But Pierre didn’t come back. It was three weeks, then four. Finally he phoned: he had been sick with malaria, but he was taking the plane the next day. When I went to get him at the airport I had forgotten what he looked like and I greeted the wrong man. I walked up to his friend Patrice—it’s true they looked quite alike, but also I still had never looked Pierre straight in the eye. It took a long time for him to rid me of that old habit.
Pierre told me he didn’t have another contract to work in Cambodia. Instead, he announced, he was going to set up a business. His idea was to open a bar overlooking the riverfront in downtown Phnom Penh. It was where all the new foreigners seemed to want to be—Phnom Penh was suddenly full of white people from the UN, who’d come to prepare the country to hold elections for a new government. Pierre said soon there would be peacekeeping troops from all over the place—like in Africa and Europe. He said you could bank on the fact that these people would be thirsty.
