The Road of Lost Innocence (6 page)

BOOK: The Road of Lost Innocence
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Grandfather came every so often to the apartment. Aunty Nop always gave him money. At first I said nothing to him—I was frightened, I think. But finally, I think the third time he came, I asked him why he had done this to me. He said it was none of my business. It was like I had no right to ask him—and I felt that, too. I had no right to ask him or to protest. I belonged to him, and this was just the way things were.

         

Occasionally Aunty Nop’s husband would come to the apartment looking for money. He didn’t like what she did to make it, but he didn’t do anything to stop it, and he wasn’t there much—he had another wife, and two children with her, and he too gambled a lot. Then he died. It was some kind of motorcycle accident, I think, about six months after I arrived in Phnom Penh. To pay his debts, Aunty Nop had to sell her apartment.

One afternoon she took us to Aunty Peuve’s and left us there. Our ownership had been transferred. From now on we wouldn’t just work out of Aunty Peuve’s brothel, we would also sleep there, on the filthy pallets that were set up in two rows across the floor, in full view of the stairs. It was a horrible place, and my skin crawls when I think of it. Aunty Peuve slept in the corner. She had built a small room with cinder-block walls, which she kept locked, so I never went in there. The “room” where I was first raped was where Aunty Peuve’s younger sister slept, on a big bed behind a wooden partition. We often slept there, all together, during the day. There was a bathroom behind a curtain where we washed with a scoop and a basin of dirty water.

I don’t remember any windows. The buildings in the alleyways behind the market were so crammed together, there wasn’t much daylight to be had anyway. We lit the place with oil lamps and then, much later, when there was more electricity in town, a naked lightbulb.

We cooked over a brazier in the large room with the sleeping pallets. People going up and down in the stairwell used to stop and ask what was cooking. There were people who lived up there—I think they were
motodup
drivers, people you paid to ride you through the city or do errands on a motorcycle. I never went up to have a look.

During the day the guards slept in the room with us, and at night we worked. Aunty Peuve was not unpleasant to us, so long as we did as we were told and she talked to us sometimes. She was quite pretty, about thirty or forty I suppose, and had two small children who lived with us too. She didn’t have such an easy life either. Li, her husband, beat her and he used to sleep with the rest of us constantly.

         

We caught diseases, of course, but we were lucky—there was no AIDS in those days. If I got sick I knew what to do, because I had worked as a nurse in Chup. I bought medicine, and I washed myself with tamarind—I think that probably protected me.

If a girl got pregnant she had to go to Aunty Peuve’s friend who performed abortions. She would come back white and bleeding. But once the bleeding stopped there was no pity; it was right back to the clients, as soon as you could stand.

Sometimes clients came directly to Aunty Peuve’s, and sometimes we stood out on the streets around the Central Market, just around the corner. Just like the villagers did in Thlok Chhrov, most of the clients called me
“khmao.”
I didn’t fetch a high price, I was just a street whore. I didn’t have regular customers like some of the other girls, perhaps because I didn’t smile and I had dark skin.

But one time a man did seem to be interested in me. He came several times, and we almost became friends. He told me that he loved me and wanted to marry me. Part of me wanted to believe him—to believe that there was a way out.

I think Aunty Peuve might have caught wind of what was going on, because she told me she would have me beaten to death if I tried to get away before I had paid back the money she was owed. But the guards had grown used to us and they weren’t as watchful. One night, when I was supposed to walk back from a client, I just didn’t go back. I went to meet that man.

He was about thirty I suppose, ugly looking, but he could talk. And I wanted to believe him. The next morning he took me to the truck station. He said we should go to Poipet on the Thai border. He put me on the back of a truck that was heading for Battambang and he promised to join me there. There was another girl with me in the truck. When we got to Battambang that night, the driver and the other men on the truck raped us. My client had sold us to the truck driver.

I was sick. Sick of it all. Everything revolted me, and I vomited. The next day, when the truck stopped at Svay Sisophon, I jumped off. I remembered that my adoptive mother had some relatives there who came from China. I asked everyone I could and I finally managed to find them.

My cousin and his wife agreed to take me in. I minded their children and started to cook and do the washing for them. I thought I had found a place to stay. But after a week the wife left—she sold gold at the market, which took her away from home. When she’d been gone for a few days, my cousin threatened me with the acid he used to clean the gold. He raped me and he threatened to kill me if I said anything about it to his wife.

I decided that the whole world was the same, that all men resembled one another. After about a week of this I begged him to let me go, and he finally agreed. He even gave me a bit of money and a gold-plated necklace. When I asked him where to go, he said I should take a truck to Battambang and stay there overnight before getting a ride to Phnom Penh.

I had already made it to Battambang when I saw his wife looking for me. She grabbed my hair in the street and accused me of having stolen her necklace. She took me to the police station, where her husband confirmed her story. They threw me in the cells—I was clearly guilty, since the necklace was in my bag.

There were three or four policemen and they said, “If you want to get out you’ll have to pay,” but I had no money—they had taken it away. They took turns beating me and raping me all night. They said this was a way to pay, and they laughed about calling all their friends too. There was no point trying to resist. I only got hit harder, as if they expected it. In the morning they just let me go.

But I had nowhere
to
go. I couldn’t go back to Thlok Chhrov. The only person waiting for me there was Grandfather. And for all I called him Father, Mam Khon had never suggested he could protect me from Grandfather. There was only the capital, Phnom Penh—that was all I knew.

I had no money and no necklace, but I convinced a taxi driver to give me a lift to the city. I was only sixteen and I had
MERCHANDISE
written on my forehead. I know now how closely taxi drivers work with the brothels—they bring in the supply of girls, as well as the clients. I suppose that taxi driver must have recognized me or heard that I was missing—a dark girl with long hair, a Phnong savage with a scar on her face. He drove me straight to the Central Market in Phnom Penh. When he stopped the car, Li was waiting, with the guards.

         

It was as if there was nothing at all I could do right—no way I could escape. I felt I must somehow be carrying this destiny with me, as if the sign of some devil had fallen across my life.

Li beat me with his cane and tied me naked to a bed. Anyone who came was given the pleasure of looking at me. Despite everything I’d been through I was fundamentally modest, and this experience was horrible. That night his brother and all their friends took their turn with me while I was still tied up. It went on like that for a week. I was sick, shaking with fever.

I think that was when Li discovered something I was really afraid of. He was scientific about punishment: he wanted us completely cowed. He must have realized I wasn’t terrorized by the basement room, because when I was taken down there I didn’t scream helplessly like the other girls. I just glared at the guards and thought about how one day I would kill them. I always tried not to show pain, because I didn’t want to give them the pleasure.

But one night Li dumped a bucket of live maggots on me. Hideous maggots, like the ones on meat. When he realized how much they frightened me, he began dumping them into my mouth and on my body while I was sleeping. I thought they would make their way inside me, into my body. That’s what I have nightmares about, even now.

         

After Battambang, I said to myself that I had tried once to escape and I wouldn’t try again. It would be the same no matter where I went. And for all her faults, Aunty Peuve was not horrible to us so long as we cooperated, though I know now that this is a slave mentality.

So I told the other girls, “It’s worse outside. At least here we’re protected from the police.” And from that point on, I capitulated.

.5.

Aunty Peuve

I began doing most of the household work for Aunty Peuve. I needed to try to keep the place clean, and by doing all the cooking and cleaning and looking after the children, I bought myself some peace. Aunty Peuve understood that I had given in. She began to be much nicer to me, even friendly. She saw that I was clean and honest and she began leaving me alone in the house—she knew I didn’t have to be guarded anymore. After a while she even began to let me go out to run errands. She knew I’d be back.

I can understand what I did then, I can understand what was done to me, but I don’t understand what I felt—or why I did these things. I had just given up.

There were about a dozen girls living at Aunty Peuve’s house at any time. New girls would come in and have their spirits broken, as mine had been. Rarely, a girl would leave to live in a special, exclusive arrangement with a client. More often a girl just didn’t come back one night, and we’d never learn why. Perhaps she escaped. Perhaps she was sold.

I know three girls who were killed. The first was a young girl, Srey, who went out one night with a client and one of the older girls, Chethavy. Chethavy was tall and pretty, and she came from Kampong Cham. She had been a schoolteacher, but her husband and mother-in-law brought her to the brothel.

Just before dawn one morning Chethavy came running back to the brothel. She said that she had escaped, but the client had shot Srey. Aunty Peuve didn’t want any of us going out—she made us shut up and called the guards to deal with it. But later that morning I went there to see. It was in an alleyway like ours, just one street away, and when I went up the stairs I saw the place—just a bare room, hardly big enough for the bed, and not even a proper door, only a curtain, to shield it from the stairwell. It was like a lot of other rooms in Phnom Penh. Srey’s body was gone, but there was still blood on the floor.

The client was drunk and angry—we never learned any more about it. Maybe Li made him pay something to compensate for Srey’s earnings.

The second girl was Sry Roat, a girl my age who arrived about six months after me. She was very pretty, with white skin, and men always picked her. I never learned who sold her to Aunty Peuve: if a girl didn’t talk, I didn’t ask questions. I was walled into my own silence, dead to almost every feeling, like all the girls. It was better to forget the past. You had to endure every day as it came and hope only that it wouldn’t be too violent. No other kind of hope seemed even a tiny bit realistic.

But Sry Roat desperately wanted out. And she thought that one of the men who used to ask for her a lot really liked her. She asked him to help her escape. She didn’t know he was one of Li’s friends.

When Li learned about Sry’s plans he came upstairs and tied her up, right in front of us. We had been sleeping—it must have been about ten in the morning. He tied her arms and held a pistol to the side of her head and shot her brains out of her head. The other girls were crying, but I watched him. After he shot her, she fell over. Her head was hanging off the bed with the side of it half gone. He shot her again, two or three times, just for sport I think. Then he and the guards put her body in a rice sack and took it away.

Another time a girl was killed by a policeman who came in late one night. He wasn’t a regular client, and it was very late, about 2:00 a.m. This girl—I can’t even remember her name—didn’t want to go with him. She was sick. He was drunk. The yelling woke us all—“Watch, all of you, because this will happen to you too one day if you don’t obey”—and
bang,
she was dead.

Aunty Peuve didn’t say anything. Everyone was frightened of that client because he was a policeman. Everyone in the neighborhood feared Li too, because he had a big stock of weapons and he was known to be very violent. But even Li didn’t do anything about it. The policeman left and the guards took her away in a rice sack, just like Sry. We were garbage in life and garbage in death. They probably threw the sack on the public dump.

Most of the time I was silent. I did what I was told. I told myself I was dead. I had no affection for anyone—not for Aunty Peuve’s children, nor for any of the other girls. I did have some pity. If another girl had had a really brutal time or if she was badly hurt, sometimes I would volunteer to go to a client in her place. But mostly I felt nothing but hatred.

One time, though, I let two girls escape. They were new, straight from the countryside, and they looked alike, with long, dark hair. Aunty Peuve had them tied up, and they were crying. I knew what was waiting for them—the life that would be taken out of them. They would die internally, like me. And for some reason I didn’t want that to happen to them too.

They weren’t the first new girls I’d seen, or even the youngest—they were about fourteen. But when Aunty Peuve left them with me to go out, I untied them. I just said, “Don’t stay here.” I had nothing else to say—I really didn’t talk, and there wasn’t anything else I needed to say. They looked at me—without a word—and they ran.

I was punished. Li hit me hard—his children were crying, because they liked me a lot. By then Li had electrodes hooked up to a kind of car battery. They burned your skin. I still have the marks. I was taken downstairs and beaten for days, three or four, I think. I felt like I was bleeding inside. Afterward I couldn’t work for a few days and when I started working again I had to work even more to reimburse the losses—the girls cost two gold
chi,
about eighty U.S. dollars. After that, I calmed right down and never did anything like it again.

My punishment was harsh, but the way they punish prostitutes today is far worse than anything I ever had to suffer. When I was with Aunty Peuve, except for that one time with the electricity, the punishments were mainly beatings and our own fear—things like the snakes. Now I see girls in brothels with nails hammered into their skulls. That sounds unbelievable, but we have photos. Girls are chained, beaten with electric cables. They go mad. We’ve rescued several children from brothels who have completely lost their minds.

Recently some dead girls were found in the sewer near a brothel: they had drowned. Another time, after a fire, the police found several girls’ bodies, still chained up. They know who owned that brothel—everybody does, but he isn’t picked up and nothing is done about it. He has too many connections, and the girls are nobodies.

The cuts and welts we see on escaped prostitutes these days are unbelievable. The clients do it, or the pimps. Maybe it’s the influence of Chinese films, which are full of torture scenes. The pimps watch them avidly, like a lot of other men.

Nowadays the girls are much younger too. This is because men in Cambodia will pay a thousand dollars to rape a virgin for a week—it’s always a week, for a virgin. Sex with a virgin is supposed to give strength, to lengthen a man’s life span and even lighten his skin.

To make it clear they offer true, bona fide virgins, the brothels today sell children. Often they are very young girls, just five or six years old. After the week is over, they sew the girl inside—without an anesthetic—and quickly sell her again. A virgin is supposed to scream and bleed, and this way the girl will scream and bleed, again and again. They do it maybe three or four times.

Brothels that specialize in virgins for rich men are evil places. After a few months the girl drops in price and they sell her on. There’s a big call for novelty, and most of the brothel keepers have family connections—there’s always a cousin in the trade, in Battambang or Poipet, who will take a girl or make a swap.

People believe sex with a virgin will protect you from illness, which is another reason for the high price of a young girl. People use them like a medicine, to cure AIDS. But the little girls tear much more than grown women, and they get AIDS more easily.

When I lived at Aunty Peuve’s there was no resewing and no small children. Aunty Peuve dealt in young girls, but they were never much younger than twelve. When a girl came in from the countryside, she just told the clients, “She’s a new chicken,” but I don’t know if that meant she got more money. I think in those days there wasn’t the same market in virginity as there is now. Under Communism, there was a lot less money.

This was ordinary prostitution. Stinking mouths and bodies, dirty rooms, violence. The blows hurt, but the act itself was much worse. Sometimes there would be only two or three men a day, sometimes many more. If there weren’t enough, Li would tell Aunty Peuve not to feed us, so we’d try harder. If there were too many, you hurt inside and out, until you managed to shut all feeling off.

It’s still happening, today, tonight. Imagine how many girls have been raped and hit since you started to read this book. My story doesn’t matter, except that it stands for their story too, and their stories are why I don’t sleep at night. They haunt me.

         

Mom, the dark-skinned girl from Aunty Nop’s house, used to go and see her mother often. She had a different kind of arrangement with Aunty Peuve, semi-voluntary. Aunty Peuve paid Mom money, and Mom used to take it over to her mother every week. Sometimes I went with her: I had nobody else to visit in Phnom Penh.

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.

BOOK: The Road of Lost Innocence
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