Read Online The Road of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam - Free Book Online Page B

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