A Glimpse Inside Cambodia’s Thriving Sex Industry

Dusk falls in Phnom Penh and cars crawl through dusty streets and motos weave around cars. Horns blare and engines rumble as the city slides into another night. A young Khmer woman sits on a plastic chair, watching the traffic pass on Sothearos Boulevard, watching men and women heading home from work. Under the Japanese Friend­ship Bridge, two sisters bathe in the muddy Tonle Sap. And in a long room above a shophouse near Psar Thmei, eight Vietnamese women rouse from sleep.

Nobody knows how ma­ny women work in Cam­bodia’s sex sector. Several thousand, at least. Like everyone else, their lives are filled with a mundane routine: wake up, work, eat, sleep. But for them, like everyone else, it is the moments between the mundane that make them individuals. Here are a few of their stories.

Nieng looks up at the dying sun, stands and ducks inside her Sotheros Boulevard brothel. She passes two open boxes of No 1 Condoms as she climbs a ladder to her room. She chan­ges out of her daytime sarong and blouse and into a tight blue dress. She applies face makeup and paints her lips a dark red. Then she slips back outside and sits down, waiting for the men to come.

She feels safe here at the brothel, safer than on the street. To leave the brothel after dark is to invite danger. She did it only once. A man came to her brothel and paid the owner 20,000 riel to take her to a house.

Sometime past midnight he took her down an alley to a dark, wooden house. Nieng tried to persuade the man to let her go back. She said she’d forgot something. He refused, and seven more men appeared inside the house.

“Please,” she begged, knowing what the men had in mind. “I agreed to have sex with just you. You paid for just one-on-one.”

The man pushed her inside the house.

Nieng had only a few condoms, and she knew the dangers of HIV.

“Please,” she said again. “I don’t want to die. I need to live to take care of my old mother and my daughter.”

“I didn’t invite you here to talk about your background,” the first man said. “I just want sex.”

“Anyway,” he added, “you’re a prostitute. You’re a dead pig, so why worry about the hot water.”

He shoved her down, and the men closed in around her.

As Nieng stares at the ground and recounts the rape and beating, it is difficult to imagine her life just four years ago. Then, she worked in a quiet rubber plantation in Kompong Cham province’s O’Reang district. Her life centered around the groves of rubber trees and life with her mother.

When she was 18, Nieng caught the eye of a prospective husband from another district. As is customary, he sought the approval of her mother. Nieng had no choice but to marry the man her mother thought fit.

Married life for Nieng was a disaster. She gave birth to a baby girl. After that, her husband began drinking a lot, became abusive, began to wander. He took on a second wife, virtually abandoning Nieng except to come home to her occasionally to berate or beat her.

She couldn’t go back home; he would follow. Work was impossible with him so near, so she took her daughter to stay with her mother and came to Phnom Penh.

“I was angry,” she says, explaining why she came to work in a brothel. She flag­ged down a moto as soon as she hit town.

“I’m looking for work,” she told him.

“What kind of work?”

“Any.”

Both she and her driver knew what that meant. Jobs in the city are hard enough to come by for graduate students, let alone country girls from broken marriages with no skills. She drove straight to the brothels behind Hun Sen park where she found a brothel owner who would house her, watch over her and rent her out. She struck a deal with the “mommi”: Half her revenues would go to the house. The other half would be held onto and distributed at the end of the month.

At first it was horrifying, she says.

“But then I decided: If other women can do it, I can do it,” she says. It took about 10 days to mentally adjust to the idea, she said, but with the help of the other girls in the house she learned how to be safe and healthy and how to be provocative—how to look at a man, flirt with him, make him a client.

Her home is now a rickety room in a line of rooms, split by a dirty alley. Her neighbors are skinny children, drunks, other prostitutes, police and the thugs that protect each brothel in exchange for some money and free sex.

Nieng sees all kinds of men in her cramped bedroom. Barely big enough for the bed, and decorated with No 1 Condom posters from wall to wall, the only color in her musty room is a display of plastic roses she made herself from colored straws.

She receives men here, sometimes for just five minutes, sometimes for the whole night. It’s all the same to her. If they stay all night, they might be restless and fondle her all night, but they’ll pay 20,000 riel, 15,000 riel more than for a short time. Some men like to be held, and some make her perform oral sex. Some sleep and some are rough.

Once, she thought she might be able to love one of her regular customers, but she knew it wouldn’t last. “I loved him, but I didn’t expect him to become my husband,” she says. “I think he only pitied me.”

He was married, and they stopped seeing each other after Nieng got pregnant with his child and had an abortion.

Nieng doesn’t know when she’ll leave. Maybe when she earns enough money, when her daughter is a little older. But she knows one thing: between her father abandoning her mother, her husband’s treatment of her, and her encounters with men at the brothel, she’ll never be able to trust a man enough to marry him.

“I’ve had enough of men,” she says.

•••

By the time Nieng is dressed up and ready for work, two sisters are finishing their chores in a stick house under the Japanese Friend­ship bridge.

They are Vietnamese-Cambodian, like many of their neighbors, some of whom live on boats, some of whom live in similar shacks leaning close together along the riverbank.

In this neighborhood, Chi, 22, and Em, 20, are loyal daughters, carrying out daily life, taking care of their parents and siblings. After dark, they work in a bar across town, dancing to attract clients and earn money for their fa­ther, who spends most of his time in Vietnam but who is home for a few months to visit.

He sits in a hammock, shirtless, his brown torso dotted with soldiers’ tattoos, watching boats row languidly across the river.

“He doesn’t know what we do,” Em confesses later. “He thinks we sell beer in the city.”

Life is tough here, the father admits. Police has­sle them and jobs are hard to find, and he knows that some of the girls are forced to work in brothels. Once that happens, he says there is “no dignity” and “no chance for love.”

Instead, he says, “they must think of their fam­ilies.”

He doesn’t mention anything about his daughters, who have been working the club for years. Both started when they were 18.

Faced with little work and aging parents, Chi went first, eventually finding the club she goes to now. When Em turned 18, Chi took her to the club.

Before it gets dark, Em and Chi bathe in the murky river, between house boats, a few meters upriver from a stilted latrine. They wear sarongs and walk around barefoot.

They get ready in their “room,” a corner of the house separated by a thin curtain.

But for the wooden walls and the lack of furnishing, it could be any young woman’s room. The walls are lined with rose-patterned wallpaper, covered in places by torn pages from beauty and teen magazines and a few pictures of past “boyfriends.” The sisters are photographed at the beach, sitting with their arms wrapped around tanned, young Western men, or laughing at parties. Sometimes these boyfriends pay by the month, sometimes by the weekend.

Chi once had a boyfriend for three or four months, earning $400 a month. For a while, the man promised to marry her and take her back to Australia, news that brought hope to her family and sorrow to her sister, her best friend. But it never turned out that way. The man changed his mind, quit payments, and effectively “broke up” with her. She said she was sad for a few weeks, but was soon back at work.

While sometimes the two are happy with their clients, it is always business. Sometimes, Chi explains, Khmer prostitutes will take a boyfriend and not take money. Not so with the sisters. If you want to sleep with her, Chi says, “you have to pay the money.”

When Em has finished brushing her hair and putting on make-up, she climbs back down the stairs, her blemishes covered, her lashes long, and her eyelids glittering. She grabs a glass of iced green soda from her sister and takes a long sip through a straw.

She goes back upstairs, returning with some laundry to hang from a cord near the house.

Nearby, children play together, jumping back and forth over a thick rope woven from rubber bands. Trash lays everywhere on the ground—plastic bags, straws, old playing cards, coconut husks—but none of the barefooted jump-ropers seem to mind. They shriek gleefully as one girl trips on the rope.

Em laughs. When she is finished with the laundry, she moves over to the children and pushes one of the girls aside. For a few moments, she jumps rope, then gets tangled up herself, eliciting even louder laughter. She returns panting, and sits down again, taking another drink of soda.

She needs her nails polished, so she waves down the neighborhood mobile manicurist. A middle-aged woman trots over with a plastic basket full of polish, files, alcohol and clippers. Em idly thumbs through the basket, looking for the color for tonight. She looks back at the children.

They remind her of her younger sister, 11, who normally lives with the family but is visiting Vietnam. She will never have to work as a prostitute, Em says. “Never.”

Later that night, in the dark of the bar, the dutiful daughters have disappeared, replaced by working professionals. Bare feet and sarongs have been replaced by high shoes and tight black pants for both, a black halter-top for Chi, and a red chiffon blouse for Em. Here they are surrounded by scores of girls like them, similarly dressed, similarly smiling.

The place has been around since the Untac days, a sprawl­ing bar with a beer garden and food court on one side and a dance floor on the other. The rippling of water from a fountain mixes with the rippling laughter of young women and girls—some very young girls—as they make their rounds through the bar.

Men, young and old, sit around, some flirting, some drinking, some sitting alone, some with a girl on each arm.

The dance floor is crowded, so Em and Chi go to work. A few minutes later, they come off the dance floor together empty-handed. Em looks at a man and laughs, but it is a hollow laugh—not a jump-roping laugh. Here, she is emotionally detached, distant.

It will be the same when she gets home with a client, she says. Sex is easy to get through.

“No problem,” she says. “I just close my eyes and think about my mother, and the money I’m getting.”

•••

By 3 am, when the sisters are heading home or off with a client, Yi is well into her second shift of the evening, dancing with friends at a late night club full of flashing lights and wealthy men.

Born to Chinese parents in Ho Chi Minh City’s Cholon district, Yi, now 22, grew up the middle sister, getting into a little trouble with her friends now and then until her mother began to worry about her. When she was 17, her mother was convinced that Yi’s behavior was going to lead to the loss of her virginity to one of her male friends.

So she convinced Yi to sell it instead. A middleman procured a Taiwanese tourist who was looking for sex with a virgin and willing to pay.

“One thousand dollars,” Yi says proudly. “No lie.”

She never saw the Taiwanese tourist again, but, five years later, she has seen many like him in one of the capital’s glitzy karaoke clubs where Yi spends the first half of her nights.

This wasn’t the work she had in mind, she says. A friend convinced her she could find work in a shop or cafe. So she took a taxi from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh.

Crossing the border and getting to town was easy, she said. But finding a job wasn’t. She looked for work at the markets, but it quickly became clear that there was none to be found.

Having already sold her virginity, she decided to find work at a karaoke club, where selling sex became a simple reality: No sex, no food, she says.

Night after night she stands in a line-up with eight to ten other girls, waiting to be chosen by carousing men. She’ll sit with them, massage them, drink with them, and sometimes sleep with them.

Her customers are usually Taiwanese, she says, as well as other Chinese. She speaks some Mandarin in addition to Vietnamese and Cantonese.

For her, they make better clients. She can talk to them if they want, make jokes, get them to drink. She sits with them quietly if they want. Some of them are young vacationers. Some of them are here on business, looking for a place to drink and socialize. Many times they come looking for a girl like Yi.

And most of them, she says, are safer than the Cambodians who kara­oke.

Vietnamese prostitutes are sometimes singled out for vio­lence by Cambodians. Some men say they seek them out Vietnamese for rough sex. Others believe the Vietnam­ese are willing to do more things than Khmer prostitu­tes, like performing oral sex.

Yi is afraid of Cambodian men in the karaoke or at night­clubs, calling them “crazy.”

So she waits upstairs with nu­merous other girls, waiting to be called down by her mommi to line up in the front of the sprawling karaoke room, waiting to be picked out of the line-up by a client.

In the air-conditioned karaoke room, before the drinks are even poured, Yi’s mommi is in the room, asking the clients if they want a hostess. Yi and the others come in and line up against the wall. The mommi tells the men each of the women’s qualities: if they speak Chinese, or are good singers, or are just a very good girl.

Yi is expected at least to sit with her client, massage him, feed him, pour his drinks and be groped. She works for tips, singing, keeping things lively, playing cards or dice, toasting and drinking along with the men.

Service carries a minimum tip of $5 for company, $50 for sex. For Yi, it has been like this for more than a year.

After the karaoke club closes, Yi heads to a late-night club for drinking and dancing and more work.

She wouldn’t work so much, she says, ex­cept that she’s now in debt to her mommi, having borrowed about $1,000 to send to her fa­ther, who was in a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.

He died last September, suffering complications from a heart attack. Yi had no money left to go visit him. When she misses him she’ll drink so much whiskey she can’t stand—or work. Then her mommi scolds her or orders her out of the club.

Sometimes, the sadness weighs too much, and in a fit of depression, Yi hurts herself. Lines from small, shallow cuts run the length of her left forearm. Brown and pink circles the size of cigarette cherries dot her wrist, inside and out.

She says she wants to get some measure of control over her work. She wants to pay off her mommi and have the option to work or not. If she doesn’t have to go home with men, she can just work for tips at the karaoke club.

Some of the girls around her are in the same situation. Others  are there to earn quick money so they can return to Vietnam to perhaps start a restaurant or other business. No data is available on how many women at ka­raoke clubs are trafficked there or how many are there by choice, but the Cambodian Wo­men’s Crisis Center, a nonprofit, estimates that 60 percent of brothel workers were tricked by agents or sold by parents.

Even if she didn’t have to work, Yi says, she would probably go out to the club at night. That’s where all her friends are. If they don’t find clients, they stick it out, dancing until late.

Sometimes they get drunk. Sometimes they get high. Speed and other methamphetamines are readily available to many of Phnom Penh’s sex workers.

Now, Yi says, she is seldom without a small green paper pouch of the drug ketamine—“K” she calls it—a powdered form of horse tranquilizer now popular in many clubs in Asia and the West.

She occasionally reaches into her back pocket through­out the night, pulls out the pouch, dabs some powder on the back of her hand, and takes a hard sniff. Sometimes two. Then she floats away for awhile.

One friend goes away to dance with a man in the corner. Another is hustled out the door by a man with a fistful of money. The music blares and Yi’s vision blurs as a night in the club swirls around her.

Eventually the crowd thins and she sobers up. Time to leave. She finds her favorite mo­torbike taxi driver, one who speaks Viet­­namese, and heads for home, where she sleeps on the floor with seven other girls.

At this in-between time before dawn—no longer night, but not quite morning—the clubs are closed, the brothels quiet. Only the street sweepers and those in-between people like Yi are awake. The streets are still and the only sounds are the sputter of a moto’s engine and the whisk, whisk of brooms.

(Additional reporting by Phann Ana)

 

 

 

 

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