Cambodia’s Unlikely Heroine

Jakarta Globe

April 13, 2009
Tracie Barrett

S omaly Mam is an unlikely heroine. But her story, though harrowing, captured me from its opening sentences and held me — in turns appalled, amazed, angered and in tears — until I turned the last page and realized I’d read my morning away.

Born in a small Cambodian village “sometime around 1970 or 1971,” the author was left with her grandmother as a small child, then abandoned by her grandmother also. As she writes in her autobiography, “The Road of Lost Innocence,” “Being an orphan in Cambodia is no rare condition. It is frighteningly ordinary.”

Somaly doesn’t even own her name, and can’t remember what her parents called her. She was named by a kindly schoolteacher who said he was her uncle.

At the age of 9 or 10, Somaly was introduced to a stranger whom she was told was her grandfather, and accompanied him to his home province. She expected to be loved and cared for but instead was treated as little more than a servant, and the brunt of her grandfather’s anger when he was “drunk and out of money.” As her body matured, “Grandfather” started touching her breasts, so she spent as little time as possible in his presence, doing chores for him but sleeping most nights by the river.

One evening he sent her to a merchant to whom he owed money, where she was raped, although the young girl didn’t understand what had occurred. “At the time I had no words for it,” she writes. “I didn’t know about penises. I thought he had used a knife.”

At about age 14, “Grandfather” gave her in marriage to a violent soldier, who beat her, “sometimes with the butt of his rifle on my back and sometimes with his hands.” When her husband didn’t return one day, her “Grandfather” sold her to a brothel owner in Phnom Penh.

Obviously, “The Road of Lost Innocence” is neither a feel-good tale nor a comfortable read, but it is compelling in Somaly’s matter-of-fact portrayal of human trafficking.

Somaly escaped with the aid of a French aid worker, Pierre, whom she met and married, and together they went to Paris. Pierre was restless though, and after 18 months, they returned to Cambodia.

The Somaly who returned was a different woman from the inexperienced girl who left a year-and-a-half earlier. “I was like the people we call Khmers de France,” she writes, “Cambodians who live in France and come back on holiday with money and power and with the white person’s sense of self-assurance.”

Pierre’s new job was for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), and through volunteering at the NGO’s clinic Somaly made contact with prostitutes in need of medical aid. She returned to the brothels, but this time to try to educate the inmates. She helped one girl escape, then another, and with Pierre and another friend, founded a charity to shelter runaway prostitutes and teach them a trade.

But this is no fairy tale and there’s no happily-ever-after ending. Somaly and her family are threatened, her shelter is attacked, her adopted daughter is kidnapped and her marriage dissolves under the strain of her work. She also receives a humanitarian award from Queen Sofia of Spain and recognition internationally, and now heads a US-based foundation. And through it all, one thing is foremost in her mind.

As she writes: “I don’t feel like I can change the world. I don’t even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering. I want to change this small real thing that is the destiny of one little girl. And then another, and another, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself or sleep at night.”

The Road of Lost Innocence
Somaly Mam
Random House
208 pages