Free The Road of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam

left Aunty Peuve, but I began to work for Min. He used to watch out for me on his motorbike while I waited for a client to come by. I worked for Aunty Peuve too. For a couple of weeks I worked out of Aunty Peuve’s apartment most evenings and for Min during the day, to make money “for us both.” Then I realized that he was lying to me just like everyone else and I stopped.
    Eventually I went back to Aunty Peuve’s place. Min was really angry about it. Months later, he was still hassling me for money. And I became even more convinced that there was only one way I could get out of prostitution. I would have to find a man who was rich.

.6.

    Foreigners
    Sometimes—very occasionally—I would go into a rage. Maybe it was the Phnong in me: I would suddenly crack and rebel. The first time was when I let the two girls go and got so badly punished. The next time it happened was at the end of my years with Aunty Peuve. I shot a client.
    It might have been New Year’s Day in 1989, because the white people were all celebrating something. There were suddenly a lot more white people around in 1988 and 1989, and they weren’t Russians and East Germans, as they’d always been. They were French and Italian and English people, and they had come to Cambodia because the Vietnamese soldiers were leaving. There were peace talks taking place in Paris, and the new white people were mostly humanitarian workers from organizations like the Red Cross. Anyway, on that night when I shot the man there was a lot of shouting and laughing from drunken white people in the street—it was some kind of special day.
    The client who had hired us was a man who always used to pick Mom and me. We would try to slip away from him when he came to Aunty Peuve’s but it was always us he chose, though sometimes he chose other girls to come along too. He would always take us to a room where there were ten or fifteen men and they were always drunk. One time they drugged us. They gave us something to drink, and when we woke up we were covered in bruises. This man was always complaining about us to Li, so we’d be beaten. He was a big man, a brute who liked to use his fists.
    Mom was back at Aunty Peuve’s by that time, because her soldier friend, Roen, was away, and her mother had run out of money. That night, the client chose just the two of us. He drove us all the way to Ken Svay, a village outside Phnom Penh—maybe it was where he was from. He was drunk and it was late, and there didn’t seem to be any other men with him. He took us to a room above a bar and he kept drinking.
    It was very late and he’d been drinking steadily for hours when he began to yell at us and shoot at Mom. He wasn’t shooting wildly—he was sitting at the table with a gun and shooting around her, just to scare her, like my husband used to do to me when I lived with him in Chup. He was angry, but he was enjoying it. Then he went to the toilet—he was so drunk he left his gun on the table. I picked it up.
    Mom said, “Do you know how to shoot?” and I looked at her and went into the bathroom. The client was frightened—he said, “Don’t do that,
khmao”
—and I shot at him. I was just so angry.
    The bullet hit his leg. He was yelling but probably nobody could hear him, because of the noise in the street. I really wanted to kill him, but I thought about his wife—of course this man had a wife, and probably daughters too. So we tied his mouth up with his scarf and left him there and ran. He was really scared, and so were we. We ran as far as we could, and at dawn we found a
motodup
to take us back to the brothel.
    That man did come back to Aunty Peuve’s to complain eventually, but it wasn’t for weeks—I think he was too frightened to do it before or maybe he was in the hospital. By that time I was already protected; I had found Dietrich.
             
    Dietrich was a humanitarian worker with one of the big relief agencies in Phnom Penh, and one night he picked me