Free Under the Dragon by Rory Maclean Page A

any proper toilets. Once, in one cubicle she thought she heard the sea, though it could have been a passing tuk-tuk , and from another, if she stood on the bed and peered through a grille, she could make out the graceful spires of the Royal Palace. The frequent displacement left her no time to get to know the other girls or to consider escape, especially as she never knew where she was incarcerated. Those who did run away were often caught by their police clients and returned to be punished, or locked up for months without trial, subjected to abuse, in a Thai immigration detention centre. The few who managed to reach Burma risked the possibility of arrest for ‘illegal departure’, and even, it was rumoured, execution if they were found to be HIV positive. Their only choice was to work until they were told their debt was paid, then to rely on an agent to escort them back through the checkpoints and over the border.
    The years crept up on her, ageing Ni Ni’s firm young body. Men chose her less often, and those who did were less particular. One client put a gun to her head when she asked him to wear a condom. It wasn’t because she was afraid of pregnancy – she had often paid the owner’s wife to give her Depo-Prevera injections – or even because he was filthy. It was simply that he frightened her. In life there is a path of fear and a path of love, and Ni Ni had been unable to follow the latter one alone. The owner threatened her with a beating if she ever came out of the room before her client again.
    Ni Ni’s hands touched and stroked and satisfied the men, but she felt nothing, sensed nothing through the empty years. Only sometimes in an Englishman’s clumsy white embrace did she remember Louis. But he never came to rescue her. At eighteen she was overhandled and utterly misused. Her life had been stolen. She had lost control of her body. She possessed nothing more than a sense of hopelessness.
    It is estimated that two million people are employed in Thailand’s sex trade. The business is probably the most valuable sector of the tourist industry, which itself exceeds all exports as a source of foreign exchange. In 1988 4.3 million people visited the country, three-quarters of whom were unaccompanied males. But it is local patronage that makes the greater demand. Half of all Thai men have their first sexual experience with a prostitute; three out of four have visited a brothel. The majority of commercial sex workers are natives, but there are also Filipinos, Indonesians, even Europeans – five thousand Russian prostitutes are working in Bangkok. And every year ten thousand Burmese women, young and infection-free, are trafficked across the border, enticed by false promises, imprisoned by debt bondage. Their great hope is to go home, but their greater fear is deportation.
    Often, in the quiet of morning when Ni Ni was left alone, she fell into the same dream. In her cubicle a miniature black spider, no bigger than a pinhead, crawled up her hand. She watched it spin between her thumb and forefinger a silky thread which glistened and grew until it twisted together her five fingers. She felt its tickle as both her hands were enmeshed. The bonds became tighter and she tried to free herself. But the industrious spider, so friendly and engaging at first, continued its labours, stitched its weave, wrapped the corners, until all her body, the bunk on which she lay, even the red plastic chips were wrapped in its cobweb, dusty and dirty, and her life was snuffed out.
    It was from this dream that Ni Ni was awoken by the sound of English voices. The Crime Suppression Division – in cooperation with the Commission for the Protection of Children’s Rights – raided her hotel in an operation stage-managed for the world’s press. The girls were arrested and interrogated for the cameras, though they were not asked questions about the brothel owner. He had been allowed to go, along with the pimps and the clients. Ni Ni and the