How I Escaped a Cambodian Brothel

Photo Credit: Mark Coggins

Editor’s Note: Human trafficking has become a scourge in Vietnam. It is estimated that each year several thousands of women and children are trafficked from Vietnam to other countries, mainly through Cambodia and China, for commercial sexual exploitation. Some 50 percent of them come from An Giang province in the Mekong Delta. Bong Nguyen managed to escape the brothel where she was captive and return to Vietnam. She is now under the care of Pacific Links, which provides shelter and education to at risks young women in Vietnam. She told her story to NAM editor Andrew Lam. 

AN GIANG PROVINCE, Vietnam - My name is Bong Nguyen. I am 21 years old. My parents work in the rice fields. We have enough to eat and enough to wear. I have two brothers, one older, one younger. 

In 2008, I went to Cambodia and ended being stuck there for over one year. 

I was in school, and after I finished exams, I was browsing on the Internet, and this guy kept trying to chat with me. I didn’t know him, but he kept asking to chat, and so we talked. There’s a coffee shop in Cambodia, he said. I could make money over there. 

At that time, I kept fighting with my mother, and she kicked me out of the house. I was very sad. In the neighborhood, there’s a person who wanted to marry me, but I didn’t want to get married. My mother said, “You better marry him,” and I was so sad. So another girl and I, we decided to go to Ha Tien province just for a few days but we planned to come back. But the guy that I met on the Internet called again and said that we should go to Cambodia to work and make money. There was another friend I knew from school, and he just failed his school exams so the three of us we said, “Why don’t we go?” 

We went by motorcycle taxi, and we went to this man’s house and two men and a woman showed up and they ended up taking us via country roads through rice fields [to avoid the police] and soon we were in Cambodia – without papers.

When we got to this house where this man was supposed to be, he wasn’t there. He was in Malaysia. But his sister was there, running the place, and she kept me and my friends there. They were also Vietnamese. They asked where we were from and we told them. The woman said she‘d buy me new clothes, and we were there for a month. I didn’t know anything about getting paid. I wasn’t thinking about money at that point. 

I soon realized the place was a way station for trafficking. It was a place that sold girls overseas. It was also selling lots of drugs. The white powder kind and the kind that you inject. I saw several girls who came and went. The woman was providing them drugs as well. She was waiting for more girls to show up to ship us to Malaysia. 

She collected money from the girls who were working, and she sold white drugs to them to smoke. She called me her “girl.” She told me she also owned brothels in Thailand and Malaysia. The boy I came to Cambodia with ended up smoking the white powder. I don’t know what happened to him. The drugs were to keep the girls in line.

It was a big operation, and there were quite a few people running the operation, but I met only four to five of them. At first I wanted to escape but couldn’t. I didn’t want to know what happened if I were caught, so I didn’t really try. But I begged: “Let us go home. We still have to go to school.” And the woman there said, “You won’t do well in school. And you have no money.” She said she was preparing a fake passport for me to go to Malaysia. 

But I was really lucky. One of the drug buyers was a boyfriend of the woman’s adopted daughter- she was selling herself at 13 but somehow was adopted by this woman – and that guy was kicked out of the place for smoking drugs on the balcony. There was a big argument, and he said, “After I leave, in three days this place will be raided.”