Book Review: The Road to Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam

I am often amazed at human nature and how cultural differences such as education, religion, and culture affects it. Rousseau, for instance, believed in the noble savage. I have read so many memoirs of missionaries in far-off lands, histories of the wild west, and war stories that I have come to believe that innate human nobility is a rare find. Sure there are those one-in-a-million tribes and countries where everyone in the clan is like a living saint but usually it’s not that way with we humans. Especially when power and money is involved.

In The Road to Lost Innocence, Somaly Mam’s account of her life in Cambodia before and after the Khmer Rouge, we see this kind of savagery. Now, I’m not an expert in Southeast Asian history and born even before the war it seemed that certain cultural cruelties were pretty ingrained, as if they were a part of a thousand-year culture. Specifically, the oppression of women, racial prejudice against dark women and dark tribes.

Somaly belongs to the Phnong, a dark tribe that lived in the deep forests of Cambodia. Unlike the Khmer, who were lighter, the Phnong were considered savage, stupid, dirty. Yes, yes, I know. Sounds familiar, but as Somaly Mam writes, all these Asian countries like light or white skin. War and poverty, of course, only made these racial prejudices and the oppression against women even more cruel.

After a harrowing childhood of whippings, cruelty, and abuse, the author’s “grandfather,” a Muslim man who has been abusing her, sells her into a brothel. He had originally sold her to an abusive husband to pay off a debt but when the soldier didn’t return from a battle, the grandfather came by and sold her to a Muslim woman, a meebon, a keeper of a brothel. Somaly then became a srey kouc, a “broken woman” who could never be fixed.

I don’t know much about American prostitutes, their johns, their drug addictions, or their pimps but it seems to me – from American movies, anyway — that American prostitutes don’t suffer as horribly as their Asian counterparts. They aren’t thrown into dark sewage pits, for instance with snakes crawling over them. They don’t have cruel men beating them or murdering them. They don’t have Chinese men renting their services then taking them to a room somewhere to service twenty other Chinese men. They weren’t forcibly aborted. And generally, the mothers of American prostitutes aren’t prostituting their daughters. Neither do American johns seek young virgins to sleep with in order to be cured of AIDS. The trouble is that after war ends, and sophistication and education supposedly arrives, prostitution still exists.

Article Author: Carole McDonnell

Carole McDonnell's short stories and essays appear online and in print, in speculative fiction, ethnic, and Christian publications. She lives in New York with her husband, two sons, and their pets. Wind Follower, published by Juno Books in June 2007, …

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