All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [52]
Pattaya was among the first places where HIV established a beachhead in Asia. At one point it was estimated that more than 40 percent of the prostitutes here and throughout Thailand were HIV positive. After a concerted effort by the Thai government in the 1990s to contain the epidemic (which was, after all, bad for tourism), the rate went down to less than 12 percent. But with a constant stream of new girls and boys coming in from the rural areas and neighboring countries, public health groups like one of PSI’s partners, had to remain vigilant in supplying condoms to the brothels and teaching the prostitutes why and how they had to use them.
We were permitted access to the brothel district, which was blocked off with a wooden sawhorse by a police officer who literally “looked the other way.” I became increasingly aghast as we progressed along the streets, where women in hot pants and glittery halter tops sat outside the bars in cheap plastic chairs, legs crossed, or stood posed sadly in postures that approximated provocation against the garish wall, as if they were living prizes in a carnival game. We parked in front of a bar, one of so many crammed onto the manic street where we had arranged to meet with a gaggle of women trapped in prostitution. Papa Jack, Kate, and a PSI staff member who would translate for me were welcomed cheerfully inside by a madam stationed behind the bar.
The women greeted me as their “big sister,” so I called them my “little sisters.” We nestled like a litter of puppies on the plastic-covered sofas (I tried not to think about why they were wipeable) as they told me about their lives. Their stories were remarkably similar to those we had heard in Cambodia. They all had married at eighteen or nineteen; all were divorced by their husbands soon after. The money they earned having exploited sex was supporting young children, elderly parents, and even a brother’s children. Several stood out. One was in full possession of a brazen personality; she seemed to be a ringleader. Another, snuggled on my right, was at the other end of the spectrum, stoic, subdued. She seemed vulnerable. Unlike the others, she wore no makeup and her hair wasn’t fixed up, just in a simple ponytail. She held my hand in hers. When I went to hold someone else’s hand, trying to spread myself around, she gripped the side seam of my pants.
She told me she grew up on a farm in a province far away, in the northeast, and came to Pattaya desperate for work to support her thirteen-year-old son (her husband had abandoned them, her in-laws disowned her, her own family could not support her and was disgraced by her divorced status). She had no education, no skills, no safety net. For two weeks she wandered the district, approaching businesses, resorts, homes, offering her services as a maid. She found no employment. She earned nothing to send home. Her son, whom she had left on his own in their hut, was running out of food. (The story bluntly demonstrated the cycle of vulnerability that poverty creates. I grieved for her; but, oh, who was grieving for him?)
A woman she didn’t know, sensing her plight, suggested she try the bars. She did not know what this meant. However, once told, and seeing scores of other women working in this way, she succumbed to what sociologists call “economically forced prostitution.” She endured one hellish month of paid sex with tourists and Thai men before returning home to her son, a small pocket full of money. Denying reality, hoping against hope, she stayed with her child until they were inevitably in the same position once more: penniless, meager rations, no prospects. Today, the very day I was there, was her first day back in the brothel. That was the difference I perceived in her. She was fresh. She could still emotionally articulate her regrets. I could smell the countryside, which lingered