The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine
Somaly Mam, 2005
Random House
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385526227
Summary
(A portion of the proceeds of this book will be donated to the Somaly Mam Foundation.)
A riveting, raw, and beautiful memoir of tragedy and hope.
Born in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old. For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia.
Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking—rape, torture, deprivation—until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker. Emboldened by her newfound freedom, education, and security, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind.
Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, The Road of Lost Innocence recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls.
She has orchestrated raids on brothels and rescued sex workers, some as young as five and six; she has built shelters, started schools, and founded an organization that has so far saved more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos.
Her memoir will leave you awestruck by her tenacity and courage and will renew your faith in the power of an individual to bring about change. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1970-71
• Where—Mondulkiri, Cambodia
• Awards—World Children's Prize for The Rights of the Child,
Sweden, 2008; CNN Hero, USA; Glamour Woman of the
Year, 2006; Olympic flag bearer, Torino, 2006; Heroes of
Anti-Trafficking Award, US State Department; Mimosa d'Oro
Award; Festival du Scoop Prize, France; Excmo
Ayuntaniento de Galdar Concejalia de Servicio Sociale, and
Principe de Asturias for International Cooperation, 1998—
both of Spain; Regis University Honorary Doctorate of
Public Service, USA.
• Currently—lives in France and Cambodia
Somaly Mam is the cofounder of AFESIP (Acting for Women in Distressing Situations) in Cambodia and The Somaly Mam Foundation in the United States, whose goal is to save and socially reintegrate victims of sexual slavery in Southeast Asia. She was named Glamour's Woman of the Year in 2006. She lives in Cambodia and France. (From the publisher.)
More
Mam, born into a Cambodian family struggling through poverty, was sold into sexual slavery as a child by her grandfather. She was beaten, raped and tortured. One night she witnessed the murder by a pimp of close friend and, at this moment, made it her mission to escape and find a way to halt the practice of child sex slavery. By the age of 30 Somaly Mam had become an international spokesperson for women and children tortured in the brothels of Southeast Asia.
In 1997, along with her former French husband, Pierre Legros, Mam created the AFESIP (Agir pour les Femmes en Situation Précaire—Acting for Women in Distressing Circumstances) in Cambodia. Since then, her international foundation has worked in Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. Its goals are to save and socially reintegrate people who are victims of the sex slave trade. Despite threats against her life, Somaly Mam has helped thousands of young girls and teenagers who had been coerced into prostitution.
Mam has attained international recognition for her work. In 1998 she received the prestigious Prince of Asturias Awards for International Cooperation, in the presence of Queen Sofia of Spain. In 2006 she was one of the eight Olympic flag bearers at the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony in Torino, Italy. In October 2006 she was named a Glamour magazine WOMAN OF THE YEAR at a presentation at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Her award was presented by Mariane Pearl, the journalist, who had been present in Cambodia at the time of the kidnapping of Somaly's daughter, and who reported on the incident for an article that subsequently appeared in the August 1, 2006 issue of Glamour:
The following day, a social worker calls me to say that Somaly has been reunited with her daughter. The police found Ning, who had apparently been drugged, in a bar in Battambang. She said she had been raped by her three captors—the young man who the family knows, along with two others.
When I see mother and daughter again, both are deeply shaken. “I think they kidnapped Ning in retaliation for my work,” Somaly tells me. I see that this is another defining moment in her life. She is deeply hurt. But pausing in her work is not an option. She must keep going—for the sake of all the girls she is helping. For the sake of her daughter. She tells me how earlier, she took Ning’s beautiful, sad face in both of her hands. “You’ve suffered what you’ve suffered,” she told her. “Now you take that pain and you help others. —Glamour
In June 2007 Somaly created the US based Somaly Mam Foundation, and in 2008, she was awarded the World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child in Sweden for her "dangerous struggle" to defend the rights of children in Cambodia. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In The Road of Lost Innocence, [Mam] writes of corrupt government officials and police who allow the illegal businesses to thrive. Her account inspires outrage.
Jane Ciabattari - Washington Post
An inspiring story from the front lines of a global tragedy. Somaly Mam’s courageous fight to save women and children reminds us that one person can stand up and change the fate of others for good.”
Mariane Pearl (author of A Mighty Heart)
The Road of Lost Innocence is unputdownable, and you read it with a lump in your throat. Somaly Mam’s story is an account of how humanity can sink to the lowest levels of depravity, but it is also a testimony of resistance and hope. She lifted herself out of a well of terror and found the determination and the resilience to save others. Somaly Mam is my candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (author of Infidel)
The horror and violence perpetrated on young girls to feed the sex trade industry in southeast Asia is personalized in this graphic story. Of "mixed race," Khmer and Phnong, Mam is living on her own in the forest in northern Cambodia around 1980 when a 55-year-old stranger claims he will take her to her missing family. "Grandfather" beats and abuses the nine-year-old Mam and sells her virginity to a Chinese merchant to cover a gambling debt. She is subsequently sold into a brothel in Phnom Penh, and the daily suffering and humiliation she endures is almost impossible to imagine or absorb ("I was dead. I had no affection for anyone"). She recounts recalcitrant girls being tortured and killed, and police collusion and government involvement in the sex trade; she manages to break the cycle only when she discovers the advantages of ferengi(foreign) clients and eventually marries a Frenchman. She comes back to Cambodia from France, now unafraid, and with her husband, Pierre; sets up a charity, AFESIP, "action for women in distressing circumstances"; and fearlessly devotes herself to helping prostitutes and exploited children. The statistics are shocking: one in every 40 Cambodian girls (some as young as five) will be sold into sex slavery. Mam brings to the fore the AIDS crisis, the belief that sex with a virgin will cure the disease and the Khmer tradition of women's obedience and servitude. This moving, disturbing tale is not one of redemption but a cry for justice and support for women's plight everywhere.
Publishers Weekly
Candid memoir of a woman trapped in the sex-slave trade, who is now an activist against it. "You shouldn't try and discover the past," Mam recalls her adoptive father telling her. "You shouldn't hurt yourself." Born in 1970 or 1971 and torn from her ethnic Phnong family during Cambodia's genocidal civil war, Mam suffered as a child in a Khmer village whose people saw her as "fatherless, black, and ugly," possibly even a cannibal. Her pederast grandfather sold her virginity to a Chinese merchant to whom he owed money, a prize in a culture where raping a virgin was believed to cure AIDS. He then sold her to a soldier who "beat me often, sometimes with the butt of his rifle on my back and sometimes with his hands." From there it was a short path to what Mam calls "ordinary prostitution," working for a madam who was quick to hit and slow to feed. In time, after a series of indignities that she recounts in painful detail, Mam extricated herself to live with a French humanitarian-aid worker. Married, she moved with him to France, where she discovered that "French people could be racist, just like the Khmers." Burdened with an unpleasant mother-in-law, she welcomed the chance to return to Cambodia, working in a Doctors Without Borders clinic and turning her home into a kind of halfway house for abused, drug-addicted and ill prostitutes, most of whom were very young. Mam recounts her battles against government officials, pimps, brothel keepers and other foes in a campaign that brought death threats against her, but that slowly gathered force as it gained funding from UNICEF and several European governments. That campaign is ongoing, and Mam concludes that there's plenty left to do, since Cambodiais "in a state of chaos where the only rule is every man for himself." An urgent, though depressing, document, worthy of a place alongside Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, Rigoberto Menchu's autobiography, and other accounts of overcoming Third World hardship.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Road of Lost Innocence:
1. One of the primary questions, of course, concerns Somaly Mam's incredible courage. What inner strengths does she draw upon that enable her to overcome her own degradation and reach out to help others?
2. Were you surprised by Somaly Mam's book? If you were previously unaware of sex slave trafficking, what does that say about the level of awareness of others in the nation and around the world? What else have you heard, watched, or read about this issue? Has it received the attention it deserves in this country? If not, why?
3. What more should be done to increase awareness and to eventually halt the practice of sex slavery? Is Mam's crusade sufficient? What more needs to be done...or, realistically, can be done?
4. Is there one special incident or individual or moment in this book that moved you more than any other?
5. Does this book move you to become personally involved in this issue. What can you, or any one individual (or small group) do to ameliorate the problem of sex slave trafficking?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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