Of Human Bondage

"Sometimes the women themselves, they think that it is normal that they have been sold in a brothel," Mam tells her. "It's like me. Before, I think it's normal that I have been sold. . . . I never knew that I had rights."

"Where do you find that courage?" Schakowsky asks Mam -- which is another way of probing the central mystery of her life: How did she discover she had rights? Where did she find her voice?

There was no Somaly Mam to help Somaly Mam. How did Somaly Mam help herself? How did she learn to banish silence?

She was born in about 1970 or 1971 in a village inhabited by a dark-skinned mountain tribe that was scorned by the lowland Khmer. The upheaval of the Vietnam War was followed by the murderous strife of Pol Pot's dictatorship. Her parents disappeared, then so did her grandmother.

She was a child on her own in a culture where children are "a kind of domestic livestock," she writes, and where "there is only one law for women: silence before rape and silence after."

"I remember one day I have been raped by a man," she says in an interview while awaiting Schakowsky's return from a vote in Congress. "I just want to run away home. I want to talk to people, have them to know. But when I need people to help me, no one help me. So I keep silence."

A man who claimed to be her grandfather enslaved her as a servant in his house. Then he sent her to a brothel. There, she says, her will was broken. She stopped feeling, stopped caring or hoping. But she found she still cared for the new girls arriving all the time -- girls who were still alive inside.

What saved her was the possibility of saving others. She could speak up for them, even if she did not feel worthy to speak up for herself.

"I think that experience make me stand up," she continues, tears coming to her eyes. "Something happen to me I didn't want to happen to the girls. I didn't want to happen to another one. Because it's not easy to survive it."

Mam began by helping a pair of new girls from the country escape the Phnom Penh brothel where Mam herself was a prisoner, working to pay off the debt owed by her "grandfather" to the brothel owner. Then Mam was lucky enough to be picked up by a client who was a Swiss humanitarian worker. He was yet another john, but he was not violent, and he eventually gave her a present of enough money to help out more girls.

Mam met more foreigners, and in about 1991 became the girlfriend of a French relief worker who spoke fluent Khmer, and whom she eventually married. She got work cleaning houses and hotels. Her husband respected her more than she respected herself. She thought he was "crazy" to insist that she make her own decisions and "do whatever I want."

She learned to look people in the eye. She realized she had rights. She stopped keeping silent.