The next time we visited Poipet, a full year had passed. When Nick walked into Momm's brothel, she saw him and dashed away in tears. After she had composed herself, she came out and kneeled on the floor and begged forgiveness.
"I never lie to people, but I lied to you," she said forlornly. "I said I would not come back, and I did. I didn't want to return, but I did."
Ultimately, it was a crackdown on the brothels that ended Momm's trajectory. Momm's brothel was owned by a middle-aged woman named Sok Khorn, who was always complaining about the business. "It's only barely profitable, and it's a huge amount of work," she would moan as she sat in the foyer of the brothel (which was also her family home). In 2008, the Cambodian authorities reacted to growing Western pressure by cracking down on sex trafficking. That raised the cost of new girls, and the police began to demand larger bribes from the brothel owners. At that point, about half the brothels in Poipet folded. Sok Khorn announced in disgust that she would try something else as well. "It wasn't making money, so I gave up and thought I'd open a little grocery shop," she said.
Momm suddenly found herself free. She hurriedly married one of her customers, a policeman, and they settled down together in his house. When we took our family to Cambodia we had a joyous meeting with Momm in Poipet. "I'm a housewife now," she told us, beaming. As for Neth, her new grocery shop initially did a booming business, since there was no other store in the village. But when other villagers saw Neth's business flourishing, they opened their own shops. Soon the village had a half-dozen stores. Neth found her sales faltering.
Worse, Neth's family continued to regard her as a foolish little girl with no rights. So any man in the family who needed something took it from Neth's store— sometimes paying, sometimes not. When a Cambodian festival rolled around, the men in Neth's family didn't have enough money to buy food for a feast, so they came to raid her shop. Her mother recalled later: "Neth got mad. She said we [the family] had to stay away, or everything would be gone. She said she had to have money to buy new things." But in a Cambodian village, nobody listens to an uneducated teenage girl. The feast went ahead, the store was emptied. Four months after the shop had opened, her business plan had collapsed.
When Nick walked into Momm's brothel, she begged forgiveness. 'I never lie to people, but I lied to you,' she said. 'I said I would not come back, and I did. I didn't want to return, but I did.'Mortified that her capital was gone, Neth began to discuss with a few girlfriends the idea of seeking jobs in a city. A trafficker promised to get the girls jobs as dishwashers in Thailand. But the girls would have to pay $100 to be smuggled there, money they didn't have, so they would have to go into debt to the trafficker. Neth fretted about the risks but was desperate. Her father had tuberculosis and was coughing up blood, and there was no money for treatment. So she decided to brave the risk. Just as Neth and her girlfriends were about to leave, an aid worker from American Assistance for Cambodia dropped by. The aid worker, wary of the trafficker's enticements, persuaded Neth not to take the risk. But what could Neth do instead?
Bernie Krisher of American Assistance for Cambodia tried another approach. He arranged for Neth to move to Phnom Penh and study hairdressing at Sapor's, the best beauty shop in the city. Neth lived in the American Assistance compound and studied English on the side, while working full-time in the beauty shop, learning to cut hair and give manicures. She placed third in a competition to apply makeup, and she lived sedately and quietly, pouring all her energy into her studies.
"I'm happy with Srey Neth," said the owner, Sapor Rendall. "She studies hard." Sapor said she had just one problem with Neth: "She doesn't want to do massage. I've talked to her about it many times, but she's very reluctant." Neth never dared explain to Sapor the reason for her timidity about massages. Over time, Neth mellowed. She had always been very thin and a bit somber, but she put on a bit of weight and became relaxed, sometimes even vivacious and giggly. She was acting the way a teenager should, and boys noticed. They flirted with her. "I stay away from them," she explained dryly. "I don't want to play around with boys. I just want to learn hairdressing, so that I can open my own salon."