For anybody who has ever been in a Bangkok girlie bar, what the smiling and giggling women in their spangles and bare skin have given up to get there remains hidden and out of sight. But these women, many of them no more than children, have faced lives almost before puberty that has annealed them into hardened and calculating individuals whose life is dedicated not to the befuddled westerners asking them to lap dance but to survival and finding money. It is kept well hidden, under the surface, beneath the smiles.
It is a story of exploitation on a savage and depressing scale. It has been told before, but is told again by a young woman whose name at birth was Bountah, born in the impoverished northeastern region of the country, called Isaan. Only 13: The true story of Lon, is told by authors Julia Manzanares and Derek Kent as autobiography.
Beaten repeatedly as a child, Bountah was forbidden from going to school because the family only had enough money to send the boys. She ran away from home at age 11 because her grandmother refused to let her go to school even though she had earned the money herself to go by cleaning houses in a nearby town. A troubled, rebellious child, she set out for Bangkok 500 miles away, only to be returned home. She ran away twice more before she fled to Bangkok to take a job as a waitress – at the age of 12, working from 5 am to 7 pm for Bt1,500 (US$48.50) a month. Full story...
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It is a story of exploitation on a savage and depressing scale. It has been told before, but is told again by a young woman whose name at birth was Bountah, born in the impoverished northeastern region of the country, called Isaan. Only 13: The true story of Lon, is told by authors Julia Manzanares and Derek Kent as autobiography.
Beaten repeatedly as a child, Bountah was forbidden from going to school because the family only had enough money to send the boys. She ran away from home at age 11 because her grandmother refused to let her go to school even though she had earned the money herself to go by cleaning houses in a nearby town. A troubled, rebellious child, she set out for Bangkok 500 miles away, only to be returned home. She ran away twice more before she fled to Bangkok to take a job as a waitress – at the age of 12, working from 5 am to 7 pm for Bt1,500 (US$48.50) a month. Full story...
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