The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine by Somaly Mam

From the Publisher

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.

To learn more about how you can help fight human trafficking, visit the foundation’s website: somaly.org.

The Washington Post - Jane Ciabattari

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.

Publishers Weekly

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. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

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. Agent: Susanna Lea/Susanna Lea Associates

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Reading Group Guide
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Reading Group Guide

1. The theme of silence–both cultural and personal–runs throughout Somaly Mam’s story. “People learned from [the years under Pol Pot] that they couldn’t trust anyone–friends, neighbors, not even their family,” Mam writes. “The more you let people know about yourself–the more you speak–the more you expose yourself to danger. It was important to see, not to hear, not to know anything about what was happening. This is a very Cambodian attitude toward life” (p. 14). Indeed, in this context, the fact that Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman, wrote a memoir is itself an act of courage and defiance. What helped Somaly to find her voice in a culture that suppresses the cries of the individual? By what methods does she combat this conspiracy of silence?

 2. Compare the Cambodian tradition of silent forbearance in the face of unthinkable adversity with the explicit repression found in political regimes that do not permit free speech and individual expression. Which do you think is a more insidious and dangerous form of repression? 

3. In chapter 10, “New Beginnings,” Somaly returns to Phnom Penh as a married woman and encounters an old man who lives in a small house with a beautiful, orchid-filled garden. He was “an intellectual and he’d been through every kind of revolution and change and suffering too.” He tells Somaly, “In Cambodia we’re like frogs in front of the king. When the king orders it, we poke our heads above water and sing . . . But if we pokeour heads out without having been invited to, the king cuts them off with his sword. I’ve seen everything and lived everything . . . It’s all useless. When you’re young . . . you want to understand a great many things. It’s no use. I fought all my life and for nothing; now I wait for death. The only thing to hope for in this world is the peace you need to look after your own garden” (p. 128). Somaly writes that she understood him and thought about his words often, but, she says, “I don’t feel like I can change the world . . . I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering. I want to change this small real thing that is the destiny of one little girl. And then another, and another, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself or sleep at night” (pp. 128—29). Compare Somaly’s life experience with the old man’s. Somaly reached adulthood without a formal education, while this man is described as an intellectual who has seen and experienced much. What do you think accounts for their different views of personal responsibility, when arguably, a person such as Somaly, who has experienced and witnessed the most violent and depraved acts of man, has a greater right to feel self-protective and hopeless about humanity? Why does the old man advise keeping one’s head low and tending one’s garden, while Somaly risks everything to save one little girl’s life? 

4. Somaly writes about the status of women in Cambodia and their sense of self-worth: “There is one law for women: silence . . . We’re taught when we’re little to be like the silkcotton tree: dam kor. Deaf and dumb. Blind too, if possible. Your daughters will look after you, because that’s their duty. Other than that, they’re not worth much” (p. 185). From a young age, girls are taught service and submission. They learn to expect violence instead of tenderness from men. Even Somaly, when she writes about her husband, Pierre, the father of her children, speaks with a frank pragmatism about her marriage: “I may not have loved Pierre, but I thought I could live with this man. He was simple, like a Cambodian. He ate rice and prahoc sauce . . . Pierre wasn’t rich, but of all the people I had ever met, he was the only one who was attentive to me–not to my body, but to me” (p. 76). Her marriage ended in 2004, shortly after the birth of her son. Do you think Somaly’s sense of selfworth played a role in the demise of her marriage? 

5. When Somaly was carrying her first child, she confides, “I felt paralyzed by the thought of being a mother to someone. I had never had a mother and I painfully felt that hole in my life. To be a mother myself felt impossible” (p. 123). And yet, after giving birth, Somaly’s fear instantly dissipates. “Something happened to me that night. It was almost like my life began again, a whole new life” (p. 124). What do you think Somaly felt after giving birth that transformed her into a mother? How do you think she finds the tenderness and compassion within to become the mother to those she rescues when also confronted with the most grim and desperate view of humanity? 

6. In the chapter entitled “The Victims,” Somaly writes, “Most [Cambodian parents] do know their children are going into prostitution. To avoid paying commissions, they take their daughters to the brothels themselves . . . But these parents do it anyway. They care only about themselves” (pp. 168—69). Is it possible to understand the actions of these parents and find compassion for them in view of the mass trauma and psychic scarring Cambodians suffered during the many years of war and dictatorship that ravaged the country? 

7. In Nicholas D. Kristof’s foreword, he describes Somaly as “the Harriet Tubman of Southeast Asia’s brothels, repeatedly rescuing those left behind.” Compare Somaly’s brand of activism and confrontational style with that of Tubman’s Underground Railroad. Which is the greater scourge–the ignorance and prejudice that allowed slavery to proliferate in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century or the cultural acceptance and capital that makes human trafficking one of the largest criminal industries in the world today? What forces must an antislavery activist of today confront that were not in place in the nineteenth century? What tools does Somaly have in her arsenal that Tubman did not? Whose challenge is greater? 

8. Arguably, when people act inhumanely they rely on a community of people who make excuses for their actions, demonize and disassociate from victims, deny wrongdoing, and look the other way when they are confronted with the truth. The very forces that are meant to provide safety–most notably the government, policemen, religious leaders, and parents–work in concert, either knowingly complicit or unwittingly, to foster this dangerous climate in Cambodia and other Asian countries where sexual slavery proliferates. And yet, human trafficking is not confined to Asia and the developing world. In fact, in a Newsweek editorial, the actor and activist Emma Thompson reveals that sexual slavery is prevalent in most Western countries, including the United States and the very section of London where she was raised. “Some 120 nations are routinely plundered by traffickers for their human raw materials, and more than 130 countries are known as destinations for their victims.” What do you think we can do as individuals to combat this issue, both at home and abroad? 

9. Why is it important to tell stories? Can you think of other true-life stories that had the effect of changing cultural attitudes? What books can you think of that have had an impact on society in the time they were published and served as agents of change? Do you think Somaly Mam’s memoir has the power to effect change on a global scale? 

10. In his foreword Kristof writes that Somaly’s “is a hopeful story. She may describe killings and torture, but the larger story is of triumph, love, and rehabilitation.” How does a story like Somaly’s, full of such unfathomable sadness, inspire hope? How has the experience of reading her story changed you? 

11. Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in her introduction, “Somaly Mam is my candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. She is living proof that one woman can change the fate of others.” Past recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize include Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Do you think Somaly’s struggles and achievements are on par with those of these winners? 

Forewords & Introductions

1. The theme of silence–both cultural and personal–runs throughout Somaly Mam’s story. “People learned from [the years under Pol Pot] that they couldn’t trust anyone–friends, neighbors, not even their family,” Mam writes. “The more you let people know about yourself–the more you speak–the more you expose yourself to danger. It was important to see, not to hear, not to know anything about what was happening. This is a very Cambodian attitude toward life” (p. 14). Indeed, in this context, the fact that Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman, wrote a memoir is itself an act of courage and defiance. What helped Somaly to find her voice in a culture that suppresses the cries of the individual? By what methods does she combat this conspiracy of silence?

 2. Compare the Cambodian tradition of silent forbearance in the face of unthinkable adversity with the explicit repression found in political regimes that do not permit free speech and individual expression. Which do you think is a more insidious and dangerous form of repression? 

3. In chapter 10, “New Beginnings,” Somaly returns to Phnom Penh as a married woman and encounters an old man who lives in a small house with a beautiful, orchid-filled garden. He was “an intellectual and he’d been through every kind of revolution and change and suffering too.” He tells Somaly, “In Cambodia we’re like frogs in front of the king. When the king orders it, we poke our heads above water and sing . . . But if we pokeour heads out without having been invited to, the king cuts them off with his sword. I’ve seen everything and lived everything . . . It’s all useless. When you’re young . . . you want to understand a great many things. It’s no use. I fought all my life and for nothing; now I wait for death. The only thing to hope for in this world is the peace you need to look after your own garden” (p. 128). Somaly writes that she understood him and thought about his words often, but, she says, “I don’t feel like I can change the world . . . I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering. I want to change this small real thing that is the destiny of one little girl. And then another, and another, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself or sleep at night” (pp. 128—29). Compare Somaly’s life experience with the old man’s. Somaly reached adulthood without a formal education, while this man is described as an intellectual who has seen and experienced much. What do you think accounts for their different views of personal responsibility, when arguably, a person such as Somaly, who has experienced and witnessed the most violent and depraved acts of man, has a greater right to feel self-protective and hopeless about humanity? Why does the old man advise keeping one’s head low and tending one’s garden, while Somaly risks everything to save one little girl’s life? 

4. Somaly writes about the status of women in Cambodia and their sense of self-worth: “There is one law for women: silence . . . We’re taught when we’re little to be like the silkcotton tree: dam kor. Deaf and dumb. Blind too, if possible. Your daughters will look after you, because that’s their duty. Other than that, they’re not worth much” (p. 185). From a young age, girls are taught service and submission. They learn to expect violence instead of tenderness from men. Even Somaly, when she writes about her husband, Pierre, the father of her children, speaks with a frank pragmatism about her marriage: “I may not have loved Pierre, but I thought I could live with this man. He was simple, like a Cambodian. He ate rice and prahoc sauce . . . Pierre wasn’t rich, but of all the people I had ever met, he was the only one who was attentive to me–not to my body, but to me” (p. 76). Her marriage ended in 2004, shortly after the birth of her son. Do you think Somaly’s sense of selfworth played a role in the demise of her marriage? 

5. When Somaly was carrying her first child, she confides, “I felt paralyzed by the thought of being a mother to someone. I had never had a mother and I painfully felt that hole in my life. To be a mother myself felt impossible” (p. 123). And yet, after giving birth, Somaly’s fear instantly dissipates. “Something happened to me that night. It was almost like my life began again, a whole new life” (p. 124). What do you think Somaly felt after giving birth that transformed her into a mother? How do you think she finds the tenderness and compassion within to become the mother to those she rescues when also confronted with the most grim and desperate view of humanity? 

6. In the chapter entitled “The Victims,” Somaly writes, “Most [Cambodian parents] do know their children are going into prostitution. To avoid paying commissions, they take their daughters to the brothels themselves . . . But these parents do it anyway. They care only about themselves” (pp. 168—69). Is it possible to understand the actions of these parents and find compassion for them in view of the mass trauma and psychic scarring Cambodians suffered during the many years of war and dictatorship that ravaged the country? 

7. In Nicholas D. Kristof’s foreword, he describes Somaly as “the Harriet Tubman of Southeast Asia’s brothels, repeatedly rescuing those left behind.” Compare Somaly’s brand of activism and confrontational style with that of Tubman’s Underground Railroad. Which is the greater scourge–the ignorance and prejudice that allowed slavery to proliferate in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century or the cultural acceptance and capital that makes human trafficking one of the largest criminal industries in the world today? What forces must an antislavery activist of today confront that were not in place in the nineteenth century? What tools does Somaly have in her arsenal that Tubman did not? Whose challenge is greater? 

8. Arguably, when people act inhumanely they rely on a community of people who make excuses for their actions, demonize and disassociate from victims, deny wrongdoing, and look the other way when they are confronted with the truth. The very forces that are meant to provide safety–most notably the government, policemen, religious leaders, and parents–work in concert, either knowingly complicit or unwittingly, to foster this dangerous climate in Cambodia and other Asian countries where sexual slavery proliferates. And yet, human trafficking is not confined to Asia and the developing world. In fact, in a Newsweek editorial, the actor and activist Emma Thompson reveals that sexual slavery is prevalent in most Western countries, including the United States and the very section of London where she was raised. “Some 120 nations are routinely plundered by traffickers for their human raw materials, and more than 130 countries are known as destinations for their victims.” What do you think we can do as individuals to combat this issue, both at home and abroad? 

9. Why is it important to tell stories? Can you think of other true-life stories that had the effect of changing cultural attitudes? What books can you think of that have had an impact on society in the time they were published and served as agents of change? Do you think Somaly Mam’s memoir has the power to effect change on a global scale? 

10. In his foreword Kristof writes that Somaly’s “is a hopeful story. She may describe killings and torture, but the larger story is of triumph, love, and rehabilitation.” How does a story like Somaly’s, full of such unfathomable sadness, inspire hope? How has the experience of reading her story changed you? 

11. Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in her introduction, “Somaly Mam is my candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. She is living proof that one woman can change the fate of others.” Past recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize include Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Do you think Somaly’s struggles and achievements are on par with those of these winners? 

Read an Excerpt