My name is Anong and I’m from Thailand. I was born in 1999 in Bangkok and my early life was like so many other Thai girls. Many people think that all Thai girls are whores but that is not true. It is true that some girls become whores because their families are poor and every child has the responsibility of supporting his or her family in any way they can. If that means becoming a sex worker, there is no shame in a girl from the poor provinces like Udon Thani in Isan in the north of Thailand becoming a whore who goes to a city like Bangkok or Pattaya to find work in a bar. The money that they can earn working in a bar or as a whore on the street goes back to support their families. But most girls are like girls in other countries. They go to school and they don’t have sex with strange men. I have a sister who is 2 years older than me. Her name is Chailai. Because I was the youngest child of my parents, I was kind of spoiled by them.

However, my father died when I was young, so I don’t remember what he looked like or what his job was but my mother worked hard to support us both after he died. She did not go to work in a bar like so many others in her situation would have done, but she had a small stall in a market where she sold cheap clothes. I never had a boyfriend because I’m not pretty. I know that I’m ugly, my hair is not straight, I have small tits and ass, I’m brown and I’m short and Thai boys prefer tall, beautiful girls, so I stayed focused on my studies at school, and at weekends and during school holidays I helped my mother with her clothes stall. That is how I learned about the business of buying clothes from a wholesaler and selling them with a slightly higher price to the public. I also learned about how to convince someone to buy from me instead of from another clothes stall. That was my first lesson in how to please a customer.

But my life changed dramatically when I was 15. My mother got cancer. At first, she just looked tired all the time, but slowly we understood that she was sick because she began to lose weight and she could not eat much. Finally, she could not even walk without help or leave the house. She could only move slowly from her bed to the bathroom and she was always in pain. That meant that she was not able to work because she was so sick. Chailai was working in a bar which meant that she could not be at home most of the time, so I dropped out of school to look after my mother and also to look after the clothes stall. It was not easy doing both, but I tried my best. I had to leave home early in the morning to open the stall and stay there until late at night. When I returned home it was always late at night but I needed to try to bathe my mother and make her some soup. That was the only food she could manage to eat without vomiting. However, we could not afford to pay for medicines, and treatment for the cancer was impossible for us because treatment in hospitals was only for people who had money. For poor people, the only options were to wait to die or get better if we got sick. The money that I earned from selling clothes was just enough to pay for rent and food, so I could only watch as my mother became sicker and sicker. Eventually, her body could not continue and she died.

I was 16 when she died. A local Buddhist pagoda helped Chailai and me with her funeral and burning her body as they knew that we did not have money to pay them. I had not finished my education, so I had no qualifications that could help me to get a job in an office. As well as that, my looks meant that shops or offices would not hire me because they always wanted pretty girls to deal with customers, so I had no option but to continue working in the clothes stall. At least I had experience of how to manage the business of selling clothes because of helping my mother when she was alive. So my life continued as a daily struggle of hoping that I could make enough money to pay my rent, buy food and try to save a little in case I had some emergency. Life is not easy for us poor people.

That was when I met Lamon. He was a short man who was about 50 years old, and I could often smell alcohol when he was close to me. He also smoked and the smell of smoke mixed with alcohol made his breath smell bad. He even sweated those bad smells so his clothes were stinking as I think he didn’t bathe often or wash his clothes. He lived alone after his wife left him probably because of how he treated her. He worked as a general helper for the wholesaler that I bought my clothes from, and that is how I met him. When I visited the warehouse he would spend time chatting to me. As I’m ugly, at first I could not understand why he would talk to me, but it made me feel good that a man would take an interest in me even if he was old enough to be my father, and in spite of how he smelled. Sometimes he came to my stall and chatted to me there or even helped me with customers and that made me feel good also. Then he began to bring me food from one of the street stalls nearby, which I was very grateful for because it saved me money, and at last he asked me to marry him.