Nothing much ever happens in Jinghong, the small town in China`s southern Yunnan province, near the Burmese border, where Zhang and Xiao grew up.
The main entertainment for schoolgirls is twice-weekly gymnastic classes. Both Xiao, 16, and Zhang, 14, excelled on the balance bar.
That saved their lives.
Shortly after 2 a.m. last Sept. 8, they climbed out a fifth-floor window of the Wang Hong (Gold Palace) Hotel in downtown Bangkok and walked, tightrope-fashion, across a bamboo pole to the building next door.
Their acrobatic escape after four weeks of life in a brothel not only ended their own odyssey from southern China to the flesh pots of Bangkok, it also helped to bare a new chapter-the ”Chinese Connection”-in the sordid history of slave trading in Asia.
Xiao and Zhang provided police their first concrete evidence that a network of slave traders is smuggling thousands of young girls and women from southern China and Burma to brothels in Thailand.
Some, like Xiao and Zhang, had no thought of leaving home; they simply were kidnapped. Most, however, had been promised lucrative jobs as housemaids, factory workers and skilled laborers in Thailand.
Bangkok`s deputy police chief, Col. Banya Charuchareet, heads a nine-member crime suppression division that has rescued 534 sex slaves since its formation only six months ago.
He said that more and more affluent customers, enriched by Thailand`s economic boom, are prepared to pay high prices for ”fresher products,” those less likely to be tainted with the AIDS virus.
Thailand tries hard to live down its image as the world`s greatest sex haven, but even government ministers are forced to admit that the sex industry-with an estimated 2 million to 3 million prostitutes, a third of them children-ranks among the country`s main money makers.
Bangkok`s Patpong district has been known around the world for years as a red-light area where any variety of sexual activity is available for the customer willing to pay. Pattaya Beach, a two-hour drive north, is another one.
What is less well known is the rampant disease that has become a common feature in these areas.
Recent official estimates have conceded that 200,000 prostitutes in Thailand may be HIV positive. Social workers and medical officials believe the true figure is more like 500,000.
Charuchareet said the new demand has spawned kidnap gangs that depend more and more on a knockout drop police call ”Up-Johnny 27” that is hard to detect in a glass of wine or a cup of coffee.
Thailand`s press carries accounts every week of young women who took an innocent walk in the park or through a department store where they were befriended by a woman or man, had a drink and woke up bruised and aching in a motel room a day or two later. Most women, including tourists, are too ashamed to denounce their ordeal.
Thai Cabinet minister Saisuree Chutikul, a stubborn anti-slavery crusader, attributed the importation of foreign women to inflation in the sex industry.
”Thai women are no longer willing to work for as little as $1.50 a trick in provincial brothels where they cater to fishermen and contract workers out on a binge,” she said.
The story of the abduction of Xiao and Zhang is one of helpless gullibility in the face of carefully organized brutality.
One day last May, a neighbor`s friend-a boy from a nearby town-tickled their imagination by suggesting a two-day excursion away from Jinghong and across the virtually open border into Burma.
At the border, he introduced the teenagers to a middle-aged Burmese couple and identified them as his relatives. They promised to take the girls sightseeing.
”The couple took us to Chin Tung, and we slept in their house,” Xiao recalled. ”The next morning, two boys on motorbikes came to take us for a ride. I noticed the boys gave our hosts a bundle of money, but it never occurred to me anything was wrong. We were too excited about riding on a motorbike.”
Thus began an odyssey of a week through Burma during which the pair-now captives-slept in the forest ”to avoid checkpoints by the army,” were handed over to three different sets of motorbike riders and were stopped by a suspicious Burmese army patrol but released after one man showed the soldiers a set of obviously forged documents.
Money changed hands each time. The young women were being sold to different slave traders.
”The boys said they could take us all the way into Thailand,” Zhang said. ”We realized something was wrong, but where could we run in a strange country and without documents?”
The trip ended in Mae Sai, just inside the Burmese-Thai border, which is open to citizens of both countries for a day`s business.
For two weeks, Xiao and Zhang lived in a house owned by a regional police sergeant named Supot Kongdee. He is now in jail on charges of purchasing young girls for 10,000 baht ($400) from Burmese agents who run a relay slave track from Yunnan to Thailand.
”Each day more Chinese girls turned up until there were 15,” Xiao recounted. ”It was then, I guess, that we realized something was very, very wrong.”
One day in June, all the women were ordered into a van and driven day and night to Bangkok. Xiao and Zhang say they were bought by the Wang Hong Hotel. They have no idea what happened to the others.
The summer was a nightmare. Xiao said she bled so badly after the ”first night” that she could not attend clients for days. Both were frightened by the thought that if they rebelled, they would be sold to the even worse sex dens of southern Thailand.
But they decided to escape anyhow, and on the night of Sept. 8, they found a bamboo pole and stretched it from their window to the building next door.
As they tiptoed to freedom five floors above the ground, other Chinese women watched but didn`t have the courage to follow. They were freed the next day after Xiao and Zhang informed the police.
Some fugitives have not been as lucky as Xiao and Zhang.
Kanitha Wichiencharoen, 72, looked after scores of runaways brought by compassionate taxi drivers, police and social action groups to her shelter and clinic near Bangkok Airport.
Among the runaways, she said, were 27 young women from Colombia whose Thai pimps advertised their ”exotic” charms in leaflets circulated all over town.
Wichiencharoen, a legendary figure in Thailand, says the demand in the sex industry has become so great over the past 2 to 3 years that young women and men are being recruited in ever-growing numbers, especially from the primitive hill tribes in northeastern Thailand.
”Their only hope of escape is to run away or smuggle out a letter for help through a kindhearted client,” she said. ”In Thailand today we have 12- year-old prostitutes with AIDS.”
Among the victims she remembers are Nakorn Pathom, 17, and Ah-Saw, 16, who jumped from the second-floor window of a Bangkok brothel after being locked up for three years.
Pathom broke her spine. Ah-Saw, a sturdy Akha tribe women, ignored a broken ankle and dragged her virtually paralyzed companion for a half-mile until she found a taxi driver who took them to Wichiencharoen`s clinic.
Chutikul, the government minister, estimates that 6 million Thai men visit a brothel at least once a month. She said a sex mafia consisting of police, senior officials, proprietors and procurers work together.
”Perhaps it would be best to decriminalize prostitution,” she said.
”Then at least the police would get nothing from the protection racket.”
———-
NEXT: Young women exported to Japan.
