Mama San won't budge from $1,000. There's the food, the clothes, the makeup, the perfume and the condoms, not to mention the fees of the middlemen. At $1,000, she's making nothing, she says. She taps out the figure in baht on a calculator and holds it up: 43,650. You won't get a pair of 14-year-old Burmese girls for less in this town.
"Thirty thousand," I suggest.
"Forty-three," counters Mama San. She tells Tip (whose name means "heavenly light") and Lek (meaning "small") to fetch their chips. The two tiny figures squatting at her feet jump up, dart under the two pink strips that provide the only light in the bar, run upstairs and return breathlessly clutching gambling counters. "What the customers paid," explains Mama San. In the three months since she was brought to this backstreet brothel in the northern Thai town of Mae Sai, Lek has collected eight white chips and four blues — a total of $59.50. Tip has done better: 20 whites, 10 blues and four reds make $163. "Not a bad little earner," says Mama San.
"Thirty-five thousand?" I venture.
With her scarlet fingernails, Mama San pinches her plunging black V-neck sweater by the shoulder pads, hitches up her matronly bosom and smooths the sweater over her belly. "Forty-two thousand, five hundred, and I'll be losing money," she sighs. "I sent 5,000 home to Lek's parents and 10,000 to Tip's." Conveniently ignoring the silver Mercedes parked in the forecourt outside, she repeats she makes nothing from prostitution. She's in it because she cares. She takes the girls in, puts a roof over their heads. "What can I do? I feel sorry for them. Somebody has to protect them."
Tip, like many of the girls in Mae Sai, is from Kentung in Burma's eastern Shan state. Mama San is also from the Shan region and grew up with some of the girls' mothers. As a 20-year Mae Sai resident who graduated from working the brothels to owning one, she is regarded as a success and a valuable contact on the other, richer side of the border. It's a responsibility, she says. Her conscience won't let the two girls go for anything less than 41,500.
"Forty-one thousand?"
Done. We shake hands.
On the floor where they have been listening in wide-eyed silence, Tip and Lek embrace. Lek claps, hoarsely barks something in slang at the 15 other girls lined up on a bench in front of the bar and runs, shrieking and giggling into the street, with her waist-length black hair trailing. The teenagers ignore her, locked into a Thai adventure-romance on the television overhead. For a moment, Tip stays where she is, her childlike hands clasped in front, bony elbows between her knees. Then she shuffles over to join the row of moon faces turned up toward the screen. She and Lek have been sold. Again.
This time to Jonathan, the photographer working on this story, and me.
Fifteen minutes later, facing an unknown future with just a pink plastic basket holding a few clothes and a bottle of shampoo, Lek starts to cry. Suddenly sensing a need to do everything properly, she runs into the bar, kneels in front of Mama San and begins to bow and chant, a good Buddhist girl in smudged makeup giving thanks for her freedom. Mama San laughs, flattered by the display of supplication. She isn't worried about finding replacements. "Their mothers or the middlemen bring them to me," she says. "There are always fresh ones."
Mama San is right: there is no shortage of kids for sale. Across Asia, tens of thousands of children are peddled into slavery each year. Some toil with their families as bonded laborers on farms. Others are sold by their parents — or tricked by agents — into servitude as camel jockeys, fisher boys or beggars. In Burma, some are kidnapped by the state and forced to become soldiers. And, according to the International Labor Organization, at least 1 million children are prostitutes, with the greatest numbers in Thailand, India, Taiwan and the Philippines. It's a growing problem, fueled by the Asian economic boom and the subsequent bust, which has fostered an increasingly yawning gap between rich and poor, countryside and city, isolated hinterlands and wealthy coasts. On the continent, alongside the millionaires of Bangkok and Hong Kong, live two-thirds of the world's extreme poor — 790 million people earning less than $1 a day. In the race to escape their deprivation, whole villages are sometimes complicit in the sale of their children. The procurers, says Sompop Jantraka, a leading Thai activist who has saved thousands of girls from being sold into brothels, might be the wives of village heads. Teachers know which children are vulnerable, and some alert procurers for a fee. He has seen pickup trucks full of girls sold to brothels leaving from schools in what is called tok keow, or the green harvest. A police officer is often at the wheel. "This is a war," Sompop says. "A war for our children."