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Almost as soon as I’d flipped an entire country two birds, a twelve year old girl in the seat beside me struck up a conversation. I hoped my rude gesture hadn’t been seen by her.
She was drawing a picture of the elephant she had ridden while at Angkor Wat, the very place I was trying to get to.
“What did you do while you were in Cambodia?”
I laughed at the irony of it all. What a darling. I told her I spent most of my vacation in a hotel room, which wasn’t that far from the truth. I saved her the other details. She told me about her family and the elephant rides at Angkor Wat. They'd had a lovely time. I drank more beer and found myself getting a bit drunk in front of her. I didn’t care. Maybe it was the thought of how much she’d be worth on Poipet’s black market that made me keep drinking. It was a terrible thought, and one sadly based on a harsh reality I had just witnessed first-hand. I thought about the girls just like her who work every day in Poipet’s casinos and child brothels. Girls like her are sold into slavery and disappear from the world we know forever. What has kept her from being one of them? A rich family that can afford business class tickets to Singapore. That’s about it.
The girl was bright and spunky, and I helped her with her homework as the plane headed toward Da Nang. It was a surreal encounter, to say the least, coming off such a misadventure, but I had fun with it. She made me kind of regret missing my chance to go to Angkor Wat. I wish I could’ve seen those ruins, and even had an elephant ride or two.
When we landed in Da Nang, the girl's mother struck up a conversation with me herself. I suppose she wanted to make sure I wasn’t some seedy child sex tourist hoping for one more round of fun before heading back home. She asked me what I was doing in Cambodia, and I told her as little as possible. She told me about their family’s lives in Singapore since they’d emigrated there from the US several years ago. She told me Singapore was one of the safest places on the planet. I breathed a sigh of relief. That would be quite the welcome respite from where I’d been.
The mother seemed particularly proud of Singapore’s death sentence on anyone caught smuggling drugs into the country. That got my attention. However unfounded it might be, my paranoia was at an all time high at this point. Normally I stowed my backpack on the plane as carry on, but I had put it in baggage check because I didn’t want security at Siem Riep tampering with it at the metal detectors. It was a lose-lose situation no matter how you sliced it, and for all I knew, a baggage handler at the airport had stuffed dope in it as a final “farewell fuck you.” I cringed in my seat. I hadn’t smoked any pot, but paranoia was getting the best of me.
We landed in Singapore. I slowly, hesitantly approached baggage check and claimed my backpack. No SWAT teams descended upon me. It was here that, for the first time, I really felt safe. It was over.
I approached the American-Singaporean family and told them the real story. I needed to tell someone, someone I felt I could reasonably trust. They took pity on me and gave me two hundred dollars in Singaporean cash and helped me find a cheap hotel for the night. They were absolutely the most wonderful people I had met on any of my journeys, and I will always be thankful to them for their compassion and humanity. And I will always remember their lovely young daughter. She was so bright and fearless, talking to a stranger like me. I hope to god she never ends up in a place like Poipet.
The cheap hotel ended up being actually a short-stay prostitution hotel, but I didn’t mind. Apparently prostitution is legal in Singapore, but I just didn’t have it in me to sample the local culture. I couldn’t take the two hundred dollars bestowed upon me in sympathy and spend it on a scaled-down sex tour. That just didn’t seem right.
Not only that, but my eyes had been opened to the fact that some of these women might not actually want to be prostitutes. Not that all of them are raped and beaten like the girls trafficked through Poipet, but certainly these girls had dreams as children that didn't involve servicing men for money. Maybe some enjoy it, it’s certainly possible. I’ve been with plenty of women who enjoy sex, and I do believe someone can be a sex worker and find it fulfilling. But it just wasn’t worth the karma for me, good or bad.
I tried to enjoy Singapore. It’s beautiful, clean, and...supposedly safe. I met a wonderful young American actress at the Embassy when I filed my report and claimed asylum. She gave me fifty bucks and bought me a cappuccino at Starbucks. So far I had made several friends and over two hundred and fifty dollars since I landed in the country—not bad for a refugee. I even ventured to the Sands Casino for some entertainment while I pondered what my next moves were. Would I go back to the states and call it quits? Had I found what I was looking for?
My credit card failed me again, and I was only able to use what leftover cash I had. I bet on one game of roulette and won, and was promptly chased out by security for not wearing suitable attire.
I'm not sure what it was that made them dislike me. Part of me wonders if the Singaporean secret police had been watching me the whole time and just wanted me out of their country the moment I walked in. I had claimed refugee status, after all, at the American Embassy on my first day there. For those who know Singapore, you know the last thing they want in their country is a refugee. It’s like being a homeless beggar on Rodeo drive. They just don’t want that in their country. Wait a sec – Singapore isn’t a country. It’s a business.
Actually they call it a “benevolent dictatorship,” but there’s never been anything benevolent about dictatorships. Singapore has all the semblance of what civilization looks like to a Westerner—paved roads, shopping malls, Starbucks. Underneath it all, though, is the harsh reality that at any time, if the government doesn’t like you, they can end you. I stopped feeling right at home pretty quickly.
I could’ve sworn I was being followed. Again, my paranoia had never been more acute than it was coming off my one night in Poipet. The run-in with the casino security did me in. They didn’t want me in Singapore, and they let me know it.
It finally dawned on me. I was done. It was time to go home. A great Hong Kong friend of mine and former Microsoft employee, Ronit, wired me 700 dollars for a plane ride back to the states. I’m forever grateful to her for her much needed generosity.
