Buying dumplings in a cheap and empty Chinese
restaurant on a Sunday in the rain. White tiled walls and a dirty fish
tank, the boss asleep on a
table, outside 3 street kids share a bag of glue and huddle close to the
window out of the rain.
Three Vietnamese girls, sandwiched onto the back of a motorbike. All identical with badly worn, stonewashed jeans and long black hair and Britney Spears T-shirts, returning from Martini’s, the infamous local disco and hooker hangout where hundreds of pretty girls compete for custom, where literally thousands and thousands start the long bitter road that is the life of a Taxi girl. Not a good night for business. Back to the 15 dollar a month wooden shed they call home. And tomorrow night back to the bar, the pool table, their friends and sex with men.
Driving down st 63 on Wednesday evening , a girl calls my name and I stop and turn around, she’s a local hooker I’ve seen around the bars for years. She looks terrible, “Do I look thin” she asks “I got AIDS” she says matter-of-factly, a little girl playing around her skirt, "they won’t let me in to the bars anymore, do you have a dollar?”
Going to work , teaching at a Chinese photo shop I’m confronted by tears and sobbing. “No class today, next week, next week", The woman’s husband just got shot and killed for his car. The next week, back to class, smiles and jokes, life back to normal.
A young woman is driving home from work early one evening , a gun is pushed into her stomach. She screams and he shoots, blood and guts and pain. He tries to steal the bike, a mob appears and he’s dragged into the road and beaten to death. The police stand and watch.
A baby lying in bushes at the side of the road, we pick her up and see that she’s alive. Alive but malformed, no eyes, a hole where her face should be, we take her to Kantha Bopha children's hospital. A French nurse is called. She says she knows the child’ “Her grandmother collected her yesterday, congenital deformity, probably syphilis” On the way out someone asks us for money.
A fight, a brawl in the street, someone throws a hand grenade, a piece of shrapnel goes through a door a beautiful young woman loses her life, a child will never know his mother, a husband loses his wife, and carries a broken heart forever.
