Little more than two years ago, there wasn’t a single recorded case of women trafficked from Cambodia to China to marry. Now, there are more than 150 — and experts expect that number to soar. BuzzFeed News’ Jina Moore reports from Cambodia.
Khai Sochoeun looks out over one of the rice paddies she and her father farm about an hour from Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital.
Jina Moore for BuzzFeed News
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Khai Sochoeun went willingly, above all, because she wanted a job. The two women who brokered the deal — who pushed the paperwork, bought the plane tickets, and arranged the airport pickup on the other side — also mentioned marriage. Chinese husbands are rich, they told her. A good Chinese husband can mean good fortune for a poor Cambodian family like hers.
If a husband came, so be it, but it was the work she was interested in. She was 29, and she'd spent most of her life as a day laborer, with her father and her seven siblings, on the rice paddies that surround her house, more than an hour from the Cambodian capital. They seeded and replanted young rice shoots and plucked ripened grains, under sun that's either hot or unbearable, depending on the season. But Khai had seen Chinese soap operas, and she knew there was better work in a world not too far away — long hours, probably, and maybe tedious, but in tall office buildings with elevators and air conditioners and rich, maybe even kind, bosses.
"When I watch TV, they never show farmers in rice paddies. They just have men in big businesses, running companies," Khai said, sitting on a bamboo mat at her home.
So she was shocked, after an overnight drive from the Baiyun Guangzhou airport in southern China, to find herself surrounded by rice fields. (Khai had no idea at any point during her experience where exactly in China she was, but the airport name is marked in the entry and exit stamps in her passport and were translated by BuzzFeed News.)
"It was just like home — and very remote, even more remote than my home," she told BuzzFeed News. "I felt confused. I felt very disappointed. I thought I would be in a beautiful city, with plenty of jobs with high wages, plenty of rich husbands.
"The reality was, they were just poor farmers, like Cambodians," she said.
Khai is one of many single, mostly young Cambodian women who have been trafficked to China as brides since 2013. Thanks to China's infamous one-child policy, experts say, there are more single men than women in the country, and as those men age, they seek marriageable women.
For years, traffickers met that demand with women from Vietnam. But Vietnam has recently tightened its marriage rules and waged an information campaign to combat the problem. For traffickers, Cambodia has emerged as an attractive alternative. With fewer regulations and no awareness among Cambodian women about the risks, business has been easy. The going rate for a foreign bride is between $10,000 and $15,000, though the prettier you are judged, the more money traffickers can charge.
"If she's a beautiful lady, young with white skin, they can charge the Chinese man around $20,000," said Chhan Sokunthea, who heads the women's and children's section of the local human rights and legal aid organization ADHOC (the acronym stands for Cambodian Rights and Development Association). "If she's not a beauty, less," she said. "The broker … sells her like a pig or a duck."
In 2013, Cambodian rights organizations, including ADHOC, received the first complaints from women like Khai, kept as domestic slaves in their husbands' homes, separated from their passports, and forced to marry. In 2014, those numbers soared, and three local organizations handle complaints, often filed by family members, for more than 150 women stuck in China, some of them (a minority) forced to work in brothels or "service" the friends of their husbands.
Road in rural Guangdong Province, the province in southern China where Khai ended up.
David Woo/Creative Commons / Via Flickr: mckln
When Khai agreed to move to China, at her uncle's suggestion, she didn't do it on a whim. She listened to a popular independent radio station called Beehive, where women who had had bad experiences in China told their stories. But she also sat face-to-face with women in her uncle's village, women who had gone to China and come back. "I didn't take a risk without getting information," she said.
The women who'd returned insisted, "'China's great.' They told me, 'If you don't like the men, you can ask to come back.' So I decided, if I don't take a risk, I won't get any benefit," she said.
"It's not just me," she continued. "Other girls from poor families, when they hear about good jobs or husbands, they think about it seriously." Young Cambodian women have few high-wage job prospects, but they face tremendous pressure to contribute financially to their families. Roughly 40% of Cambodians live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank's most recent country estimate.
And it's often a family member that suggests moving to China to fulfill those pressures. In Khai's case, her uncle brought up China after she sought his advice on finding better-paying work. She wasn't interested, she said, but "he kept lobbying me. 'If you want to marry a Chinese man, you would be a good woman because you can send money home to your family,'" he told her. When she relented, he introduced Khai to her traffickers.
Khai doesn't know if money changed hands between them, and she kept her decision a secret from the rest of her family until mere hours before her departure for the airport. "My father," she said, "was so angry."
The United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP) says it's common for the traffickers, who rely on networks of trust to win recruits, to pay the family member who introduces the idea.
Khai only knew her traffickers as Yeay Soeung (meaning "Grandma Soeung," a prefix showing respect for elders) and Ming Mao ("Auntie Mao"). But she said she felt more at ease because they were Cambodian women. "If they were men, I would not have any trust in him. Girls trust women. That's why they use women as ringleaders."
The Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, known by the acronym LICADHO, says in the cases it handles, women are most often the "brokers" who convince potential victims to make the move. Men, meanwhile, grease the bureaucratic wheels needed to get the proper paperwork, especially the passport. That document usually costs $135 and takes a month, according to the Cambodian government. But if you top it up by paying a bribe, things can more faster. "For $800 or $1,000, you can get it very quickly," said Sem Chausok, who runs the anti-trafficking program at LICADHO.
Khai doesn't know how much her traffickers paid for her passport, but she said only a week elapsed between her first meeting with them and the June 8, 2013, issue date of her passport. Two weeks later, she incurred the wrath of her father by deciding to leave over his objections, and she bid a tearful good-bye to her sister at the Phnom Penh Airport, more than an hour away.
At the airport in China, she and two other women, both younger than her, waved a Cambodian flag to identify themselves to their next set of traffickers, four Chinese men and a Cambodian woman, whom Khai called "the ringleader." After an overnight drive to what felt to Khai like the middle of nowhere, they were kept in the woman's house. "We belonged to the ringleader," she said, "so we stayed at the ringleader's house." They relaxed for a day, and then they were told to primp and come downstairs, where Khai found a man and five or six of his female relatives.
"I thought they were visitors," she said. "I didn't know they were picking out a girl to marry." But then the ringleader lined them up, and she realized what was happening. "The two other girls looked prettier than me, so they were chosen right away."
As other men visited, Khai resisted. She wanted a job, she says, not a marriage. But her tourist visa was only good for 45 days, and the ringleader held her passport. "She told me I had to marry the next man who came, or she would abandon me on the street, and I would have nothing to prove I was there legally."
Khai also didn't speak the language, so she would have been helpless to find and explain her situation to the Chinese authorities. She didn't know where she was, or how to find the Cambodian embassy. And she didn't have the $3,000 the ringleader demanded when Khai said she wanted to go home.
Still she refused and begged to be sent home. She thought she'd made the ringleader crack at one point, but the four Chinese male traffickers hardened their stance. Khai counted the days left on her visa and then, finally, "forced myself to agree."
