Cake: The Sacrificial Lamb

Cake is 19 years old, she currently works at a hotel but she hangs out at the bars every night, making friends with bargirls, flirting with foreigners. She left her hill tribe to find work when she was only 14. Her English is well enough that she could obtain an ok job, but compared to what the bargirls make, which usually is a foreign husband after a year or two, she makes little. She mimics the moves they make; she befriends them to learn their ways. Within the year, she will quit her job and work at the bar. A foreign man is dollar signs, a source of income far greater than what she will make in her lifetime in Thailand.

Cake clung onto me, literally, following us to each place we went, chatting up a storm about this guy or that guy she met. How she didn’t sleep last night because she was busy getting ready for a date with a foreigner that she met and then he never showed up. You could try to tell her that these foreign men that come to Thailand are pigs but all she sees is money.

I learned a lot on these night visits with the bargirls and ladyboys, not only from them, but also from a Christian woman who opened up a massage parlor on this street. Unlike the other massage parlors, hers is closed at night. She spends every day with these women and let us in on a little insight. The majority of these bargirls are not there by choice, but were sent away by their families. I knew that women in Northern Thailand, Burma, Laos and Cambodia are considered less and will often be sold in order to purchase things like a television, or a water heater. But the girls on this street were different. They were sent away from their villages at a young age because their family could no longer afford the “free” education and they needed money. It is known in most families that one must be sacrificed for the other to flourish. The girls here are the sacrificial lambs. They come to find work, starting in dishwashing, laundry service, housemaids and waitressing. In this they can earn at most $120-$200 USD a month, which is three times as they would make in their poor village. Some get kidnapped right away in their timidness of the city and sold to illegal brothels, others get tricked into it, and the rest tend to find meager work. In their new jobs they encounter bargirls. These bargirls have beautiful hair, fashionable clothing, and made up faces. They have money. The constant demand from their families back home to send money sends these girls like Cake into the glamorized world with the dark underbelly. Cake see’s the money the girls flash around, she sees their beautiful accessories, and the attention they get from men, she gets calls from home demanding more money so that her family can “save face” in the village. (In Thailand, it is more important to save face and have better things than everyone else, than it is to be moral or righteous). Girls like Cake are doomed from the start.