Word: tippings
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...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...
...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...
...numbers are wrenching, but to comprehend the problem, one need only watch the sordid hour-by-hour lives of girls like Lek and Tip. As we talked with them over a few days, our sense of being impartial observers gave way to a feeling of being uncomfortable voyeurs and then grew to a gnawing sense that just by watching the children's degradation we were somehow implicated. I'm not sure at what point we decided that, although we couldn't guarantee their futures, we could buy their freedom. We could help them escape...
...come and arrest me. They held me there with only bread and water for three days. After that I was too afraid to run away. Mama San knows people everywhere, on both sides of the border. She could arrange for me to be taken back to her anytime. Tip knew this: she told...
...Although Lek and Tip have been in Mae Sai for only a few months when we meet them, they have already learned to hide their inner thoughts. "We don't have feelings anymore," says Tip. "We cleared them out." But they can still dream of freedom, can still tell us they want out. They talk about how hard they would hug their mothers if they ever get home, so tightly no one could ever separate them again. "My mother would be really upset if she knew what I was doing and I desperately want to tell her," says...