Dance For Me
By Tiffini Johnson
The story of Maelea is a fictional account of an 11 year-old Cambodian girl and her poverty stricken family living along a remote region of the Mekong River. It opens with her letter to her father, Eu. It has been two years since Maelea left her home and the letter rings of happy memories.
The novel then moves to Maelea telling the story of the horror she has lived during that two-year period. She takes us into her family’s life in a thatched hut with bamboo-woven mats for a floor, and hanging blankets are the only room dividers. And it is where the life of subsistence farmers depends on the whims of the Mekong, and where a meal consists of a spoonful of rice for three people. It is a place where hunger leads to worry, and “worry steals things,” things like sleep and fun. To bring joy, Maelea will dance like a dervish, whirling with arms it the air until she falls to the floor exhausted, to the cheers and laughter of her sister, mother, and father.
Maelea’s life takes a change when her sister, Srey, comes down with Dengue fever. It will require a doctor to save her and that will require money, money the family does not have. To save his youngest daughter, Eu’s oldest daughter must become an indentured servant. In Cambodia, for a young girl, that means a sex slave.
She is told she will be taken to a school, and for Maelea, the word means paradise. Upon arriving in Phnom Penh she is thrown into a dark underground dungeon and soon learns disobedience results in extreme pain. But her most hurtful experience is the realization that she has been sold and is now “waiting to be picked like her father picks sheep.”
Author Tiffini Johnson raises the curtain on the horror and brutality to children forced into brothels. While her words are delicate and compassionate and the scenes not explicit, it is very clear what is happening to Maelea at the hands of brutal men who pay for an hour to use her. But the real brutality rests with the brothel owners, for whom torture is a means of control and a way of life.
This is an important book. While the character, Maelea, is fictional, the scenes portrayed are real for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys throughout the world. We tend to think this is a problem of third world countries, but we would be fooling ourselves. It occurs, but is well hidden, in developed countries as well. How many weeks go by without a news account of an arrest in your city for child abuse or child pornography? Ms. Johnson’s novel is but one soldier in the crusade to end the nightmare.
The novel contains a Book Club Guide that offers the reader thought provoking questions appropriate for group discussion.
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