She was halfheartedly helping out in her parents' grocery store in Bangkok, daydreaming of an office job that would let her wear pretty clothes, when evil entered her life in the form of a man who made her an irresistible offer: He would arrange her passage to the United States and a job as a bar hostess, he said, and it wouldn't cost her a cent, because her future employer would pay his commission.
Within days, the year-old Thai woman, who asked that she be identified only by her nickname, Na, was in New York. In New York, and caught in a nightmare of sexual slavery, an ordeal so hideous that even months later, as she described it in the downtown Manhattan office of the immigration agents who helped save her, her head drooped in shame, and she doodled unconsciously right on the Government tabletop.
Almost as soon as Na arrived last September, she was informed of the real, Faustian terms of her passage to New York. To pay off the people who had bought her ticket and arranged her visa, she was expected to have sex with more than men. She would be held captive behind the locked doors of a Chinatown brothel where, she later learned, the Thai women were known by numbers instead of names, bars covered the windows and buzzer-operated gates controlled the doors.
She would not be allowed to leave the building until she had worked off her debt. I am there; I can't do anything. I'm in their hands.
The United States is not the usual destination for international traffickers in human flesh, who mostly feed on the thriving sex industries in Thailand, the Philippines, Japan and India. But experts say the scale of the operation that used Na -- a brothel at Bowery housing more than 30 smuggled Thai women -- indicates that thousands of Asians could be engaged in forced prostitution in America.
