‘I was screaming for help’: sold as brides in China, few Cambodian women escape their fate

Dozens of Cambodian women and girls are taken to China each year, where they are forced to marry local men. Only the lucky ones manage to escape

Reading Time:11 minutes

Kunthea is one of hundreds of Cambodian women and girls duped and trafficked to China each year, where they are forced to marry local men. Photo: Cindy Liu

Published: 8:15am, 21 Aug 2022Updated: 9:00am, 21 Aug 2022

As the January sun sets over verdant rice fields somewhere in Cambodia’s western Pursat province, Kunthea’s two-year-old clamours onto her lap. Sitting on a daybed, clad in a black and orange tie-dye T-shirt, she is quietly savouring a moment with one of her two children.

They are the reasons, after divorcing her first husband in 2020, she picked up a job at a toy factory in central Cambodia, even though that meant leaving her children in her cousin’s care halfway across the country.

But as the economic slowdown spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Kunthea’s already meagre salary was slashed in half. This left the single mother was earning just US$120 per month working 12-hour shifts daily, barely enough to sustain her family.

So when in October 2020 a fellow factory worker told her she could be making US$1,100 a month doing similar work in China, Kunthea didn’t hesitate. “I have two children to raise so it’s very hard for me,” she says. “When I heard that I would earn a high salary I just wanted to go without thinking.”

Kunthea was sold to a balding Chinese man in eastern Jiangxi province. Duped by traffickers offering lucrative jobs, hundreds of Cambodian women and girls are trafficked to China each year. Photo: Cindy Liu

She was given US$200 by the woman and an address in the capital, Phnom Penh, from where she was to travel to China that November. After two days of waiting around in a broker’s house with a dozen other women, the group was told to hop on a bus.

The journey lasted about one week with stopovers, driving through Cambodia and Vietnam towards the Chinese border. Once they had crossed into China, the women were split into groups of four and put into taxis.