The Rent Collector

Lucky Fat bursts into Sang’s home and asks for her help with his friend, who is bleeding. When Sang arrives at Lucky Fat’s home, she discovers a beautiful young girl, “eleven or twelve at most” (76), named Maly. However, Maly is not injured but has begun menstruating. Sang explains to Maly that she is “experiencing what is called rodow, meaning season,” which is “a moment to celebrate in a girl’s life, not to fear” (78). However, Maly and Lucky Fat explain that now that Maly is “a woman,” her brother, who has joined one of the gangs of Stung Meanchey, will take her “to the city’s red-light district and […] [sell her] to a brothel as a child prostitute” (78).

Although there have always been troublesome gangs at the dump, consisting of orphaned and abandoned adolescent boys, the “gangs [are now] […] more aggressive, more brazen, and nearly deadly” (80). The increasing violence leads to Ki’s insistence that the residents must do something about the gangs, but as Sang ironically notes, this is the very reason that most people do not want to be involved. She explains that in the 1970s, during the Khmer Rouge revolution, many Cambodian citizens “were slaughtered by the vicious dictator Pol Pot and his government,” which has produced “an entire generation of children who have been taught that to stay alive in the world, it’s best to lie low, mind your own business, and let others do the fighting” (80).