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Prostitution is illegal in most of Southeast Asia, but there's a big ol' set of quotation marks around the word. Thailand and Vietnam are especially notorious as destinations for sex tourists. And since Cracked has developed a habit of interviewing prostitutes over the last year for totally official reasons and not at all because we need somebody to hold us while we cry, we decided to speak with Diem Phu Nu. Diem was a Ho Chi Minh City moped prostitute. A moped is the third most hilarious vehicle for a prostitute to use, behind a jetpack and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
Nghia Pham. For poorer women like me, prostitution is seen as a fairly acceptable way to get income. I started when I was 15, not because we were starving and needed groceries although I did help them out on expenses -- I simply wanted some spending money, and part-time prostitution was a way to get it.
I had a lot of English-speaking clients who wanted to take me to dinner as part of the escort experience, so I got free meals, too. It may seem tragic to you, but I was OK with it, and so was my family. The street caller who got clients for me was a family friend, and he looked out for me. An unexpected fringe benefit: Many of my clients were talkers, and that wound up helping me out a lot in school.
I got top grades in English thanks to all the practice I got with clients. You can study quietly in a library, or you can study while having sex and getting paid for it. Seemed like a better deal to me. It's really only tourists who look down on us for it. One white woman passed me and an older guy holding hands in the street once and told us that "we should be ashamed of ourselves. I certainly didn't feel ashamed or abused while hooking; I felt like I was 62 percent of the way to a bitchin' scooter.
