Rare insight into the life of a trafficker in human misery

We’ve all seen those classic horror movies where someone in the group suggests splitting up to save time in exploring the haunted house or monster’s lair and there’s a collective sigh of “no, don’t go in there” or “don’t split up” or even “don’t leave the gun in that supposedly dead guy’s hand”.

In The Trader of Saigon the monsters are the men who trade in people. They are the businessmen who barter using real women and who rate a person’s worth by calculating whether she can be sold as a drugs mule; or a prostitute to an endless stream of tourists and sailors; or whether she’ll serve as a ‘wife’ to a rich man who wants to use the same prostitute until she’s no longer attractive to him and he can upgrade to the next teenage girl.

You’ll find yourself silently urging teenage girl, Hanh, to “carry on collecting fees at that filthy latrine toilet in Vietnam” and “not to get too ambitious or brave” or even “avoid getting involved with that kindly, rich man who says he only wants to help you”.

But the reader has to actually think like a trafficker for a bit here and come to the same realisation they have — there are plenty more girls.

Willing Hanh to work her way out of her predicament only means the traders will replace her with the next innocent girl. And we’re even shown who that ‘next girl’ is when we see the naïve gambler Phuc reckon he can solve all his problems with one big win. So sure is he that he can beat the house, he ends up offering his beloved daughter Kieu as forfeit in a game against a local smuggler.

The frustration and anger you might feel for Phuc is largely wiped away when you see how much anguish his foolishness causes himself. He opts for a heart-stopping double-or-nothing scenario reminiscent of folk-tales where the clever rabbit goes up against the wily fox.

Cruickshanks does an excellent job of personalising the blurred line between centuries of arranged marriages, a profitable matchmaking industry and trafficking.

The disastrous consequences of falling even one step down the economic ladder when you live in grinding poverty is really clear in her description of life for people struggling to survive in a country shattered by war and carved up by the corrupt and elite when the economy collapsed.

In keeping with the grim realism throughout the book, she offers no easy solutions to a reprehensible situation fuelled by gender inequality and rampant corruption.

This her first novel and her next will be set in Burma. One to watch out for.