Novel reveals terrible world of child sex trafficking in Asia
Book based on author’s work in freeing victims, Tiffany Crawford writes.
There’s a truly horrifying scene in R. Bruce Logan’s debut novel, Finding Lien, where two girls, who have no idea they had been sold into the sex tourist trade in Cambodia, are forced to watch a child perform oral sex on a client as education for their new roles.
It was almost enough to put the book down to avoid nausea. But Logan is deft at keeping the description of this nasty business concise, so the reader won’t feel overwhelmed with gratuitous details of kids, all under the age of 15, being raped by old white men in this seedy Asian underworld.
For instance, Lien, the young girl in the story, chronicles the thrashings the children receive from their pimps, who shock them with cattle prods to avoid marks on the skin if they don’t acquiesce to customer demands, but he doesn’t have her describe the agony in detail.
Lien’s narrative is subtle, and the reader can extrapolate that these innocent children would rather submit to rough sex with brutish tourists than endure the excruciating pain of torture.
Their only comfort in this twisted world becomes the white pill handed out in the afternoons: Methamphetamine to keep them compliant.
Logan is no stranger to this corrupt world of bad cops, pimps and terrified children.
He and his wife, who live on Saltspring Island, have spent countless hours in Vietnam trying to help free victims of human trafficking. Together they have also published a non-fiction book entitled Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart.
Logan says all royalties from Finding Lien will be donated to two NGOs combating child trafficking in Asia.
Using his experiences, Logan has built fictional characters based on real lives that the reader will connect with and stay with until the end of the book, despite the glimpse into the depths of human depravity. We care about these girls and hope for their escape from the daily horror, and eventual recovery from what the girls call their dead souls. In this regard, it an important novel, a documentary style of fiction wor- thy of our attention. The book is mostly told from the point of view of a former Vietnam War soldier, Peter Trutch, who is catapulted into this deranged world by learning he had a son he never knew about.
He discovers he has a granddaughter, Lien, an innocent village girl in Vietnam who helps her disabled father, Ngoc, Trutch’s son, on their small farm. But Lien is missing and Ngoc is desperate to find his only child. With help from a young Australian volunteer, he writes a letter to Trutch.
Trutch is torn between his sense of duty to a son he never knew he had and his comfortable life in Seattle with his wife Catherine.
But Trutch is a soldier, a dutyfirst man, and so it doesn’t take much soul-searching before he is on a plane to Vietnam to search for his granddaughter.
As he learns more about the life Lien — renamed Lotus in a Cambodian brothel — has been sold into by her trusted uncle, he becomes determined to do anything to save his granddaughter.
To do so, he must face violent criminals and the dirty cops, who, just as in real life, help keep the child sex industry alive with bribery and corruption at every level.