Sara, I decided to write this after reading the Addicted to Phone Sex posting on your blog. This will probably be a long story. Pop open a cold one!
When you're as overweight as I am, you can't be picky when it comes to dating or marriage. I'm in my 30's and close to 300 pounds. I work at a small town newspaper as the editor for the Sports section and now also the newspaper's Sports blog. I have to work late. We actually print and collate our own papers here, so late night is when the newspapers are assembled and the sales inserts are stuffed into the papers. That's where I met Wuen, my Vietnamese wife. She was a "stuffer" as we call that job, so breathtakingly beautiful in such an ugly place. I asked the manager about her. Yep, we get these gooks for minimum wage, she's from Nam, y'know, me love you long time. I just found it so insulting what he said about her and his racist comment in general, but I didn't want to stir up trouble, so I just let it go.
I found out more about her by bribing an older Vietnamese guy who works there who unofficially recruits other Vietnamese to take any open positions. She was 22 and had no children. He even said, for a price, he could make a date happen. The way he said date, well, he meant the dirty type of date. We kept going round-on-round, I kept saying, yes, I want to date her, but not date her. Obviously, the nuance got lost in translation, so I had to let that go, too. Finally, I told him, yes, I would date her and gave him $150 in cash. She was off on Monday night, so I took her out. I think she looked scared, because she was probably expecting that I was going to try to have sex with her, but I took her to a nice restaurant and we had dinner. I asked if she wanted to go to a movie, and she was reluctant and said "my English not so good". I told her it might help with her English to watch movies and tv and listen to the radio. She said she does that when she's not working.
I dropped her back at her apartment, one she shared with other Vietnamese immigrants. I kissed her hand. That was as much physical contact as we had. For every date, I gave her $50 cash and expected nothing. One date she asked if she was my geisha? And I said yes, even though geishas are Japanese, perhaps it was a close definition, since she was my social companion, who I enjoyed spending time with, and who I gave money to, in exchange for that time.
About 2 months later, she relayed to me that she was having difficulty with her Visa and that she would either have to return to Vietnam or stay on illegally. I suggested that we get married to take that burden away from her, and that if she wanted, we could divorce after an acceptable time, so that her residency would not be compromised. Amazingly enough, she agreed.
I was in heaven the first few months we were married. Although I had never kissed her lips, or done anything but kiss her hand and her beautiful feet, I just enjoyed having her there. The conversation, the laughter, the excellent food she prepared, how nice she kept my condo. Then things started to fall apart. Suddenly, she wanted to go back to work and make some money of her own, even though I told her that my money was her money, if she needed to buy anything, to let me know. She told me she needed to send money back to Vietnam to help various relatives, and that she wanted this to be money she earned. She told me she needed to wire $50 per week to her grandmother. And another $50 a week to her Aunt who had a small mushroom farm and was supporting 3 children. I heard from some of the Vietnamese in the "stuffing" department, you could live well on $30 a week, so for her relatives to get $50 a week was generous. I told her I would be glad to give her the $100 per week to wire to her relatives, but she refused.
The next day, Wuen announced that she had found a job as a waitress, which didn't thrill me at all when I found out it was at a Vietnamese restaurant an hour away in the city. And her schedule would keep her working till 1am and by the time she got home, it would be 2am or later. So for a while I was only seeing her a few nights a week, when she was off and a few hours a day, if I was lucky to be home early enough. When I told her I wanted her to quit this job, she stomped her feet and yelled NO. When I insisted as her husband that she quit, she slapped me and yelled at me in Vietnamese and swatted me with her purse, hard.
I'll cut to the chase and tell you that she kept working and our marriage was miserable. Then one nite, I got a phone call. She got busted by an undercover officer for prostitution at a massage parlor. Massage parlor? Luckily, the charges were dropped when I showed up with my brother, a fairly well-known city government attorney. My brother and I explained that her English was really terrible and that she must have misunderstood what the cop had asked her. So now, my family knew my situation, because my brother wasn't born yesterday. He told me I should cut her loose as quickly as possible and that he would recommend a divorce attorney. Divorce? I didn't want a divorce.
I was shaking when Wuen confessed that when she first came to the US, she was basically enslaved to work at the restaurant to pay off her debt to come here, then she was purchased to work at the massage parlor, but she had left and moved out of the city to my town, to escape and make a new start. But someone in the Vietnamese community had turned her in to her former "employers" for a cash reward. She told me I could buy out these "employers" for $10,000 and then she could be my wife forever. While this all sounded incredible to me, the next day I talked to a friend, an editor at a paper in the city, who told me this immigrant slavery isn't b.s., but often, the girls are working with gangs to scam the guys into the buy-out. So I might have just been a mark the whole time?
The night after I get Wuen out of jail, this tricked out car pulls up, like one of those cars from the Fast and Furious movies. Two Asian guys are in the front, I assume they are Vietnamese and there is another Asian in the back. They leave the car running, get out of the car and knock on the door. They are all posing, pretending to be tough, but not one of them weighed more than 130 pounds. I heard these posers like to carry knives and guns for show. But what did I have to lose? My pathetic life? They didn't even know how much medication I have to take to get through the day to fight high blood pressure, to fight fluid retention, fight back spasms, that I have no quality of life without my wife, that she was the only thing who brought me any joy, whether she was a prostitute or not. The person who has the least to lose is always the most dangerous. The gangstas tell me that Wuen belongs to them and that she must leave with them, or else.... I'm thinking about how I can crush all these tiny Asian dudes....
Then I see the flash of red and blue lights....someone has called the cops, apparently an annoyed neighbor, because there is very loud rap music coming from their car. The Vietnamese gangstas leave, but they leave with Wuen! How humiliating....
My brother called a few days later. He had hired a P. I. to look into her background. Wuen wasn't wiring any money back to relatives. Well, no surprise there. And she had been working at the restaurant and then the massage parlor run by the gangstas to pay off her debt to come to the US. So she wasn't lying there either. She had tried to escape, but they got her back. But the $10K to buy her out was most likely a scam they engineered, as they probably thought I was easy. But the realistic outcome? If I had given them the money, they would have kept it and kept pimping her out at the massage parlor.
I felt bad for Wuen, and I don't know who the real victim was, her or me. But I haven't seen her again. I don't know where she is. Technically, I am still married to her, because I can't find her to serve divorce papers. I have a P.I. tracking leads, but the P.I. said that these massage parlors are run by gangs who move the girls around the country to different locations, and that Wuen has been moved.
I wonder if she really did want a new life with me, even though I never slept with her, or consummated the marriage as the saying goes. I wonder if I was her port in a storm. Or I wonder if it was all part of a plot to get money out of me. Maybe I wasn't the first one she had scammed? Maybe you can make me your June Loser of the Month. I just don't want to send a picture, in case someone recognized me.
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