A Korean-American woman whose life was stolen by sex trafficking is turning her story into a movie.
Chong Kim, a Korean-American victim of sex trafficking, published a book called “Broken Silence” in 2017 based on her story, and last year made a short film, “E40S,” which won the Best International Narrative Short and Best American Director Awards at the 8&Half Film Awards, an international film festival. Kim is currently working on a full length feature film.
The filmmaker was born in South Korea in 1975 and immigrated to Oklahoma in 1984. Then, in 1994, at the age of 19, Kim moved to Dallas, Texas, where she faced an irreversible reality.
The nightmare started on a trip with her boyfriend, whom she had just started dating. “He had blue eyes and pretty dimples that stood out when he smiled, and I dreamed of a beautiful family with him, and I thought the American dream would come to me, too,” Kim told CBS News of the incident, adding, “At the time of the incident, he asked me to take a trip to Florida, and we got in the car and set off.”
According to Kim, their destination was Nevada, not Florida, and her boyfriend was a sex trafficker.
“The only way I could escape from sex trafficking was through becoming a madam,” Kim said. “After two years of hard work, I gained the trust of the sex traffickers and became a madam. At that point, I realized that I had gotten pregnant through her trafficker and decided that I had to get out of this horrible cycle. After I escaped, I was homeless and living on the streets.”
The sex traffickers used abandoned warehouses in Las Vegas’ Native American neighborhoods to house the women to avoid detection by police. Most of the women Kim stayed with were minors of ethnic minorities, who were forced to fake their identities to travel out of state for sex.
“My goal is to become a full-time filmmaker. I want to utilize film (in an) immediate (and) in a positive way to bring out more voices and …. bring on more survivors …to share their story in the media format,” she said.
The film Eden, based on Kim’s sex trafficking story, premiered in 2012 and went on to win the Audience Award, Golden Space Award, and Seattle International Film Festival.
Meanwhile, according to CBS News, there were 51,123 reported cases of human trafficking nationwide in 2021. Of those, 3,534 were reported in Texas, and 1,702 involved victims of sex trafficking. Most of the victims were adult women, and 28 percent were minors.
BY YEJIN KIM, JUNHAN PARK [kim.yejin3@koreadaily.com]
