By the third day, Uy recalls, Chamnan was so weak and distressed that the man summoned a doctor on his payroll to give her painkillers and a vitamin shot "so she had the strength to keep going until the end of the week". She was allowed to call her mother once a day.
He installed her in a hotel room on Phnom Penh's outskirts and visited her many times to have sex. He bought Chamnan for six days and nights. The man was a police general who frequented the beer garden where Uy worked as a kitchen help, she says. "I wanted a place where my daughter and I could work together." So Uy did something she describes as her "only choice": she sold her 18-year-old daughter Chamnan's virginity to a wealthy local man for £900. "But my family could find only dirty jobs," she says. She wanted to open a hair and beauty salon on proper premises in the Cambodian capital. Three years ago, when she arrived from the countryside, Uy had a different plan. She performs a manicure or pedicure on the spot, sitting on a plastic stool by the side of the street. Uy, 42, rides it around her Phnom Penh neighbourhood – a tangle of alleys near the river where the residents' domestic lives spill out of their open front doors – until a customer flags her down. It's a bicycle with a plastic crate on the back filled with hand lotions and nail polishes. V annith Uy is the owner of what translates from Khmer as a "mobile nail salon", although the word salon is a stretch.