Today Quyen Truong has a happy new life in Hawaii a long way from her childhood home in northern Vietnam. But to get there, she made a terrible pit stop. For a year she was the virtual prisoner of a heartless human trafficker. He would cost Quyen her freedom, her dignity… and even her eye.
Kil Soo Lee ran a South Pacific sweatshop, preying on poor Vietnamese women desperate for a better life for themselves and their families. They were lured into Lee’s scheme with promises of work in an American factory where they could make more than 10 times the salary they could earn in Vietnam. However their rosy opportunity turned into a nightmare when their passports were confiscated, and the women were confined in what newspapers later called “modern-day slavery”.
Finally after months of deprivation to the point of malnutrition, some of the women got up the courage to sneak away from the compound and seek help from a local lawyer. With the assistance of several tireless supporters, one of whom even went under-cover to document the women’s living conditions, their case became the largest human trafficking lawsuit ever prosecuted on American soil. Kil Soo Lee was finally convicted and sentenced to forty years in prison.
