Karin’s Book Nook welcomes Kim Purcell, the author of TRAFFICKED, to the blog.
My novel, TRAFFICKED, is about a girl who comes from Moldova to Los Angeles to be a nanny and ends up a modern-day domestic slave. People ask me all the time if Hannah is based on someone. They would like me to hold up one particular modern-day slave and declare, this is Hannah. However, that’s not how this story came to life. Hannah is not based on one person or one sad story, but on many girls and women I interviewed and knew both in America and in Moldova.
I went to Moldova to research the lives of the girls and women there and this research shaped who my main character became. However, two beautiful women here in America also made a huge impact on this story and I’d like to tell you about them now.
Before I ever heard about trafficking, my husband and I hired a cleaning service to clean our very messy apartment once every two weeks. The woman in charge said she was sending a Spanish-speaking woman but she’d translate for me if I needed to tell the cleaning woman anything. Maybe she didn’t know I would be home part of the time, writing. Perhaps she thought I didn’t speak Spanish. I’m nearly fluent in Spanish, but I didn’t tell her. Something about the boss didn’t feel right from the beginning.
“Ana” came to my apartment to clean and we became quick friends. She’s one of the warmest, most loving people I’ve ever known. She confided to me that she was paid just a third of what I paid the service, which worked out to about four dollars an hour. The boss had a “bonus” which she was holding for her and her sister, so she couldn’t leave even if she wanted because they’d both lose the bonus. This seemed illegal to me, but she said she had no choice. Because she was tied to this job, she also had no choice about where she was sent to work. Ana told me stories about one man who came home while she was cleaning and made advances at her. Another woman left garbage everywhere and demanded she clean used condoms from the floor by the bed.
I told her if she chose to get out of the job, I’d highly recommend her to everyone I knew. She was so good that I was sure she could find work. She wasn’t so sure. She spoke almost no English. I started to teach her English and promised I’d translate for her when she needed it. In the end, this is what she did. She was so relieved that first day when she told me she was going to leave, it was really a cool moment. She said she could work half as much and make a lot more money, which would give her more time to spend with her daughter. Since that time, she’s had steady work and she’s no longer being exploited by a greedy boss or pawed by a disrespectful man. In fact, one of her rules is she doesn’t work for single men. I love that she makes her own rules now.
The other very special woman I knew here in America was a nanny when I met her. “Svetlana” took care of an acquaintance’s children. She’s from Uzbekistan and she was trained as an elementary school teacher there. She came to America legally; however, she spoke no English. Now she speaks very well, but it took her many years. The problem when she first came to America was that she was stuck in a house where the children had to speak Russian and she had no opportunities to practice English. She didn’t have a car or a license to drive so she was stuck in this house in a suburb of New York City. (This was I knew her – I met her in Brooklyn.)
The people kept her in their garage, which was cold and had asbestos, even though they had a nice guest room upstairs. Svetlana started to get sick, but she didn’t learn why until later. The husband sometimes came into the garage and hit on her. She always worked more than forty hours a week and they withheld money for months at a time, claiming that the husband hadn’t gotten paid. As a result, she couldn’t leave because she had no money, nowhere to go, and couldn’t speak English.
If you’ve read TRAFFICKED, I’m sure you can see some of the similarities between Svetlana’s story and TRAFFICKED. However, she is not Hannah. Ana is not Hannah. Neither of these women would be considered a trafficked person or a modern-day slave. The many girls and women I interviewed in Moldova are also not Hannah. Some of the other people in the story are more closely based on people I knew, but Hannah came to me entirely separate and I think that’s how it should be. After all, it is fiction, and isn’t that the beautiful thing about fiction? Even if you base it on well-researched facts, you get to make it up.
Thank you so much, Kim.
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