The fat guy smoking Pall Malls, he says he almost married one of those girls. Honest. He met her in a bar one of the last times he was in the Philippines and fell in love, almost bought her a ring and took her home. It didn’t work out, though, and he doesn’t say why because it doesn’t really matter. He shrugs.

The skinny kid with the knobby head understands. Same thing happened to him, sort of. She was 19, beautiful, didn’t wear makeup or anything. She was so…what’s the word? Simple. You know? “Just give her the American necessities and those are, like, her luxuries,” he tells the fat guy. “Let her live like a queen.”

The fat guy grins. His front teeth are missing, and he’s got hair like an oil slick, long and black and greasy. Oh yeah, lots of those girls want an American husband, and they’re not picky, either. “As long as you’re not married and you’ve got an income,” the guy says, “you’re good to go.”

It’s four o’clock in the morning in a Japanese airport, thirteen hours out of Detroit Metro, on a layover in Nagoya before the last 1,700 miles to Manila. The fat guy and the skinny kid found each other in the smoking lounge as if they had picked up a shared scent, a couple of misfit white guys dragging halfway around the planet.

Then another, a fellow traveler in a red running suit, walks over. He’s fiftyish and pudgy with gray hair and enough of a beard to cover a weak chin. He’s never been to the Philippines before, he tells them, just heard the stories about the bars and the girls, and now that he’s divorced, what the hell, treat himself. Still, he’s a little nervous about the whole thing.

The skinny kid knows that feeling, too. He was nervous his first time. It’s kind of weird, the way you can buy a girl for a couple of bucks, a different one every night, every hour if you want, walk around town with her and not even pretend it’s anything more than a cash transaction. “I walk into this place with my arm around this local girl, you know, and there’s all these guys sitting around looking at me,” he says. “And I’m thinking, I’m gonna get my ass kicked, you know?”

The fat guy’s grinning again. He knows where this is going.

“But then they’re all like, ’Hey, American, come and drink with us!’ ”

“Oh yeah,” the fat guy says. “And after ten minutes, you’re not talking to them. You’re talking with them.”

They all nod, even the guy in red.

“Seriously,” the skinny kid says. “They love Americans.”

There’s a girl on a small stage in a bar called the G-Spot Lounge in Angeles City, a sprawl of cinder block and tin about an hour northwest of Manila. She’s wearing a sky blue bikini that matches the powder Mamasan swabbed on her eyelids, along with enough blush and mascara to make her whole face itch. She hasn’t worn makeup since her first Communion, and then not so much.

She has a birth certificate that says she’s 19. It’s false, and obviously so, because she’s only 13, but nobody cares, because in the dark, under all that rouge and shadow, she looks old enough. All the girls—the other ones onstage, the ones waiting tables, the ones cuddling up to customers, sweet-talking foreign men into buying them drinks—look old enough, which isn’t very old at all.

An American man is yelling at her. “Hey, you!” he says. “Yeah, you. Dance! You’re getting paid to dance.”