In the longest summer of my youth, I found myself in the passenger seat of a shoddy car with a stranger to the left of me, a stranger I would have to put all of my trust in. He drove us up and down Los Angeles’s Crenshaw Boulevard, waiting for a prepaid phone to ring. The men calling would ask for “the Asian one.”

Upon meeting, I would be paid $300, do my job, and walk away with 50 percent.

Over the following years I would go through the same routine in a number of cities. Sometimes I worked with a partner and sometimes I worked independently. Legally, I was engaged in sex trafficking. But for me, it was just work.