At twenty-one years of age, Lek, an ordinary, contemporary, farm girl from the northern Thai Rice belt, had to go to Pattaya to work in the leisure industry to help her widowed mother pay off the mortgage to save the farm from foreclosure and keep her siblings in school. This book, The Beginning, shows what her life was like before she had to leave her small, hard-working, but happy village and the only people she had ever known. It depicts the events that made her happy and those that saddened her in her early life from living with her grandmother to surviving with her husband, Tom. At the very last moment, some friends step up to make Lek's transition to life in Thailand's number one sex city just that little bit easier.