Wan Chai Sex Workers
It is midday Sunday and business is already booming in
the bars of Wan Chai.
In poorly written English, signboards outside Lockhart Road hostess bars welcome crewmen off the
aircraft carrier USS Nimitz - just arrived in port to offload a few thousand sailors and marines. The streets are full of frisky young men looking hip and civilian, aiming more for Snoop Doggie Dogg than spit and polish warrior. They are thirsty for beer and sexual adventure.
Trailing them are scores of attractive young women. In miniskirts and toting fake Gucci bags, they're stepping out in a dance that's been performed on this street since the 1950s.
The old style gogo bars of Wan Chai, where lithe young women still gyrate - legally - against shiny firepoles and entice customers to buy them overpriced drinks, are the places most commonly associated with the sex trade.
But the action in Wan Chai has shifted considerably in recent years. Now it's likely to be found inside a handful of bars blaring canned dance music or the raucous sounds of a Filipino cover band.
Entering one of these bars, one soon understands the dimensions of
Hong Kong's unregistered sex trade.
Dozens of girls, most of them Filipinas in
tight jeans or
mini skirts, dance or mill about, waiting for an eager male.
Many of the women are simply customers out for a good time with their friends but an increasing number are here to ply the sex trade, brought into Hong Kong by shadowy recruiters with the promise of big money.
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They're put up in cramped flats and often end up hoping they can at least break even before an immigration officer puts an end to their sojourn and sends them packing.
The male punters are businessmen, expatriates, tourists and, on this Sunday, exuberant soldiers and sailors off the Nimitz.
A man on a
bar stool needs to wait only a few moments before a smiling woman's face appears at his side, angling for a drink, a chat and maybe more.
According to officers in the Philippine consulate the girls are charged about US$1,000 as a recruitment fee by representatives of triad syndicates to come to Hong Kong and work the bars. The money covers their airfare and has to be paid back in daily installments.
"We call these girls victims of human trafficking," one officer says. The consulate says there is little it can do. The girls come to Hong Kong of their own free will with scant knowledge of what they are likely to encounter, according to one officer.
A spokesman for the Wan Chai police station took exception to the idea that the trade is organized, insisting triads are not involved. "There are no known syndicates," he says. "The foreign girls usually operate alone."
That is not the picture
painted by the women themselves, who are lured to Hong Kong thinking they will
make lots of money. The reality, though, is that they become virtual debt slaves, forced to hustle deep into the night to pay "managers" for their air tickets, lodging and food. Many times, the girls say, the syndicates keep their passports and travel documents until the debt is paid.
None of this is a secret. Buy a girl a drink and you'll hear the stories. They live in tiny flats, up to eight in a room, cooking meals on a hot plate and paying HK$80 to HK$100 a night for the privilege, according to one woman, who, like others interviewed for this story, was afraid to be named.
Encountered in one of the bars, she discusses the business as I buy her a steady supply of drinks. The girls get HK$40 from the bar for each drink they get a customer to buy for them.
She keeps her voice low, afraid of being overheard, and while she talks she looks frequently over her shoulder, keeping an eye on the manager as she rests a hand on my
knee and pours out a tale.
"Sometimes I even have problems paying my rent," she says. "I was sick the first week I was here and still my manager wanted money from me." She has just come back from a visa run to Macau to extend her stay in Hong Kong.
On this Sunday the bars are packed with many more women than men. It is impossible to know exactly who are the working girls and who are domestic helpers enjoying a day off in the disco.
But it soon becomes apparent.
"Supply always exceeds demand," says a Hong Kong resident familiar with the area. "Prices (for sex) have gone down lately from HK$1,500 to HK$500."
Most of the girls are Filipinas but this is a multinational stew. There are Indonesians, Thais (See: Bar Girl Love), Vietnamese, Laotians, Mongolians, mainlanders. There are even girls from Columbia, Venezuela, Latvia and Estonia in one bar.
"We're in Hong Kong on a working holiday. Can you buy me a drink?" a blonde woman says with a generic European accent.
The conventional wisdom, says a long-time Hong Kong expat, is that some of the domestic helpers hanging out in the Wan Chai bars "are looking for a boyfriend or a husband and are not necessarily prostitutes."
Others, says an officer at the Philippine consulate, are moonlighting in the sex trade to
make extra money to send home to their families.
One Sunday afternoon Wan Chai regular, who identified himself as a teacher, explains it this way - "I was dating an Indonesian who was a part of the scene. I want to have her here as my maid. I would give her a working permit but my wife is not too keen on the idea."
In the beginning, the man says, he thought his mistress really was a maid, but one of her friends told him she was actually working in the bar. It ended a common fantasy - that these overly friendly women are domestic helpers just out for a good time.
An Indonesian woman in a bar insists she goes to Wan Chai on her day off just to dance. She is obviously having a good time and repeats a familiar bar-girl refrain that she does not like handsome men because they cannot be trusted. She prefers the old and the unattractive.
Her 59 year old boyfriend doesn't like her to go to Wan Chai, even though this is where they met, she continues, as she taps out an SMS text message to him on her cell phone.
"My boyfriend said I look like Miss Thailand," she says. "His Thai girl-friend died in a car accident. I hope he will marry me." She declines an offer of a second drink.
Dolores Balladares, chairwoman of support group United Filipinos in Hong Kong says she has been told that some of the girls working in Wan Chai come to Hong Kong with the promise of jobs as domestic helpers and are forced into prostitution. She has no proof, though.
Regardless, few women will ask for help. "They will not come to us for help, they are too afraid," she says. "Our culture treats such work as degrading."
In constant need of money and wondering how long they will be able to renew their short-term visas before they are given the one-day stamp and told to go home, the itinerant Filipinas of Wan Chai roam far and wide in search of custom.
They are happy to give out their
phone numbers and provide home "services." They will never make enough money to pay their debts just hustling drinks.
"Hong Kong is so expensive," intones one sad-eyed lady on a bar stool. She needs money for rent, food, the debt on her recruitment fee, and maybe, if she is lucky, to send to her family.
More than half a million men and women leave the Philippines every year to work overseas and the billions of dollars they remit home every year is a vital factor in keeping the struggling Philippines economy afloat.
The Philippine government calls them heroes.
For women, the work consists primarily of unskilled and poorly paid jobs like domestic service. Those are the lucky ones. Some end up in prostitution or become mail-order brides or 'Japayukis', the Philippine slang for women who work in the bars and
nightclubs of Japan.
In the past, many Filipinas working in Wan Chai secured entertainment visas to dance legally in go-go bars but the consulate says these are rarely offered now.
Today's visiting prostitutes come on a 14-day tourist visa, a consulate officer explains. They are shuttled in and out of Macau and Shenzen to extend their visas, which they can do for about three months.
"How can immigration prove they are prostitutes?" he asks.
When they go off to Macau or Shenzhen, the official says, the girls will gather as much money as they can to prove they are tourists. Only after several entries does immigration start asking questions.
The girls are schooled to use the money as an argument, claiming they will contribute to Hong Kong's economy. A woman I met in a bar even asked if I would go with her to China. Traveling with a foreigner, she reas-oned, would make it easier to get back into Hong Kong.
"Hong Kong immigration is powerless," the consular officer explains. "They can only limit the days the women can stay in Hong Kong." After a while, they limit the entry visa to one day.
"This is typically the only time we hear from any of the girls," the officer explains. "They come to us in desperation when they haven't got enough money for the flight back home. We supply temporary housing until they depart."
It's a sad and desperate system, a way for bars to ensure a cheap supply of women to draw customers. The Filipino girls operating in Wan Chai are usually unsophisticated girls from rural areas.
"It is from the poorest provinces that the girls are recruited," Balladares says. With the economy in the Phil-ippines getting worse, she adds, even those with an education can't find work. "This forces women into prostitution."
The consulate regards the trafficking of women as a serious problem and the Philippine government is screening women at the Manila airport to try to stop them. There are anti-trafficking campaigns in local newspapers, providing information about the dangers of getting involved in prostitution in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities.
It is doubtful anything will stop the trade and traffic, of course.
Hong Kong's massage parlors and their free-flowing staffs of local and mainland girls are well known and documented, as are the legal 'one-woman' brothels found throughout the territory, many of which advertise their services openly on Web sites and street signs. Meanwhile, police have been criticized for an anti-vice operation in West Kowloon that netted 295 women on Tuesday, 40 of whom were main-landers who were detained in an open-air steel cage.
But little research has been done on the informal trafficking of women to work as casual bar girls, even though their presence is obvious to almost anyone who has had a beer in a certain kind of downmarket Wan Chai disco.
These women have no legal rights or medical services. They are not employees so they have no protection at work. In winter many of them shiver in the cold, not knowing that Hong Kong is chilly compared to their tropical homeland.
Whatever their troubles, they dare not go to the police if they are hurt or abused for fear of being charged with soliciting. They are at the mercy of their managers and their customers.
The police spokesman says the Wan Chai situation is "well contained." "Regular covert operations are mounted to apprehend, charge and deport the bar girls for soliciting prostitution and breach of condition of stay," he says.
Immortalized as the seedy but romantic World Of Suzie Wong in the novel by Richard Mason, 1950s Wan Chai became famous for its drunken sailors and prostitutes.
The reality was never so pretty. In Suzie Wong's day, Wan Chai's neon-lit streets housed hundreds of dingy brothels, dance halls and massage parlors. It was the center of a local sex industry that has now largely moved to Mong Kok and Sham Shui Po.
With prosperity Wan Chai became a trendy spot with sky-high rents and its own bit of flash.
But prostitution never really left. Today's Suzie Wong is most often a Filipina or a Thai living in the shadows and dreaming of getting rich in Asia's "world city."
What do you want? a girl is asked in a Wan Chai bar. "A foreigner boyfriend or husband," is the predictable reply. "I want money, a better life."
Go home, you want to say. It won't happen here.
See also on the forum: Is Prostitution Inherently Wrong?
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