South China Batik Wall Hanging
In today's London Guardian, there is an excerpt from Hsiao-Hung Pai's book Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour. It is about Asian migrant women who entered the sex trade in England. Below is a portion of what was published in the Guardian -
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Local men have a special liking for foreign girls - but they want it cheap'
- The Guardian,
- Tuesday April 22 2008
Ah-Fang, an illegal Chinese migrant, works as a housekeeper in an 'Oriental' brothel in Cheam. She earns £180 a week - a step up from the £50 she got picking leeks. And at least she doesn't suffer the degradations of the brothel's 'Misses' who sell sex for 14 hours a day. In the first of two extracts from her new book, Hsiao-Hung Pai hears what life is like for the 3,000 Chinese women who work in Britain's sex industry
One night about a year ago, Ah-Fang sat up studying the job advertisements in the free paper she had picked up in Birmingham's Chinatown. "Oriental Massage", "China Red", "One Night Passion": Ah-Fang circled them all with her pen.
"Massage parlour", as every Chinese worker knows, is a euphemism for "brothel". There are more than 600 Chinese parlours in London alone - half the number of Chinese takeaways in the capital, as Chinese like to joke. Most of them advertise vacancies in the Chinese papers.
Ah-Fang, a 52-year-old Malaysian-Chinese woman, had a little experience of working as a massage-parlour housekeeper. It was one of the less appallingly paid jobs she had had since arriving in Britain in 2005. She felt she could continue with this kind of work.
"Are you sure you can handle it?" I asked her, when she told me what she was planning. The first time I met her, she had been picking vegetables for a living, and the advertisements she was scouring were the lonely hearts.
"It isn't for everyone," she said. "It's one of the toughest and most dangerous jobs for Chinese women in England. But I'm helped by my age. Usually being old is a disadvantage in job-seeking, but in this job it's an advantage. My age is what protects me."
The next day she started to call the parlours. "Sorry, the job's gone," she was told each time. It surprised her how quickly the vacancies had been filled. So she turned to the page where the agencies advertised, and phoned a firm called Xianglong ("Fortunes and Prosperity"). After some haggling over the fee, she was eventually put in touch with the owner of a parlour in London.
Mr Lee was Malaysian-Chinese, and liked the fact that Ah-Fang was also from Malaysia. He told her she would be paid £180 a week. This was riches compared with the £50 a week she had been earning picking leeks. "At last," Ah-Fang said to me on her mobile phone as she took the coach to London, "I've achieved my dream of leaving the world of work in the Midlands. But," she said with a giggle, "I'm not sure whether I'm moving up or down the career ladder."
Lee picked her up at Victoria and drove her to her destination. Ah-Fang had no idea which direction they were going in. "Are we still in London?" she kept asking. After more than 40 minutes, they arrived in an affluent-looking suburban town, which Ah-Fang later discovered was Cheam. All she could see then, however, were rows and rows of houses, with hardly anyone about. "A massage parlour in this quiet place?" was her initial reaction.
Lee turned into a narrow lane that looked so sleepy and residential that she thought they must have made a wrong turn. But the boss parked outside a small block of flats. When he put the key in the door of a second-floor flat, Ah-Fang asked if he owned the place. He scowled and shook his head. She was later to learn that all Chinese massage parlours rent their premises: impermanence is of the essence...
for complete Guardian post click here
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