"Her bleak, concrete-walled room is first in a row down a dark alley, behind a small shop selling water, cold teas and sample packets of shampoo. Inside the bare room lit by a single fluorescent tube, the prostitute sits atop a hard single bed, dressed in deep blue and gold. Her long hair cascades down her back; her face is painted carefully.
She is 19, and only agreed to meet if we protected her identity. In another life, she might be a university student or a farm girl. Here, she is a prostitute servicing Chinese men in a drug-riddled city on the China-Myanmar border.
There’s a knock at the door. It’s another young woman from Myanmar (formerly Burma), hurriedly pulling a stack of cash from her bra and handing it to the young woman. “Keep this,” she says. “The gangsters are outside tonight looking for money.”
The panicked interruption is routine.
Gangsters are never far; there is no protection by police, the women say. The young woman tucks the cash into her top and continues talking. She tells of crossing the border into China at 16 to work as a cleaning maid. She was, she says, tricked into prostitution, working on the streets. She moved up because she was good looking.
She’s now a “mommy,” in charge of handling arrangements for other Myanmar prostitutes in this neighborhood. She accepts a limited number of her own clients, but wants desperately to be seen as in charge of her own affairs.
The money she earns goes home to her family, to educate her brothers in Mandalay. While she was tricked into this life, she says, she’s accepted it. Her family, she insists, must not know how she earns the money she sends home.
At this point, her visitors are rushed from the room. A customer is on his way"..............READ MORE
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