By Lam Vu Thach*

VAN NAM, China - From Lao Cai in Vietnam’s border with China, all you  need is only a short walk cross Kieu bridge, or about 10 minutes on a  boat, to go abroad. Ha Khau, a town in Van Nam in China, is a crowded  and busy market with all kinds of merchandises, most of which are  cheap consumer goods such as clothes, shoes, blankets, candies and  cookies, and other necessities.

   Vietnamese merchants from the north-west provinces of Vietnam  such as Lao Cai, Yen Bai, Lai Chau will buy these cheap products and  sell it for a profit over in Vietnam. It is also a hub where  agriculture products and minerals from Vietnam are distributed for  the Chinese domestic market. Tourists from many countries, mostly  from Vietnam and China, also flock here, making Ha Khau a bustling town.

   However, it would be a mistake to describe Ha Khau as a mere  commercial centre. The sex trade is openly seen by visitors in this  tiny town, and there lies the often cruel lives of many young  Vietnamese female sex workers in this foreign land.

   I visited Kim Ninh, a commercial centre near the border of Ha  Khau and Lao Cai on New Year’s Day of 2006. On the first floor, one  can find fruits and vegetables, clothes and groceries. However, there  are also “special goods” – pornographic materials, aphrodisiacs and  sex toys – which are hard to find in Vietnam. The second and third  floors of the commercial complex are full of massage and barber  shops, with signboards written in both Chinese and Vietnamese. Some  don’t even have signs, and the looks of the young women standing  along the corridors, wearing thick makeup, revealing clothes and  casting provocative glances at men passing by say enough about what  these places really are.

   The receptionist of a “hair wash” shop on the second floor, who  looked 18 or 19 years old, was humming a Vietnamese song. She jumped  out of her chair, and welcomed us in Vietnamese with a strong  regional accent. “Baby, have your hair washed, you’ll like it!”

    She put her arms around my shoulders and pushed me back into the  chair without waiting for my response. Sensing my apparent  embarrassment, she continued: “Don’t be afraid, baby, enjoy it! Or  you want to come inside, only me and you?”

   “How did you know I am Vietnamese?” She grinned: “I have been  here only a few weeks so I can’t speak Chinese yet. Other girls who  have been here longer told me that it’s okay to speak Vietnamese.  More important is the way you serve the clients, if you are good it’s  doesn't matter if the clients are Chinese or Vietnamese.”

   “Are there many other girls in other shops who can’t speak  Chinese like you?” I asked. “Yes, new girls arrive every month,” she  replied. Asked about the price of commercial sex, she rattled them  off, saying “I give you this price because you are Vietnamese. If you  are Chinese it will be double.”

   When we left, the woman yelled from behind: “Remember to come  back as soon as possible, I’ll wait.”

    In interviews, Vietnamese women who work as sex workers here  said that there are nearly 50 massage and hairdresser shops in the  second and third floors of this commercial complex. During busy  times, it becomes the hub for around 200 hostesses-cum-sex workers.  Each sex shop has a total area of around 20 square metres. The lower  floor has some chairs or a sofa where girls talk and bargain with  their clients. During peak hours, the area is turned into a waiting  room for clients. A garret would be divided into two or three  different tiny rooms, separated from one another by thin plywood or  bamboo blinds, and where the sex trades unfold.

   Each shop has three to five women working 24 hours a day.  Although the working time of each woman starts differently, this is  usually from 7 to 8 p.m. onward. The sex trade is not just in this  commercial area, but can also be seen in the central part of town,  including hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. Aside from Kim Ninh,  Gieng Sao market is also known as a place where there are commercial  sex workers. Many of the sex workers come from different rural areas  of Vietnam, where it’s difficult just to make ends meet.

       Each Vietnamese woman here has a different story to tell. One  named Hoang Lan (the name of a beautiful flower) is 18 years, an age  when she should have been going to school and living with her family.  But for Lan, who has a sad and mature expression, her future is  uncertain.

       “My hometown is Lai Chau,” she told me. “My family is very  poor. My mother died when I was 13. My father was so sad he decided  to leave us to find work elsewhere, and never returned. I and my two  siblings lived with my grandparents, but life in the rural area is so  hard, we had to depend on the support of the villagers. When I was  16, a village girl returning from Hanoi urged me to go to Hanoi with  her. We did all kinds of odd jobs, from being street vendors to  dishwashers to helpers in the markets, but nothing worked, we were  still dirt poor. Towards the end of 2004, I came back home and stayed  there for a few months,” she recounted.

   “But then I couldn’t stand watching my siblings and grandmother  suffer,” Hoang Lan explained. “Some people told me that many  restaurants and hotels in Ha Khau are in need of staff, so my friends  and I decided to come here. After learning about the nature of the  ‘hotel, restaurant staff’ job, my friend, who couldn’t stomach it,  returned home. But I decided to stay because I had no money and was  in difficult circumstances. I still stay in touch with my friend to  know what’s happening to my grandmother and sisters. My family still  thinks that I am selling clothes in Lao Cai. Every time I call my  friend, we are both choked with emotion.”

    Through Lan, I met some of her friends who work either in Kim  Ninh and Gieng Sao markets or massage shops scattered in the alleys  of Ha Khau town.

   Ngoc, who used to work with Lan in Gieng Sao, said: “My family  lives right in Lao Cai. I used to come here with my father to do  business, when one day a Chinese hired me to work as a maid. He  promised to pay high salary, so I ran away from my father to go with  him, only to be taken to a brothel. My father tried to find me, but I  was so ashamed that I endured this kind of life. I didn’t dare see my  father, and would only call home from time to time. I told him I am  working as a maid far away.

       Nhung, a 16-year-old from Tuyen Quang, had a different story.  “The sisters here prepared a birthday party for me because I am the  youngest,” she said, a feeling of self-pity evident in her voice.  “And because my situation is so bad.”

       She said her father died when she was very young and she had  to live with an uncle, who has a big family and didn’t really have  time to take care for her. Two years ago, an uncle’s relative, who  lives in Ha Khau, visited him and told him that she wanted to adopt  Nhung and take her to Ha Khau. The uncle hastily agreed. The relative  then sold Nhung to a brothel here. Nhung was beaten and forced to  sleep with men, and the owner threatened to kill her if she  disobeyed. In her first year there, Nhung felt like a prisoner.

       “Everyday, I had to sleep with all kinds of men, some as old  as my grandfather but who wanted me to call them ‘honey’,” Nhung  said. One tortured her when she was “too embarrassed” to do just  that, she recalled. “It’s too late now, I don’t want to go back to my  uncle’s family any more.”

THE DICTATES OF SURVIVAL

       But survival in a foreign land means the women is have to  comply with the orders of the pimps and the madams who run the sex  trade. They have to share with them the money they earned. The rest  they send home to support their families, after using some for  cosmetics, food and vitamins. “We have very little time to sleep,”  Lan said. “We have only a few hours to sleep, the rest of the time we  have to work. If someone spends the night, then we have to work all  night. It’s miserable, but we can’t complain to anyone. If we open  our mouth, we will be scolded and beaten by the owner.”

       Lan said many Vietnamese women who work here were sold by  pimps or entered China illegally, and don’t have any identity cards  or passports. In short, their lives are in the hands of the madam.

       There are many types of clients who visit sex workers in Ha  Khau: businessmen, local small-business owners, tourists, porters,  workers and gangsters, which proliferate in border towns. Lan said  most of the clients are Chinese, but that there are also some  Vietnamese and Western tourists.

       “After a ‘service,’ if you’re lucky, you’d have a decent  guest who would pay you, but there are also bad guys and drunkards  who would torture you to death and then walk out without paying. We  just have to endure these circumstances. It’s not as worse as getting  deadly sexual diseases such as gonorrhea, or even hepatitis,” she  pointed out.

       Lan said many friends of hers have gotten diseases from  sleeping with customers. Some, she added, got so sick that that just  about the money they earned was spent on medical bills. They were  eventually fired by their owners. She hasn’t seen most of her friends  since.

   It’s not difficult to fathom the misery of these girls. In poor  countries, especially in rural areas, not every girl is able to  escape poverty or have access even to elementary education. Poverty  and the lack of education make many young women vulnerable to sex  work in the hands of professional human traders. All the young women  I interviewed expressed their desire for a happy life, to have a  husband and children. But I wonder if they understand the  consequences of their being tortured physically, emotionally and  spiritually. I wonder if they will ever have a chance to lead normal  lives. (END/IOM/LVT/NLA/JS/07)

*Lam Vu Thach of the Hanoi-based Asia-Pacific Economic Review, did  this story under the Imaging Our Mekong media programme  (www.newsmekong.org)