Prostitution in China - KTV Story (Part 5)

Her earnings increased exponentially and she now had enough money to move into her own apartment.

Though she could have afforded a decent one bedroom, she instead rented a suitable studio. That way she was able to send more money home to her family, save more for the future, and even give a little to her cousin for the baby.

With the amount she was making, she figured she only needed to work another two to five years. Then she planned to return to her hometown and start her own small business, probably a little shop or restaurant.

She also began to chat on QQ with a cousin of one of her old friends from high school, a boy only a couple years older than her, by the name of Huang Mo Zhe. Mo Zhe was working on his family’s farm, which was turning a respectable profit.

The more they talked, the more she envisioned returning to her village and marrying him, starting a family, and forgetting all about her current life.

***

Ying only worked nights, so most of her days were spent sleeping, watching Thai soap operas, and playing on QQ.

But mostly she went shopping, since for the first in her life she had disposable cash, and she liked to use it to buy all sorts of clothes, shoes, and make-up, especially the Korean style stuff her favorite K-Pop singers wore.

She and Di often met up in the afternoons or early evenings before work and would wander arm in arm around any number of different shopping malls in Guangzhou or Shenzhen, buying whatever they felt like, sitting next to each other in restaurants, playing on their cell phones, and talking about anything other than work.

Sometimes Ying went to the mall by herself, just to walk around and window shop or sit in a café, where she’d sip coffee and surf Weibo or QQ on her cellphone...

When shopping one balmy afternoon, Ying came across a sale for the newest iPhone.

Excitedly, she purchased it, and remembered the long hours she’d spent in that hot and sticky factory and those berating Cantonese shrieks that spewed from her old boss. Ying couldn’t help but wonder if maybe one of her old colleagues had assembled the phone she now held in her freshly manicured hands.

She rushed it back to her apartment, tore open its packaging, powered it on and began to fiddle with its features.

She’d been so ecstatic to see it in the store and to buy it, but as she played around with it and clutched its cool, shiny silver body, she didn’t really feel anything at all.


PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

Prostitution in China - KTV Story (Part 4)

The man got up and Ying reluctantly followed him into a room at the end of the hallway. The room looked like a hotel suite. There was a queen sized bed, small bathroom, mirror on the ceiling and TV atop a small dresser.

Ying’s heart began to pound. Her boss then entered the room and produced a syringe and quickly stuck it into her arm, saying to her it’d prevent “any infections.”

The boss then left and the man undid his suit and undressed. Ying tried not to look at him and slid off her miniskirt, bra, and panties, and joined the man on the bed.

Her heart beat faster, and she lay flat on the bed, spread her legs, gritted her teeth and closed her eyes.

The weight of the man hovered over top of her and she smelled the stench of his strong, musty body odor and awful breath. Then she felt the prick of his warm, short and thin penis as it entered her. He only pushed into her a handful times before pulling out and ejaculating onto her stomach.

The man got up and hurriedly dressed and left the room without saying a word. She then got up herself, went into the bathroom and took an especially hot shower.

She’d been terrified at the start, but now, as she got dressed, she didn’t really feel anything. It had happened so fast that she’d gone kind of numb.

Though she didn’t have much emotion, she definitely knew she didn’t feel like seeing that man again, ever.

Fortunately for her, when she got back to the singing room, neither the man nor any of his colleagues were there.

***

Following the first night she’d slept with a customer, Ying no longer was mere scenery at the KTV. Every night she’d be whisked to the room down the hall, on occasion two or three times.

There the same routine would always take place. She’d get an injection (before the first customer), then would disrobe and have sex.

The men were usually in their 40’s, though sometimes 50’s and occasionally 30’s or late 20’s. Mostly the sex was missionary and fast.

Some used condoms. Some didn’t. Some paid for her to come back to their hotel rooms. Sometimes she’d even spend the night with them…

The sex to her was completely without feeling. It was simply an action, and she derived no pleasure at all from it- however convincing she eventually became at faking it…

Most of her customers were Chinese, but there were a few foreigners. She liked the Western ones most because they treated her kindest and tipped her handsomely, which the Asians never did. They never tipped at all.

She did refuse certain requests, though, mostly made by foreigners, especially for French kissing or those for non-standard sex. And she flat out refused to be with any dark-skinned foreign clientele. No matter how much they offered.


PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

Prostitution in China - KTV Story (Part 3)

Her first night on the job and next three weeks were pretty much the same. She’d doll herself up, slip on a skin tight, shiny silver one piece miniskirt and matching 10cm heels, and basically just sit there looking pretty for groups of businessmen who’d belt out song after song and down beer after beer.

Occasionally one of the men made small talk with her, but not too often. Mostly the men just talked business and got filthy drunk. By end of the night many would be passed out.

Ying wasn't making the money she thought but still was making far more than at the factory. Plus, all she had to do was sit there, look pretty and pour drinks. Other than having to breathe in copious amounts of second hand smoke, it wasn't too bad.

Finally though, after about a month on the job, a customer took a liking to her and spent most of the evening talking to her while his colleagues drank and sang Westlife songs in a mixture of Chinese and broken English.

The man was mid to late 40’s and elegantly dressed in an expensive looking, navy blue three piece suit. He appeared to be the laoban of the group.

Ying wasn't entirely pleased by the attention, though, because from the moment she first saw him, the man flat out disgusted her. He was terribly short and had a tiny head and receding hairline that crested at a peculiar angle and an ugly, pock-marked face with virtually no chin.

His teeth were rotted and crooked and he had horrible breath. Besides his looks there was an additional something, too, something intangible, that nauseated Ying.

He seemed oblivious or apathetic to her thinly disguised disdain, however, and was surprisingly candid as he spoke to her about his family, his daughter, and the stresses of his job. He didn't ask her any questions except for her age, and when she told him she was eighteen, he called for her boss.

Her boss, the same young man who’d hired her, came over to the man and whispered something into his ear. Money was then exchanged and her boss whispered to Ying that the man wished to spend some time alone with in her in an adjacent room.


PART ONE

PART TWO

Prostitution in China - KTV Story (Part 2)

The “Super Song Star” KTV was in an alley behind a non-descript block of stores near a busy shopping street in Guangzhou’s Panyu District.

Inside the narrow, grayish concrete building, most every room looked the same. A 50’ inch flat screen TV was mounted to the wall in the middle and there was a 17’ inch touch screen computer next to it for selecting songs.

A faux leather couch was parallel to the TV and another was perpendicular to it. A small coffee table for drinks, ashtrays, and cordless microphones sat in between the couches. All the rooms were dimly lit and always smelled strongly of cigarette smoke, even when nobody was smoking in them.

Framed posters for Chinese beer and mobile phones, featuring Jackie Chan and smiling, sleek young women adorned each room’s walls…

The shifty-eyed man who conducted the interview, a tallish, skinny fellow with a crew cut and tattoo on his neck, who wasn’t much older than them, offered the girls the job after only asking a few questions, which were: “Are you single? How old are you? Do you have kids? Can you work any evening of the week?”

Ying and Di accepted the job; quit the factory, and both moved in with Ying’s cousin, for the time being.


PART ONE

Prostitution in China - KTV Story (Part 1)

Rong Ying was the prettiest girl in Wanshan, a tiny, impoverished village, in a northern province of China.

Like so many girls in Wanshan, as soon as she turned eighteen she bought a third class train ticket to Guangdong Province, in the south of China, to search for work. Many from her village who’d gone down there had made enough to live well and also send money home to their families.

Upon arrival, Ying’s cousin, who’d gone south to Guangdong seven years prior, let Ying stay over at the cramped eighth floor one bedroom walk-up she shared with her husband, her husband’s mother, and the baby girl they didn’t have.

After a couple weeks of job hunting, Ying found work in a factory in Dongguan assembling iPhones. There she worked twelve hour shifts, with only two twenty minute breaks. All additional breaks, including toilet breaks, were timed to the second. Anyone on break too often or for too long was terminated.

Ying lived at the factory in a dorm room with five other girls. They slept in bunk beds wrapped in mosquito netting, washed their clothes by hand, and had an 11PM curfew every night of the week. At 11:30PM the factory shut off all the dorm rooms’ electricity until morning.

At the factory Ying met another pretty girl named Qwai Di. Di spoke of how her friend was working at a KTV (karaoke bar) and making ten times what the two of them made per month at the factory.

But what exactly did the work involve? Ying queried, as she and Di stabbed chopsticks into plates of spicy noodles during break.

Di said they’d provide company and drink with the KTV’s male customers, and every so often the men, usually businessmen in their 30’s and 40’s, would tip them extra for favors, Di said, hesitantly but not ashamedly.

Ying knew what this meant. She wasn’t completely naïve. She also wasn’t a virgin, having had sex with her high school boyfriend, which was part of the reason she’d left her hometown.

(The two of them had discussed marriage, but after they’d had sex, he’d quickly broken it off with her, saying that he couldn’t be with someone who’d have sex before marriage. Heartbroken, and having lost her precious commodity of virginity, she’d decided to go south for work.)

Looking down at the callouses and blisters blotting her once soft hands, and thinking of their floor boss, that fat little middle aged woman with the terrible acne who screamed in Cantonese at all the workers, especially the pretty girls, but mostly thinking of the money she could send to her family, Ying made a snap decision…

She decided to join Di on their day off and apply for a job at the KTV.