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 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.