Tag Archives: Prostitution

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Reading: Gordon Mathews — Ghetto at the Center of the World

I once stayed a night in Chungking Mansions, when a flight from Canada arrived too late to catch even the cross-border bus to Guangzhou. I was given the address by a woman at the information booth just past the exit gates from customs, and probably told to make certain not to get off the city bus one stop too early. Someone was waiting for me, amidst the hysterical confusion of touts, and led me into the depths, up an elevator and to a small guesthouse, run by an older Pakistani man. My room even had a window, from which I could see the street below, washed in rain, with a throng of bodies like no other.

Another time, after a climbing trip on Hong Kong island, I went with a group for dinner in a Pakistani restaurant. Once more up elevators and along corridors. As we departed, I glimpsed through another door momentarily opened and saw groups of serious islamic men eating their own dinners around wooden tables.

I stayed there because of course living in Guangzhou and having a fascination with the Pearl River region how could I not hear of this place with the dangerous reputation — especially given my taste for Wong Kar-wai’s films. Were I to get stuck again in Hong Kong now, I’d likely stay there again, given at least it’s a name I know.

There is a compulsion in accounts of globalisation and the developing world to make the story about us, we who live in the global north, who either speak english, are of european descent, or both. That there could be a parallel yet predominantly disconnected globalisation, a flow of trade, people, ideas and culture is often seen as irrelevant or incomprehensible to the central narrative, if even addressed.

Gordon Mathew’s anthropology of this building, Ghetto at the Center of the World — Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong appealed to me for more than just what goes on in the confines of its seventeen stories and five separate blocks. As he points out in the introduction, the history and culture of the building is also one of low-end globalisation. This is not a narrative of the developed world’s arrangement with China in providing cheap, off-shore manufacturing, but rather that of a globalisation in which Europe and America are at best ancillary nodes on multiply-layered and discrete trade routes that span from Africa to South-East Asia by way of Dubai, India, and Guangzhou, and more often simply don’t occur at all in the narrative.

I’ve already spent much of the morning perched on the windowsill in the sun, having knocked off half the book in a sitting, which should give an idea of how fascinating I find the topic and book.

Gordon Mathews — Ghetto at the Center of the World Gordon Mathews — Ghetto at the Center of the World
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sunday morning avoiding-work blogging

More stuff I’ve read in the past two weeks for your amazement and occasional pleasure, though because everyone’s taste is different, no porn links. I do have a major grant application due tomorrow that I’ve been putting off since Friday when I posted off three other big applications, and since have felt a complete resistance to answering such questions as, “Why do you want to do it?” preferring instead to have my newly opened comments spammed by a Viagra-spewing, Norfolk-dwelling transvestite.

Because it will soon be in the old media, probably as a filler story at the end of the news, dressed up as some evidence of emerging property rights and consequently democracy in China, and because it’s been all over Chinese Blogistan for weeks now, and largely because Feng37 turns it all into a story about Guangzhou, here’s the 钉子户. That’s ‘nail house’ to you, as in the sticking-up nail that tears a hole in your nice clothes, or is the house that pesky proles should but won’t leave so the to-get-rich-is-glorious capitalists-with-communist-chinese-characteristics (I think that should be the other way around) can’t get on with getting rich.

The always exceptional China Digital Times 中国数字时代 looks at the extremely photogenic Chongqing nailhouse as a fomenter of citizen journalism. 在桥下流 says, “Speaking of which of which, gz got one too, on Longjin East”, and points to Global Voices Online for the definitive coverage of the Chongqing house. All this makes me anxious for Liwan, my favourite part of old Guangzhou that for years has been eaten away at by property barons and political corruption. Liwan doesn’t need Hong Kong cash to rebuild, especially when the south-of-the-border types think historic reconstruction means pulling everything down, filling in the harbour and selling it off to their government-friendly cronies.

A bit over a month till Sunn0))) and Boris play in Melbourne, and all I’m listening to is Southern Lord, so of course I downloaded Burial Chamber Trio live at the WORM in Rotterdam, and could see Emile there smiling with un-joy.

Nicholas Pritchard, blogging intelligently on performing arts in Sydney does a quite reasonable evisceration of a recent play he saw. He accuses the director of carrying the Plague of Realism, that reminded me of a remark in Realtime by SPILL festival director Robert Pacitti in London, equally applicable to Sydney or Melbourne. “The city likes to ‘big itself up’ as a wild theatre capital, but in reality it still exists within very safe territory. This is clearly evident in the current plethora of site-specific work being made by younger artists who seemingly lack any desire to present content.”

Is pornography free speech? This is an American, as in United States question, that is beholden to a very specific set of jurisprudence born of their constitution. Any country can engage in such a question, but freedom of speech refers strictly to the First Amendment. My reasons for making such a delineation comes from my recent or on-going brushes with civil rights (and linguistics) in regard to transsexuals, that are simultaneously presented as universally representative from within America, and accepted as such by those of us outside. There is a strong lack of appreciation that circumstances are very much dependent on your geographic location, and that even countries that nominally share similar values can in fact have a wildly different appreciation of the issues. Pornography, or how American cultural hegemony determined how we get off.

No Quarter has a huge post on Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and the diaspora leaving them spread across the globe. It’s a fascinating read, and if you’re unfamiliar with them, a concise introduction to their history, culture, religions, the political machinations that led to them being dispossessed in three acrimonious nations.

Tranny stuff!!! Cool!!! That’s why you come here anyway.

Harisu, everyone’s favourite Korean tranny is performing in Beijing. And Feng37 sent me a piece about Lili, not Chen Lili though, who was in this week’s oeeee supplement of 南方都市报. The difference between the media’s depiction of transsexuals in China and my own experience, compared to the often undisguised hostility that comes out of the American culture is … If someone gave me a research grant, I’d hang out in China for a few months just writing about this.

Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus. Yeah. it’s nice to know there’s a biological basis, but … the search for explanations in this way can easily impress the notion that this is an abnormality against which a particular type of physiology is measured. Whatever it means to be normal, there is far more difference between you and the person you are currently nearest to than between any spuriously assigned categories of human.

The world of teenage trannsexuals, the ones with no family support who become the gutter of humanity, and all that it entails is one I flirted around the edges of. Salon Magazine interviewed Chris Beam, the author of Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers, that I’ve mentioned before, and if you come here because this interests you, it’s really worth a read.

Another standard story with a nice picture about a transsexual, mainly a weekend filler piece that at least isn’t sensationalism, though is it really necessary to have pieces like this done every couple of months, it’s not like someone gets interviewed because they’re gay or married, but the transsexual thing is always presented as the defining characteristic of a person’s identity.

Sex!!! Or why the Age of Reason was a better time for smut and fornication than the early 21st century.

[(δU/δL) / (δU/δC) | Sp=0] ≤ w – [(δU/δr) / (δU/δC) | S = 0], or using calculus to assess whether prostitution is your best career choice.

That’s enough for one day. no?

chongqing nailhouse “公民的合法的私有财产不受侵犯”!!! chongqing nailhouse “公民的合法的私有财产不受侵犯”!!!

guangzhou nailhouse guangzhou nailhouse

harisu visits beijing harisu visits beijing

李鹏丽很开心 lili is very happy 李鹏丽很开心 lili is very happy

kelly roberts straight outta brisvegas kelly roberts straight outta brisvegas

sunn0))) boris - only deaf is real sunn0))) boris – only deaf is real

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stuff i read and even bookmarked in the last week

Bookmarked, that is, so I could blah on loudly here about it, in lieu of dragging myself through the warm 37 degree afternoon to the nearest bookshop to buy something edifying.

Off to Shenzhen first where the Cultural Revolution has resurfaced, minus the dunces hats and bullets in the back of the neck but still high on public humiliation and incarceration without trial. But once the black-uniformed law enforcers had finished their campaign for moral purity and smashing prostitutes, they in turn got roundly and publicly shafted on the internet for brutal violation of human rights.

Shaanxi, in the opposite end of China is home to some of the last remaining women who had their feet bound. It’s a bit of a filler story, but I often experience a sense of vertigo reading about people who have lived through the length of the previous century, to quantify the unimaginable changes of this period into a single person’s life.

And to remind ourselves repeatedly that despite the impending Olympic trough of slovenly avarice and all the Shanghai rising dragon hubris, China is still a third world impoverished dictatorship full of rural peasants who barely survive on what amounts to small change in the west, and campaigning for filial piety is an obnoxious refusal to provide a proper health, education and welfare system which unlike a dazzling urban skyline is the true measure of a country’s wealth.

Maybe the filial piety line is why a Guangdong school integrates Confucian classics and traditional Chinese cultural practices into a modern elementary school curriculum, or maybe it’s that rote learning and recital is not actually an education, and “creativity and critical thinking” in whatever form is.

Veering off into other old dead writers for a bit, Dream of the Red Mansions gets a literary rewrite or a backstabbing hackjob. Either way it sounds better in Chinese: 红楼梦.

Back to misery. Fancy protesting about your land getting stolen, getting shot for your efforts and if you’re still alive after going to jail? It’s the anniversary of the Dongzhou village killings in Guangdong.

Speaking of extra-judicial killings when peasants get uppity about losing their land to the families that rule, Chen Tao was executed for his part in the protests against the Pubugou dam in Sichuan. His father found out when the police told him to pay the 50 yuan “bullet fee”. It’s all getting a bit depressing actually.

Getting out of China and Asia in one quick go, it’s the 9th Asian History Carnival over at kotaji 거타지. Get your fix.

Queer stuff for a bit. When I first landed in Guangzhou it was decidedly un-queer and I met many guys who were certainly not cock-suckers because they were married ergo not … Then earlier this year it was as if you were nobody if you hadn’t pashed on with your best same-sex friend. So what’s going on? Nothing much?

The New York Times deals gender identity, and all that yucky stuff in a couple of pieces that came out around the time of the New York City’s Board of Health proposal that would have allowed transsexuals to change the gender on their birth certificates even if they hadn’t had “the op”. Seems like everyone got a bit freaked out thinking about bodies with the wrong nasty smelly bits. What if It’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl? or how about ‘disorders of sex development’ cos we’re all fucking freaks. Oh well, a lazy “I shit on ya” from me and moving on…

Rolling around to slagging off Australia, How many fucking David Hicks’s can fit on the head of a pin, Prime Minister?, and Phillip Ruddock on illegal detention in immigration jails, “”Look, I won’t detain you long,” he began. Pause. Wry grin. “My wife keeps telling me I shouldn’t say that.”" Reasons You Will Hate Me replies, Die you vicious cunt.

Going all intellectual: “Yes, I agree that the theory cannot be improved. It is simply false”. Philosophers insulting each other. It’s like So Bad—It. Really. Sucks? University Professors insulting their, like, liguistics students, y’know? The question of defamation enters the issue of arts criticism on the blogosphere, Melbourne thespians engage in open and frank discussions.

That’s about it, It’s 40 degrees, windy and smokey. I’m going climbing.

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prostitution in china

Andrés Gentry has written one of the most in-depth and compassionate pieces on prostitution in China I have ever read. There’s so much in it and it relies heavily on a vast amount of source material. Just read it.

Seven different categories of sex work can be bought in China:

1. ‘second wives’ have the superficial identity of concubines. However, second wives charge by time, usually per month, providing sexual services without the emotional and family elements which usually accompany the concubine’s role;

2. ‘packaged women’ work similarly to second wives but they do not live with the client, only ‘packaged’ for a business trip;

3. ‘female companions’ are active in cabarets, dance halls and restaurants charge by the hour. This service varies between merely accompanying a client while he visits the venue, to the ‘quickie’, to the ‘overnight package’;

4. ‘ding dong girls’ (‘ding dong’ refers to the doorbell) rent their own room and call clients by telephone after initial contact by another worker in the same establishment;

5. ‘hair salon’ or ‘massage parlour’ girls who on the surface wash hair or feet, or massage clients, but they also “do the business” in the establishment. They have less opportunity to ‘go out’ with clients or provide the ‘overnight package’;

6. ‘street girls’ usually hang around motels, cinemas etc. and perform ‘quickies’ elsewhere once a client is interested. Some accompany clients to the cinema, but they are actually providing a fondling service.

7. ‘underclass women’ generally service migrant workers, living in urban slum dwellings on construction sites. For some this is occasional or part time work, but others live with workers. They represent the lowest stratum of sex work, some doing it for basic food.

prostitution in china prostitution in china