by Mitch Moxley
We talked excitedly about how good a story we had, congratulating ourselves on a great job. Later, when telling friends about the trip, I would feel guilty about not feeling guiltier while I was in Erlian, speaking with women with crushed lives—guilty about the life I led compared to the lives of the women we interviewed.
Havar drove us to Beijing in his shitty little car—some Chinese brand I’d never heard of, a rust bucket that felt on the brink of collapse at all times. The seats were too small, but I was used to this after a year and a half in China. I rested my knees on the dash and watched the sun set over the grassy Inner Mongolian plains.
A few weeks later, Tom and I took the train to Guangzhou, in the Pearl River delta, twenty-four hours from Beijing. We spent the train journey reading books and talking about our story and trip and future plans. We were embracing new identities as freelance writers abroad. It felt like we were the stars of our own films.
Jim flew down and met us in Guangzhou, and the three of us took a two-hour bus to the gambling mecca of Macau, the former Portuguese colony turned Las Vegas of Asia. We came to report the second half of our trafficking story, but we had no idea how to do it. NGO workers had warned us that Macau could be a violent place, and nobody with a vested interest in the sex trade would be pleased with three foreign journalists wandering around town asking too many questions.
Macau is an odd town. For centuries it was a Portuguese colony, but it had been handed back to China in 1999. Because of the same “one country, two systems” policy that allowed Hong Kong to retain relative independence from the mainland, Macau had flourished as a gambling destination. About five times more money flowed through Macau than Las Vegas.
But Macau lacked much of the fun of its American equivalent. The major hotels—the MGM, the Wynn, the Venetian—although flashy and just as impressive as their Vegas counterparts, felt soulless. The restaurants and bars they housed were quiet; the casinos were for serious gamblers only. The bars out on the streets downtown, lit up with neon signs and housed on the ground floors of nondescript office buildings, pumped freezing air-conditioning and brutal European club music through their open windows.
The three of us checked into a fleabag hotel on narrow street in Macau’s old city. We were on the main island, a few miles but a world away from the glitzy hotels on the Cotai Strip, and we spent the first day wandering our neighborhood.
The buildings were in disrepair. Air conditioners leaked onto the sidewalks below, staining the walls of buildings as the drops of water snaked their way down. There was a rustic feel to the old city, where people ran small shops at street level and gathered on benches to talk and smoke. It was a mix of Portuguese and Cantonese. The food was delicious—we ate at a Portuguese restaurant that served chicken with rice, salted fish, warm bread; and at a Cantonese hole-in-the-wall offering dumpling soup and slices of duck. The city seemed stubbornly nostalgic, proud of its past and unsure of the new reality of gambling dollars and private jets.
We walked through thick crowds on the cobblestone streets of Senado Square in the center of the old city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, not far from churches and houses of worship from several different faiths. From certain streets in the old city, we could see the Grand Lisboa, the gold-windowed, lotus-shaped abomination that served as a line in the sand between the old, quaint, charming old city and Asia’s Vegas.
We walked over to the Grand Lisboa, through its packed casino floor, and across a sky-walk to its predecessor, the Casino Lisboa, a Macau institution built by gambling magnate Stanley Ho in 1970. The Casino Lisboa was a gaudy, shiny, sparkly freak show, with garish chandeliers and men in terrible suits and women with big hair wearing too much perfume. The Lisboa felt like the set of a Coen Brothers’ movie.
“This place is like a shag carpet,” Jim commented as he snapped photos, “or like your aunt’s house, where everything is covered in plastic.”
Signs of the sex trade were everywhere in Macau, ranging from freelance prostitutes trolling the casinos in major hotels to entire floors in smaller hotels dedicated to “saunas.” The young women who staffed the saunas came mostly from the Chinese mainland, as well as from Southeast Asia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Mongolia. Many of them were sold to sauna owners and were forced to work. Their passports were confiscated and they were housed in tiny dormitories. If they complained, they would be threatened with violence or rape. The year before, according to one of the NGO workers we’d interviewed, a fifteen-year-old girl’s tongue had been cut out by her captors after she sent text messages pleading for help.
In Macau, we arranged to meet a Mongolian woman named Naran, an outreach worker from Ulaanbaatar doing an internship with an international NGO in Hong Kong. She was twenty-four years old, tall and slim, with long black hair and prominent cheekbones. She had spent the previous four months seeking out Mongolian sex trade workers in Macau and Hong Kong, attempting to learn their stories and, if possible, offer help.
“They don’t want to speak to me,” she said over Cantonese food during our first night in the city. “They worry about getting killed.”
Tom asked how she was able to meet the women at all.
“I pretend to be one of them.”
“A prostitute?” he asked.
“Yes. I tell them I’m on a visa run from Hong Kong, and when we talk, I ask them about their health and if they feel safe.” She went on. “Traffickers control everything about the girls. They threaten to call their families and say they’re working as a slut in Macau. The pimps treat the girls as moneymaking machines, and they control them by any means to keep them in debt.”
After dinner, Naran walked us around to bars and saunas where she knew Mongolians worked. She stopped outside Eighteen Sauna, attached to the Golden Dragon Hotel. Lights in rainbow colors danced up and down above the entrance next to an illuminated dragon in gold and red. At street level, young men in suits tried to lure customers passing by on the street.
We talked about how we were going to report this. Clearly, it wasn’t going to be as easy as Erlian, and the prospect of violence came up when we mentioned to Naran that we were going to try to interview the women. We decided that Tom and I would go into the sauna first and pretend to be customers, and Jim would enter later and try to get photos with a concealed point-and-shoot camera.
Tom and I climbed the stairs inside to Eighteen Sauna. We were greeted by an attendant—twenty years old at most, with a brush cut and a baggy suit—who handed us laminated menus with peeling corners. A “Taiwan Model Massage,” the most expensive item on the menu, went for $1,914 Hong Kong dollars—about $250—followed by Korean, Chinese, and Filipino massages, at varying prices. About halfway down the list was a “Mongolian Massage,” for HK$1,705.
“We want to see the girls first,” Tom said.
“No problem,” the young attendant replied.
He grabbed Tom by the elbow and escorted us down a short hallway to the dimly lit bathhouse. The circular room, lined with shower stalls along the wall, smelled of soap, while steam rose from a large, peanut-shaped hot tub in the center of the room, where a few dozen men—mostly Chinese, with a few foreigners—waited, wrapped in red towels.
To electronic music, a line of about seventy women wearing lingerie were paraded before the men, circling the hot tub. Each woman had a number pinned to her bra. I was surprised at how beautiful some of them were. Others seemed drained and withdrawn, and several had bruises on their legs.
The men were quick to choose, walking down the line to stand opposite their preferred girl. They touched and flirted. They had one hour.
Tom and I watched from the doorway, the attendant standing behind us.
“This is even more depressing than I thought,” Tom whispered.
The attendant leaned in between us.
“Fifteen percent government tax,” he said, tapping his thin index finger on the menu. “Hand jobs are ch
eaper.”
We spent a few more days in Macau, visiting more saunas posing as customers and attending a conference on human trafficking, at which Naran spoke. We had everything we needed and decided it was time to go back to Guangzhou, where we planned to report another story.
On our last day in Macau we took a cab to the Cotai Strip, home to most of the major casino-hotels, including the Venetian, the biggest casino on the planet. We walked around the hotel’s cavernous halls; I bought a magazine from a souvenir shop and ate a fifteen-dollar slice of lukewarm pizza from the food court. There was a fake canal snaking through the hotel, with depressed-looking Middle Eastern men rowing gondolas. They offered us rides to nowhere, and we politely waved them off.
For a few minutes the three of us stood on a bridge over the canal and watched it all happen. I thought about the women we’d seen over the last few days. What were they doing right now, I wondered, the girls from the saunas? Did their parents know where they were? Did they have friends here? They were young girls. Did they have plans for the future? Where would they go next—to one of the brothels of Erlian? To Maggie’s in Beijing?
I took some coins—a few Macau pataca—from my pocket, made a wish, and tossed them in the water below.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
11
Chocolate City
We wandered the streets and alleys and garbage-strewn crevices of central Guangzhou, the southern Chinese metropolis once known as Canton, on the Pearl River delta, and marveled at what was for sale.
Everything.
There were oversized stuffed animals, Christmas decorations, fake plastic trees, neon signage, buttons, and bulk candy. There were paper, plastic, and reusable bags; stationery, sneakers, and scooters; Jay-Z T-shirts and LeBron James jerseys and pleather jackets. Butchers sold parts of animals I couldn’t identify. One shop had the flattened, dried-out face of a dead pig dangling from its awning, like some macabre Halloween mask.
We arrived in Guangzhou from Macau in the middle of the week. We shared a room in a hostel on the south side of the Pearl River. I was on a tight budget, living off my one and only check from Asia Weekly and some money I had borrowed from my parents.
That morning, we set out exploring. It was a humming city, the Asia of my imagination. Beijing could be chaotic, but Guangzhou was different: the hot, humid, sweaty mayhem of a southern Chinese city. In the old part, the narrow streets were warrens of chaos lined with palm trees. Overhead, elevated freeways clogged with traffic offered views of apartment towers with barred balconies strung with drying laundry. The new areas displayed the city’s growing wealth, featuring soulless apartment complexes, wealthy residents with spotless Audis and Mercedes, and high-rise buildings plucked from the Hong Kong skyline.
Tom, Jim, and I wandered the city that first day, stopping for noodle soup, drifting in and out of shops, and asking the prices of things we’d never buy. My Chinese was lower-intermediate now and I enjoyed the broken banter with shop owners: I feigned anger when they blatantly tried to rip me off, and I walked away once I’d haggled them down to a tenth of the original price.
Guangdong province was nicknamed “the World’s Factory.” In the fall of 2008, when we visited, it was home to 28,000 industrial firms, including 15,000 overseas-funded businesses. It made 75 percent of the world’s toys and 90 percent of its Christmas decorations (in a country that doesn’t celebrate Christmas). In Guangzhou, the provincial capital, it was all available directly from the source and at a discount.
Over the years, this access to cheap goods had attracted traders from around the world. When it was known as Canton, the city was China’s first port opened for trade with foreign countries. The British, Americans, French, and other world powers settled on a small island called Shamian, and evidence of Guangzhou’s colonial history remained in the form of ornate European-looking buildings that housed overpriced, mediocre restaurants, and a Starbucks filled with American couples waiting to adopt Chinese babies.
By 2008 the most visible foreign community in Guangzhou was African. These were the people we had come to meet. What had been a small group of a few hundred traders a decade earlier numbered as of 2008 as high as twenty thousand, according to the few articles we could find. The Africans living in Guangzhou dubbed the community “Little Africa,” or “Chocolate City.” Its residents came from Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, Tunisia, and elsewhere. They came to buy jeans, shoes, fake iPods, wigs, makeup, and whatever else they might be able to sell back home.
We thought it was a great story, one of the “big” stories Tom and I were after. Tom had read about the community in a Hong Kong newspaper, but we found that the story hadn’t been covered much internationally. It was interesting, counterintuitive, and timely. Trade between Africa and China had been soaring, but most stories focused on the other direction: Chinese involvement and investment in Africa. Both Tom and I were surprised to hear of the scope of Guangzhou’s African community. We planned to sell the story to a top-tier publication—the New York Times, Time, the Guardian. Somebody, we figured, would buy it.
Little Africa was actually in two areas near the city center, both surrounding large markets. One area was predominately Muslim, the other Christian. The men (most of the traders we would meet were men) who frequented the markets bought bulk goods that they shipped back to their home countries, where a relative or a friend would distribute them. For the most part, the communities had been allowed to thrive. The markets that catered to them were fully stocked and bustling, and nearby were African bars and African restaurants, unregistered African churches, and African mosques. Many of the traders had lived in Guangzhou for years. Some had settled down with Chinese wives.
But the rising cost of goods, currency inflation, and a faltering world economy had put pressure on Little Africa. Business was suffering. More crucially, China had been granting African traders only short-term visas or denying them outright. Africans who allowed their visas to expire were often imprisoned or forced to pay hefty fines. And the community was facing increased persecution at the hands of police, a crackdown that coincided with a growing number of Africans—eight that year—being sentenced to death for smuggling drugs into China.
We were clueless about how to approach the story. We had no contacts in the city and had done little in the way of preparation. During the afternoon of our first day in the city, we took a taxi to Tian Xiu market in the mostly Muslim area of Little Africa. The market was several stories high and wig shops dominated the ground floor. Barack Obama–wear was popular. He had been elected president a few weeks before, and several shops sold T-shirts and hoodies with a picture of the president-elect, and the words in English, “The First Black Man to Sit in the White House.”
We stopped for coffee nearby and debated how to make inroads with the traders. Three white guys wandering a market filled with black guys was enough to draw suspicious glances. We deployed Jim back in the market to take photos, and Tom and I went out to the quieter side streets adjacent to the market to scout out a few people to interview.
On a leafy street just around the corner, two African men were loading large boxes into the back of a van. One was tall and wearing a black T-shirt; the other short with a goatee and a navy sweater. Tom and I walked up and watched them work.
“Hey, what are you guys doing here?” I said, and as soon as I did, I winced, realizing that it was a stupid question, something a cop might say to a suspect in the movies. “I mean . . . what are you up to in Guangzhou?”
They looked at each other. The stocky man in the navy sweater said, “Who are you? Why you want to know?”
“We’re journalists, living in Beijing,” Tom said. “We’re down here doing a story about African traders like yourselves.”
They both laughed. “Why you want to do a story?” the man in blue said. “There’s no story.”
“Maybe. But we�
��re just curious. So what are you guys doing this afternoon?” Tom asked.
“Working,” the taller one said.
“What’s in the boxes?”
“Why?”
Tom and I exchanged glances. We tried a few more questions and got nothing. This was going nowhere.
“Okay,” I said, “thanks for your time.”
Tom and I walked back toward the market. We stopped outside a convenience store, bought bottles of water, and sat down on the curb outside.
A tall African man walked by and asked for a lighter.
“Sorry, don’t have one,” I said. He started walking away and I called out. “Hey, where are you from?”
His name was David and he was from Mali. We talked for a few minutes and he invited us into his store, which was in an alley around the corner from Tian Xiu market.
We took seats on fake leather chairs inside, and he offered us bread and a sugary orange drink. David had a lanky frame and dark skin, and wore baggy jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. I sat back in the pleather chair and took notes while Tom asked questions.
David had lived in Guangzhou for four years. He liked living there, he told us, and he liked working with Chinese. But rising prices were killing him. He bought whatever he could sell, whatever he could afford.
“G-Star is popular. Diesel. Depends. Depends if you can get the cheap price,” he said.
He picked up a folded pair of dark G-Star jeans and tossed them on my lap.
Guangzhou was changing, David said. His friends were leaving. He could only get one-month visas these days, and so he had to leave town every few weeks for Macau or Hong Kong in order to renew his visa. The costs added up.