Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:14:00 +0000

It’s easy to disregard sex workers, to relegate them to the margins of society and pretend that they don’t exist in the perfect little world that is uncomfortable with the idea that there are members of our population who have sex for money. Often considered an untouchable part of society (no matter what culture we’re talking about), sex workers are often overlooked in anthropological or sociological studies with many researchers content to look at the more accepted members of society rather than delve into the seedy underbelly of urban life. Luckily, the sex workers of Dalian, a bustling metropolis in Northern China, had their voices heard by Tiantian Zheng who writes a beautiful study of the realities facing these women.

Red Lights shows that not only are these women a vital part of society, their work is inextricably entwined with China’s rapidly changing economy. The hostesses that Zheng follows are not the stereotypical submissive Asian sex goddesses that are so often a fixture of the porn industry. Nor are they unwilling sexual slaves, sold into a world they don’t understand. Many of the women enter the trade willingly, seeing hostessing as the only way to make enough money to support their families back in the rural villages that they call home. But, this is not a female empowerment story either.

Zheng does an excellent job of showing the reader all sides of the story. The struggle to stay safe in an incredibly unsafe profession. The violence and fear that are often a daily part of life for the hostesses. The conflict between their new lives in the city and their rural pasts and the difficulty of “going home again” when the city has hardened the hostesses view of life and the way the world works. The thrill of making their money versus the shame of a profession that isn’t looked kindly upon by family—even though for some of these families, it’s often the only source of income.

Like so many decisions in life, the decision of these women to become hostesses and to willingly serve men isn’t an easy one and it isn’t easily understood. This book adequately portrays these women as real people. We learn how they feel about their jobs, how they relate to their families and how they survive in the dangerous world of sex work. Unsurprisingly, the real world is quite a bit more complex than the stereotypes let on.

Given the serious nature of the subject, one would expect Red Lights to be a tough read. However, Zheng handles her subjects with a delicate touch, showing readers the hostesses’ pain, as well as their happiness. While the lengthy breakdowns of the Chinese economy and the effect of decades of socialist beliefs on the Chinese citizen may be a little too long and too in-depth for a casual reader, overall I found the book engrossing. The hostesses’ stories scattered throughout added a human element to what could have easily been an overly academic tome. Those interested in the social ramifications of sex work or the effect the post-Socialist economy has on Chinese women should pick up this book.

Written by: Jennifer Lee Johnson, August 31st 2009

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:56:00 +0000

By Tiantian Zheng

University Of Minnesota Press

On one occasion, gangsters walked into the bar, grabbed me by the arm, and started dragging me up the stairs toward a private room intended for hostesses’ sexual encounters with clients. The women were also sometimes raped there by gangsters. I quickly realized what was going on—that I was in real danger... Whereas safety was a major issue, hygiene was another. Living in a filthy karaoke bar room without bathing facilities, I had lice in my hair and over my whole body. However, by living and working closely with hostesses in the bar, I gained their recognition and friendship.

Ethnographers always get their man (or woman... or both) even if they have to use their bodies as instruments of data collection and analysis. Ethnographers usually become participant-observers during fieldwork to facilitate rapport and to capture what people actually do as opposed merely to what they say they do, but as these snippets suggest, such can lead to squeamish feelings and harrowing experiences. Zheng participated in activities that male ethnographers could only have observed. Her analysis of sexual networking is consequently first-rate because she moves easily and persuasively from person to state, capital to labor, ideology to practice.

Red Lights is a beautifully written account of the emergence of new femininities and masculinities in post-socialist People’s Republic of China. Zheng analyzes the growth, structure, registration and functions of the karaoke bars now dotting the landscape and in which are played out the social and economic contradictions of class, heterosexuality, ethnicity and gender. In often grim detail, she shows how Communist Party bureaucrats, gangsters, and small business owners (literally) patronize young, unmarried females. In so doing, the former make money, express obeisance to their own social superiors, and get back at Mao Zedong for allegedly having sapped their masculinity during the Cultural Revolution. Women escape poverty (sort of), find boyfriends (ditto), manipulate men as best they can, and experience female solidarity. Her male informants freely express their disturbing misogyny while also confessing their sexual anxieties and class resentment. Confucianism, capitalism and communism each but differently punish women for alleged sexual promiscuity while rewarding men for theirs.

Many tens of thousands of Chinese women have migrated from economically and socially stagnating rural areas to the strip clubs and karaoke bars, back rooms, and guest houses of urban centers such as Dalian, where they “choose” forms of employment that entail grotesque subservience, daily humiliation, squalid working conditions, and social leprosy. Dalian was long ago hailed as an oasis of economic development during the period of Occupation by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s. Its morally unsavory status today as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah—but whose economic function is central to post-socialist China—reveals the social and economic contradictions of Confucianism, patriarchy, communism, Western media forms and capitalism. “In Dalian,” Zheng writes, “taxes paid by the entertainment industry are the largest source of local revenue.”

Red Lights opens with Zheng’s painful personal stories of growing up a filial daughter in a sex-negative and patriarchal Chinese household. It continues with her painful humiliation in a U.S. college classroom regarding her views of gender relations. It proceeds to detail the humiliation of Chinese women. Her extremely sorrowful Afterword, entitled “From Entertainer to Prostitute,” shows the inexorable logic of patriarchy and capitalism and gives the lie to pro-sex work activist positions that can neglect or ignore specifically gendered humiliation in sex work. Her Acknowledgments section deeply moved me in recounting the joys and pains of scholarly work. It exemplifies the beauty and honor of academic collaborations that break through barriers of geography, language, culture, theory and gender but that are nevertheless mindful of them.

Red Lights would make a fine addition to graduate-level courses in social theory and fieldwork, but could be used in upper-division courses in gender studies and ethnography, too. It is a major contribution to ethnographic explorations of gender, sexuality, and prostitution, and to Asian Studies, too, which has enabled too few participant observation-style studies of sexual networking.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., August 7th 2009