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Fast-money sex trade lures Hong Kong maids
By Cookie Micaller
January 30, 2002
Hong Kong - Marie is seated at a corner table, her profile flickering amid the
confusion of lights at a popular disco where she works. She is one of the
latest recruits in a virtual army of heavily made-up young Asian women who
enliven Hong Kong's entertainment district of Wan Chai.
At 1am on a cold Wednesday, Marie should be sleeping off another exhausting day
of housecleaning and laundry work. But that night, she decided to cross the
thin line between domestic servility and prostitution.
Yet her story was drowned out by the disco beat and the commotion of dance,
booze, tipsy swagger and commercial sex negotiated in whispers. At 4 in the
morning, Marie - richer by HK$500 (US$64) - called it a day.
That was easy money for one night. It would have taken her a week of
back-breaking toilet cleaning, dishwashing, babysitting and laundry work to
earn that amount in the New Territories, where Marie has been a part-time
domestic worker for two years since leaving the Philippines. Like the more than
800,000 Filipino workers who leave home each year, she wanted to help turn her
family's misfortunes around through clean, decent, honest work.
"I didn't want to do this, but I'm forced to do it because I need money. I have
no other means," says Marie, 25, who is from the rice-farming Cagayan province
north of the Philippine capital, Manila. Her new night job, she confides, is a
secret from her parents back home.
Marie is not the only domestic worker seeking new opportunities in Hong Kong's
club scene. At the other clubs along Jaffe Road in Wan Chai, Mongolians, Thais
and mainland Chinese also wait for business executives and expatriates on the
prowl for quick, cheap sex.
There are no statistics on prostitutes in Hong Kong. But this does not mean
that prostitution does not exist, says the head of the United Filipinos in Hong
Kong (UNIFIL), a non-government organization working with the more than 150,000
Filipino domestic workers here.
"The fact that there are no [official] figures seems to me a denial of the
problem," says UNIFIL chairwoman Connie Bragas Regalado, who points out though
that the problem of domestic workers drifting to prostitution is not yet
widespread.
But it could reach that point, no thanks to the syndicates behind this thriving
industry, adds Regalado, who claims to have witnessed a long queue of Filipino
women being brought to ships to provide "entertainment" to sailors.
Apart from the syndicates, however, the women themselves are lured into the sex
trade by the easy money they can make to augment the wages they receive for
working eight hours a day, six times a week as a domestic helper. A domestic
worker earns a minimum monthly wage of HK$3,670, but Hong Kong legislators are
expected to decide soon on a proposal to cut this rate.
Many Filipino workers here also feel the pressure to earn more because they had
borrowed money from loan sharks to pay for exorbitant recruitment fees, in
order to take up work here. Yet many continue to come to Hong Kong to work, and
somearie, who find themselves needing more money, go beyond domestic work.
An accounting graduate, Marie was introduced to Hong Kong night life on a
seemingly ordinary evening: she and other domestic workers spent their day off
at the discos.
"Later on I got to meet some [Filipinas] working there," she recounts. "And
soon enough I learned what a 'PR' [public relations] job was - dancing with
customers, being 'tabled' [reserved as a customer's companion], being served
drinks and getting a cut from the club owner. The money comes fast."
For every drink her customer orders for her, Marie gets a HK$50 commission. It
is the same amount she gets hourly as a part-time domestic worker, except that
she gets twice, thrice or even more that amount in one hour at the nightclubs.
"PR girls", as Marie and the rest call themselves, are not employed by the
clubs, but they are used to lure customers. What happens outside the bars is
beyond the concern of the club owners and is the PR girls' own business.
Marie's friend Monette, who also moonlights as a PR girl, takes home HK$300-500
a night. "But on weekends I earn HK$1,000, besides the extra service if it's
called for, which is bigger," she says.
Loida, 31, worked as a domestic helper before becoming a waitress, and then a
PR girl. She is now married to a Westerner - but her work still continues.
"The income is too good to pass up," says Loida, while grooving to the music in
the club. "I told my husband I don't go out with the customers anyway. At least
I don't have to ask for money from my husband to send to my kid back home."
Whatever the women's reasons for plying the trade, the bottom line is still
economics. "The reason why these girls are here is the same as that of other
Filipino migrants, to earn money because there's no work in the Philippines,"
explains Gie Estrada, research and documentation coordinator of the
Asia-Pacific Mission for Migrant Filipinos.
Yet is not always easy for non-governmental organizations to monitor the
situation of these women. "Unless they come to us, it's hard to give them
assistance. Many are controlled by the syndicates," Estrada says. "So they're
exposed to all kinds of dangers," including HIV/AIDS and other sexually
transmitted diseases.
Estrada believes the Philippine government should get into the picture to help
the women, saying there should be "an effort to know this problem". Regalado
agrees: "The government should give the girls protection if it can't already
give them jobs in their own country."
An official at the Philippine Consulate admits that his office has no record on
Filipinos engaged in prostitution. But this, he says, does not mean that the
government is ignoring the problem.
"We can't ascertain that they are into prostitution, since most of them are
legally employed in Hong Kong," the official says. "Unless somebody comes
forward or complains, we would not really know how many are out there. Of
course, we are concerned about this and we would like to discuss this issue
with the Hong Kong authorities."
But while neither the women nor the government are seeking each other's
cooperation, it is business as usual in Wan Chai.
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