Invisible E-Book

Hsiao-Hung Pai

• Herausgeber: The Westbourne Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Ming and Beata share neither the same language nor cultural background, yet their stories are remarkably similar. Both are single mothers in their thirties and both came to Britain in search of a new life: Ming from China and Beata from Poland. Neither imagined that their journey would end in a British brothel. In this chilling exposé, investigative journalist Hsiao- Hung Pai works undercover as a housekeeper in a brothel and unveils the terrible reality of the British sex trade. Many workers are trapped, some are controlled - the lack of freedoms this invisible strait of society suffers is both shocking and scandalous and at odds with the idea of a modern Britain in the twenty-first century. 'This is investigative journalism at its best. Fearless, rigorous and compassionate, Invisible is a shocking exposé of Britain's shadow world of sex slaves that enthralls and shames by turn. A master storyteller, Hsiao-Hung Pai opens a door onto one of the most secretive and least understood communities in the UK. Essential reading for anyone interested in the real price of sex.' James Brabazon, author of My Friend the Mercenary 'To navigate the sex trade of Chinese women in the UK with Invisible is to feel the desperation of thousands of women who enter sex work as the only option for survival. Hsiao-Hung Pai has done it again; she went undercover, smelled the breath of violence, cried hidden in a brothel bathroom and videotaped the underworld of pimps and madams who make their living off slaving women in need. Hsiao-Hung deflates the myth of sex work as a free choice for migrant women.' Lydia Cacho, author of Slavery Inc. 'Hsiao-Hung Pai is an intrepid seeker of truth, fearless and unstoppable.' Nick Broomfield 'A profound, disturbing and compassionate account of the tragic lives of women migrant workers who live and suffer in our midst' Helen Bamber

Leseprobe

INVISIBLE

Britain’s Migrant Sex Workers

Hsiao-Hung Pai

Hsiao-Hung Pai is a Taiwanese-born writer and journalist. She is the author of Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Orwell Prize, and Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants. Pai’s report on the Morecambe Bay tragedy for the Guardian was adapted into Nick Broomfield’s film Ghosts. Her undercover work for Invisible also forms much of the basis for a documentary made by Broomfield for Channel 4. She lives in London.

http://hsiaohung.squarespace.com

‘This is investigative journalism at its best. Fearless, rigorous and compassionate, Invisible is a shocking exposé of Britain’s shadow world of sex slaves that enthrals and shames by turn. A master storyteller, Hsiao-Hung Pai opens a door onto one of the most secretive and least understood communities in the UK. Essential reading for anyone interested in the real price of sex.’

James Brabazon, author of My Friend the Mercenary

‘Hsiao-Hung Pai has done it again; she went undercover, smelled the breath of violence, cried hidden in a brothel bathroom and videotaped the underworld of pimps and madams who profit from the enslavement of women in need. To navigate the sex trade of Chinese women in the UK with Invisible is to feel the desperation of thousands of women who enter sex work as the only option for survival … Invisible seeks to deflate the myth of sex work as a free choice for migrant women.’

Lydia Cacho, author of Slavery Inc.

‘A profound, disturbing and compassionate account of the tragic lives of women migrant workers who live and suffer in our midst … Once read there is no place for denial or complacency – they can be invisible no longer’

Helen Bamber OBE

This book is dedicated to all migrant women workers in their struggle

Contents

Introduction

London Calling

Go West

Bedding in in Beds

You Pay, We Play

Under Pressure

A Tale of Two Women

Taking the Plunge

Title to Come

Opportunities Knock

Love and Money

A Room with no View

Living in the Light

Going Home

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

This book is a work of non-fiction. All names have been changed to protect individual identities.

Introduction

‘Why are you so interested in sex and sex work?’ ‘Why do you want to write about it?’ These are questions I’ve been asked many times while working on this book.

Actually, sex work was not one of the occupations I was looking at when I started researching my first book, Chinese Whispers, which explores the lives of undocumented Chinese migrants working in Britain. I talked to and visited migrants working on salad farms and construction sites and in food factories, restaurants and takeaways. At the time – this was around 2005 – there had always seemed more Chinese men than women in these workforces, but every now and then I heard stories, told mostly by men in private conversations, about Chinese women entering the sex trade.

As my workplace research progressed, I noticed a rise in the number of women I was seeing. I was told by migrants themselves that the proportion of female migrant workers is now around 20 per cent, compared with 10 per cent at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is indicative of a well-recognised trend towards the feminisation of migration resulting from increasing poverty and structural inequality in the global economy. And it is a trend that’s growing.

China’s increased participation in the global market-place during the past three decades has changed the position of women beyond recognition: privatisation of public services has pushed them back into the carer role within the family, while at the same time the dismantling of state-owned enterprises and privatisation of national industries have made millions of working women jobless and marginalised in the job market, pushing them to find alternative means to feed their families.

As in the former Soviet-bloc countries, economic liberalisation has been accompanied by a boom in the sex industry in China. Sex tourism has flourished alongside a growing eroticisation of popular culture and commodification of sexuality, particularly over the past two decades. Women have once again become objectified and second-class – much more so than ever before. While economic reform has created new opportunities for some, working-class women and women from rural China particularly have seen their status degraded in the transformation.

During the last decade, as migration has continued to feminise globally, we have seen ever more migrant women filling the lowest-paid British jobs. In the course of my research, I began to hear more and more stories of what was happening to migrant women as the most vulnerable group of workers in a variety of workplaces. I heard of cases of sexual harassment of waitresses and kitchen workers. I became acquainted with a Chinese single mother who was raped while working as a nanny in Birmingham. She told me she wasn’t the only one. I listened to the stories of Filipino and Indian domestic workers who suffered from abuse behind closed doors in the households of celebrities and wealthy businessmen. I also met new arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria and learned how these women struggled through low-paid work and gender discrimination in the hospitality industry. Some of them have discovered Britain’s trade unions and become members, but the majority fight their battles in isolation.

Then, in 2006, while working undercover as a leek picker in Northamptonshire, I befriended a woman who told me she worked as a maid in a brothel when there was no farm work available. She had been robbed before during a raid by a local gang, but that experience didn’t deter her from returning for more work in other brothels. She introduced me to a precarious world in which migrant women have found themselves trapped, one in which sex work stood out as the employment option with the highest potential rewards but also the highest risks to women’s personal safety and well-being.

After completing Chinese Whispers, I decided to investigate further. Invisible is the result. I began my background research by contacting the London-based British organisations that promote health care and health awareness in the sex industry. These groups were finding it hard to reach migrant sex workers, there being no migrant community organisations working with them and also a great deal of prejudice towards them from their own communities.

Through my contacts in the migrant communities, I learned more about the industry and was introduced to a number of people working in it. I discovered that there are 80,000 sex workers in the UK, 20,000 of whom are migrants. In the EU, research into the sex industry conducted by the Amsterdam-based TAMPEP project, among others, has found that the number of nationalities has increased over the years, from at most thirteen during 1993–4 to sixty in 2008. This is a clear indication that the number of migrant sex workers has grown and that the industry has been highly ‘ethnicised’.

I also learned that in 2000 there were already up to half a million migrant women working without documents as sex workers in EU countries. That number has undoubtedly grown since then as such underground work has attracted increasing numbers of migrant women, despite its risks and social stigma, largely due to their illegal immigration status.

The social stigma attached to sex work makes research difficult. In the British Chinese communities, for instance, sex workers are subject to a great deal of contempt and discrimination and prostitution is treated as a taboo subject, even though sex is sold in every town and city across the country. Understandably, few sex workers are willing to share their stories without trust and the guarantee of confidentiality. And trust takes time to build. This was why, initially, I relied on my existing contacts for introductions. This way, I got to know Ming, a courageous Chinese single mother who was reserved, dignified and kind. And through her, I became acquainted with others working in the trade.

Not wanting to rely entirely on my contacts, I began a more direct, ‘door-to-door’ search for women who might be willing to share their stories. I trawled Soho, and many times I had doors slammed in my face. Eventually, though, my strategy worked and I found Beata, a single mother from Poland, who was pleased to have someone to talk to. Since then, we have had numerous chats over coffee and cigarettes in the flat where she works, her local café and her bedsit in Finsbury Park. I also became acquainted with the maid, Pam, who looked after the place where Beata worked. Pam was very approachable and chatty. She, too, shared her story with me.

I visited other cities: Nottingham, Manchester, Portsmouth. I became convinced that I’d never understand what really goes on in the trade simply by conducting one-off interviews, so I began to get more ‘personal’. In Manchester, I met with local pimps, letting some of them buy me dinner, visiting them in their local bars and, on one occasion, even meeting a brothel owner in his house. It took time to gain such access, but it gave me an invaluable insight into how the industry works and how those within it operate.

At this stage, though, I remained an observer. When I went to these meetings, I was seen as a reporter trying to do her job. I was someone with a particular agenda. An outsider. We would agree on a venue and always be in a controlled, well-managed situation. But although it is standard journalistic practice to adopt an objective stance as a neutral observer, doing so removes the possibility of ever obtaining an entirely unfiltered account of the issues you want to write about. As an outsider, all interaction is based on social presumptions about your role and your understanding. You are fed the standard line. You lose the opportunity to build the closeness and intimacy which precondition truthfulness.

The paradox is that sometimes we need to put on a different identity in order to understand how different social relations and identities really work. We need to deceive in order to expose deception. As journalist Günter Wallraff, who posed as a Turkish migrant to research the lives of West Germany’s often badly exploited migrant workers, famously said, ‘One must disguise oneself in order to unmask society; one must deceive and dissimulate in order to find out the truth.’

Through my research, I realised that an ‘observer’ approach wouldn’t be enough to get to the bottom of the subject matter. How would I ever understand how Beata and Ming really felt if all I could do was to listen to them? How could I discover the extent to which their experience of exploitation is shared among migrant women in the sex trade? And how could I test the theory that the nature of sex work conducted by migrant workers is determined by inequalities of gender, ethnicity and class?

I had a framework in mind: not only did I want to examine the process by which migrant women left their homes to enter the sex trade and to detail their exploitative working conditions, I also wanted to understand their sense of economic powerlessness and their perception of the reality of entrapment – and in some cases, control – that I believed were characteristic of their lives as sex workers. I didn’t want to portray the migrant women as merely victims of oppression (although they clearly are victimised, as they have no control over the material circumstances that determine the course of their lives and no control over their wage structure and work regime), but to document their reconciliation and their resistance against their circumstances.

I knew that the best and only way to do that would be to adopt a ‘participant approach’. Inevitably, that would involve subterfuge, but I considered that a necessary means to an end – the exposure of exploitation and its mechanisms in order to uncover and question the lack of institutional protection for workers and to reveal the failure of government immigration policies as one of the causes of such workers’ vulnerability. In my opinion, it would serve the public interest to achieve these aims. A little subterfuge was clearly justifiable, and I decided, as I had with the farm workers, to work undercover. I would live and work in the sex industry in order to witness its reality and experience at least some of it first-hand.

My first step was to get a job inside a brothel, as a housekeeper. Looking through the papers, I saw many ads repeating this identical message for punters:

‘Oriental. Very young and busty. All services. Reasonable price.’

Amazingly similar in tone to the ads placed by migrant jobseekers found in many West German newspapers – ‘Foreigner, strong, seeks work of any kind, including heavy and dirty jobs, even for little money’ – when Wallraff started looking for a job for his undercover research in March 1983.

An old London contact told me he knew of someone who was looking for a housekeeper in Burnley. He had never met the man, but believed that it was a business recently set up in the depressed Lancashire town. I dialled the number he gave me, and was offered the job straight away. Finding work through word of mouth is very common among migrants, and the brothel owner suspected nothing unusual about my call.

Although this was not the first time I’d worked undercover, I was aware that this would be a much harder industry to work in, and a much more dangerous one. On the train north I rehearsed my cover story: my name is Li Yun. I’m thirty-eight, a single mother. Without papers. I remember my heart beating fast during that train trip. What I knew of the industry from the interviews I’d conducted didn’t fill me with confidence. I could only speculate about the risks involved.

The brothel owner turned out to be a harmless-looking man, a former kitchen worker, quite smartly dressed, from the northeast of China. He met me at Blackburn, from where we took the train to Burnley. ‘Call me Li,’ he introduced, handing me a can of Coke. He told me that he had closed down his business in east London and relocated in the north ‘because there were too many robberies in London’.

I was to be paid £180 for a seven-day week and was to have only one day off per month. I was also instructed not to leave the premises during working hours. These, I found out later, were all common conditions in the Chinese-run sex trade. Inside the brothel I was told by the madam not only to do all the household duties and keep accounts, but also keep an eye on the girls ‘in case they cut short on working time’.

The madam ruled her charges harshly, forbidding unnecessary communication, despite the fact that the women were here for only a week at a time and there was little chance of rebellion against an employer who openly treated them as commodities to be distributed among the parlours. When I asked one what food she liked the madam intervened to tell me that the workers’ needs were irrelevant to the business.

The girl in question was called Mei. Like all the others, she was there to be worked like an animal to the maximum – till around 2 a.m. each day. When she came to say good-night to me on the last evening of her stay, she’d removed her make-up and looked like herself. She’s a single mother, too, just like my undercover identity Li Yun. Wearing an exhausted expression after working more than sixteen hours, she said the words that I was to hear from every single mum working in the trade: ‘I’m doing this to support my child.’

She told me she was leaving for Blackburn the next morning to work in another brothel for a week. She worked a circuit of four different sex businesses in four Lancashire towns.

As it turned out, the Burnley experience confirmed my expectation and theory: migrant women are compelled to enter the sex industry by the low-wage economy in which they become trapped as soon as they arrive in Britain. Within the sex trade, they are trapped once again: their freedom of movement is restricted, most of the money they earn is extorted and both their health and safety are put at risk.

I wasn’t a resounding success as a brothel maid. My first assignment lasted only three days, mainly because I couldn’t stomach sharing a bed with the madam (the place wasn’t large enough for me to have my own room). But it had given me a taste of what it was like to work in the trade, and prepared me for my next position – as a brothel housekeeper in dull, suburban Bedford. As you’ll later learn, the set-up there was even worse than in Burnley, the employer ruling with a rod of iron. But it was all good experience, and the various interviews I conducted with brothel maids, sex workers and their employers enabled me to build up a clear picture of what life is really like for a migrant worker in the sex industry.

So when film-maker Nick Broomfield contacted me to discuss making an undercover Channel 4 documentary about the sex trade, I felt quite confident that I would be able to do the job. This time, I was not only going to record the daily happenings in my diary, but also film them using a camera concealed in a pair of glasses. The footage would be saved on memory cards which I was to exchange with the crew as often as possible.

Once I’d learned how to use the glasses, I scoured the Chinese newspapers to find a job. Predictably, there were more vacancies in London than anywhere else: a staggering 80 per cent of women sex workers in the capital are migrants.

This time my cover identity was Xiao Yun, a forty-two-year-old single mother from Zhejiang province in southern China. (I chose Zhejiang because the social networks of the Zhejiangnese migrants are not as established as those of the Fujianese or north-eastern migrants. Therefore it was less likely that my deception would be discovered.) I had come to the UK three years earlier on a business visitor visa that had since expired, so was now an ‘illegal’.

My first job interview was in an upmarket brothel called the House of Leisure in affluent St John’s Wood. From its decor, it might have been a four-star hotel. A woman named Ling Ling, who looked to be in her early forties, came up to the top of the road to meet me, looking around warily all the time, as if to check that no one was following us. I hoped she hadn’t spotted Nick in his spy glasses down the road. As we walked on, she told me that her premises, close to the famous Abbey Road recording studios, was a ‘high-class place for wealthy locals’.

Although Ling Ling and I had talked only about housekeeping on the phone, when we finally sat down inside her room – the only place in her otherwise pitch-dark flat that had any sunlight coming through – she asked me whether I would consider sex work. ‘Haven’t you thought about that before?’ she said in a soft voice. I was surprised, as this was the first time a brothel madam had asked me this openly. I demurred, saying I was too old.

‘No, no, many women of your age do this work, believe me,’ she persisted. Then she looked at my spy glasses and added, ‘If you do decide to do this job, though, you can’t wear your glasses during work.’

Ling Ling was obviously uninterested in hiring a maid. Back in the office, I dialled the number given in another job ad and got through to a woman named Ah Qin, based in Stratford, east London, who was looking to exploit the business opportunity offered by the forthcoming Olympic Games. That was my first job for our documentary, though I was no more successful there than I’d been in Burnley. A week later, as it became clear that Ah Qin’s new venture wasn’t going to work out, I appeared to be the major dispensable item and was dismissed after being paid half of what was promised. Fortunately, one of my coworkers at Stratford, a girl from Taiwan, tipped me off about a new housekeeping job in Finchley, where I was subsequently employed for six weeks.

This turned out to be toughest assignment I have ever undertaken. Partly, it was because both my task and my agenda were different from previous undercover jobs. Filming without permission was difficult enough, but I also had to make sure that the battery in my glasses stayed charged as well as recording the footage onto memory cards, changing the cards when they were full and smuggling them out. And all without letting anyone suspect what I was up to. (There was a full day when I simply couldn’t find a place to recharge the battery and therefore couldn’t film.) Apart from these technical difficulties, I had to develop my relationship with the women around me and deal with Grace, my harridan of an employer, who began to pressure me to ‘help out with sex work’ almost as soon as I arrived.

As someone experienced in undercover work, I’d never imagined that I wouldn’t be able to cope with life inside a brothel. I had thought that the only challenge for me would be to produce visually satisfactory material for a documentary. To my surprise, within two weeks I began to feel so emotionally and physically exhausted that I felt a desperate need to leave the place. It affected my performance inside the brothel and I was losing concentration even in the everyday tasks my job as a housekeeper obliged me to do: cleaning, cooking, opening the door to customers and keeping track of each girl’s daily earnings.

I tried to control my own feelings and not allow despair to creep in. I constantly reminded myself that I was doing an undercover job and that I mustn’t become emotionally involved. But things continued to deteriorate. My stubborn refusal to take up part-time sex work in addition to maiding had infuriated Grace, resulting in constant verbal abuse on a daily basis. It was becoming unbearable and I was ready to give up.

At the time, my reaction puzzled me, but I later realised the reason for it. I had focused on filming and writing about the women I had met and talked to and their relationship with their employer. I had observed the daily life of the women without trying to reflect on what was happening to me and my own feelings. By ignoring my own emotions, I wasn’t understanding them. I had participated emotionally in all that was happening around me. I had internalised the pain and hardship these women were suffering and the inhumane relations I had witnessed. Simply put, I had let it get to me. When Grace gave me her harsh moralistic lectures on how to earn money for my family, I tried to hold back my tears and smile it away. But soon enough, I found myself crying uncontrollably behind the closed bathroom door. By my fourth week into the job, after each session of bullying and verbal abuse I was locking myself in the toilet in order to find some individual space where I could try to put myself together again.

I had become Xiao Yun. How could I not? I had adopted the identity of a single mother working without papers and willing to do anything in order to support her family back home. Desperation motivated Xiao Yun, and everyone around her could see that. Grace saw that very well. She wanted to make sure Xiao Yun would yield to her pressure to take up sex work, for then she would become even more desperate, even more malleable. I experienced what was inflicted upon Xiao Yun, as I was meant to. The problem was that Xiao Yun and I were now one. I took personally everything that was happening to her. I felt everything that she would possibly feel.

I survived only because I knew there would come a moment when I could leave Xiao Yun behind. At the end of the assignment I could walk away and shed her like a too-tight skin. I would be able to leave this underground world, never to return. But Xiao Yun and her kind would not be so fortunate.

Günter Wallraff ’s undercover persona, Ali, suffered similarly. Through Ali, Wallraff saw the racism of German society, the hypocrisy and brutality of the ruling ideologies; in his words, he saw an apartheid within a ‘democracy’. Through Xiao Yun, I saw the sacrifice of all those migrant mothers who are like her. I experienced what they have to endure in a society that has consigned so many migrant women to a subhuman existence.

London Calling

I met Ming for the first time five summers ago, when a friend of a London kitchen fryer known as Brother Li introduced us. But it took more than one phone call to convince her she could trust me. At the time, Ming was a thirty-two-year-old single mother from the outskirts of Shenyang in the north-east of China. For most of her adult life she had worked her heart out in a state-run brewery, until 2003, when the company laid her off, along with fifty others. Ming told me she’d been the victim of so-called ‘reform’ that had swept across the industrial north-east of the country resulting in mass job losses. The minimal compensation she had received on her dismissal had lasted barely two years, and she had found it increasingly difficult to support her seven-year-old daughter and elderly parents. Decent jobs in her city were few and Ming eventually felt she had no option but to go abroad. She borrowed what was, for her, a large sum of money and left the country to seek a livelihood.

I was anxious to hear Ming’s story, but when I finally sat her down to talk about her life in Britain, she had other things in mind. She wanted to tell me about Xiao Mei, a murdered fellow migrant whom she’d never met, but whose own tale Ming had somehow internalised. Ming seemed haunted by Xiao Mei’s misfortune. ‘It is so sad,’ Ming said frowning solemnly, stirring the hot chocolate in front of her in a café in Chinatown, the only place she would meet me. She raised her thick eyebrows as she spoke, her dark brown eyes shining movingly with melancholic compassion. Her straight dyed brown hair, long to the top of her jeans, looked reddish against the sunlight through the window.

It all started on a sunny day at the open market on Whitechapel Road, Ming told me breathlessly. The midday hustling and bustling had only just begun, right below the first-floor room where Lenin had stayed during his years in exile. Here, British Asian street sellers of cheap garments and handbags busied themselves with more customers than usual – when the sun was out, business prospered. Meanwhile, young South African nurses and Lithuanian builders and labourers strolled along during their lunch break from the Royal London Hospital across the road.

A few steps away, old men clutched half empty bottles of drink outside the Blind Beggar, waiting for it to open. (Back in 1966, the much-feared East End gangster Ronnie Kray shot his rival George Cornell in this pub when he was enjoying a gin and tonic, because Cornell had publicly called him a ‘big fat poof’.) That morning, Ming related, a group of young Chinese men and women arrived outside the pub – all with bags and rucksacks of DVDs on their shoulders. They made a space of a few yards between each other, and formed a line of street sellers in front of the underground station. Each of them watched the movement of the pedestrians warily, alert for plain-clothes police officers – men who often confiscated counterfeit DVDs but kept them for their own consumption.

Like all the others, Xiao Mei carried hundreds of DVDs in her bag, ready for a long working day. To protect her eyes from the strong sunshine, she pulled down a white straw hat she had brought from home, a tiny village in Jiangjing, central Fujian. Xiao Mei had left Fujian with her husband a year before, but had already outgrown her nostalgia for home. Eking out a meagre living on a tiny plot of land was not something either of them wanted to return to. For the same reason, tens of thousands had left villages around Jiangjing to come to Britain to work in the past fifteen years.

At the time, Xiao Mei and her husband’s primary aim was to pay off their suffocatingly heavy debts to the moneylenders from whom they had borrowed to pay the smuggler’s fees. Their need to earn fast had taught them to be accepting of all the available work choices and conditions in Britain, no matter how difficult. But it had become increasingly hard to get any sort of employment in the Chinese catering trade, so the couple had decided to go into DVD selling on the street, exactly as many of their relatives and neighbours from their village had.

They had moved into a crowded first-floor flat on Cannon Street Road, just off the busy Commercial Road, with their cousins and villagers who’d come to Britain earlier. The group kept to themselves, constantly aware of the risks of exposing their place of residence to the authorities. Luckily, everyone else in the building seemed to like minding their own business, too. Their next-door neighbours were a group of young Ukrainian men and women who never tried to strike up a conversation with anyone outside their flat. The only thing the Chinese knew about the Ukrainians was that they seemed always to return home late in the evening – perhaps they worked shifts as cleaners or bartenders?

Despite its modest surroundings in the more run-down part of the area, Cannon Street Road was a perfect place for the Chinese migrants – it was relatively secluded and only a few blocks from the main street where they did their DVD selling. But one unlucky workday, Xiao Mei’s husband hadn’t run fast enough when the police officers showed up on Whitechapel Road. He had been arrested and jailed, a devastating development. Xiao Mei hadn’t blamed him for being careless, nor the police officers for catching him. She was modest and accepting, quite like Ming, as I found out later. Xiao Mei blamed her own fate instead. After all, it was fate that had condemned her to a life of poverty as a nongmin (peasant) in Fujian; she had only the heavens to cry to.

Xiao Mei had no idea if her husband would be deported at the end of his prison sentence. Thus the burden of debt she carried on her shoulders had become even heavier. She had to make more money, even faster, to be able to pay off their debts. Only then could her two sons back home finally benefit from any improvement in their lives. Xiao Mei was aware of the many risks around her: not only of police raids, but robberies by local youths who targeted Chinese street sellers. She knew also that for many local men she was viewed as an exotic sex object on display. Xiao Mei and every other female DVD seller knew that many of the men who walked past were not interested in buying DVDs; many seemed to have a fetish for East Asian females.

Ming sneered and shrugged her shoulders at this point. It was as if she herself had had similar experiences. On Whitechapel Road, most of the Chinese women selling DVDs didn’t mind the local men’s over-friendly approaches, patting them on the shoulders or touching their arms, so long as they took a few pounds out of their pockets and bought a couple of DVDs. As one told me later, ‘There’s always the risks of being troubled and harassed; there’s no way around it. But the main thing is to sell the goods. We’ll tolerate most things in order to achieve that, and local men know it – they know we’ll put up with their rude manners and talk.’

Often, local men would approach the most attractive of the Chinese women asking them whether they ‘liked to fuck’. Initially, the women didn’t know how to respond. They would giggle and wave the men away. But some men took it a step further, asking the women to return home with them ‘to try out the DVDs first’ before buying them. It couldn’t have been easy to refuse such requests, Ming said, shaking her head, sighing. After all, these men were their local buyers, and losing only one of them meant losing potential income on this street.

Under such pressure, some felt compelled to agree, in spite of the dangers. For these women, the risks did not seem as frightening as being arrested and deported back to China. And once again, they trusted to fate. ‘It all depends on luck, whether you stay safe or not,’ one of Xiao Mei’s fellow villagers later told me.

Knowing the migrants were without papers and all on their own, certain local men felt free to do anything they wanted. Some women had been sexually assaulted or even raped in customers’ homes. Others felt they had no alternative but to accept money for sex.

The day Xiao Mei was murdered had been a slow one, Ming said. After several hours Xiao Mei had sold only five DVDs, earning a mere £10. She had begun to feel restless. But the sellers couldn’t be too aggressive with their sales pitches. Police raids had increased in the area and everyone had to be vigilant. For fear of attracting the authorities’ attention, sellers had to wait for buyers to approach them.

‘Miss,’ a voice said from behind her.

Xiao Mei looked back and saw one of her regulars – an overweight forty-something white man. She remembered him well because of the paleness of his face. He was wearing a rucksack on his shoulders. He smiled at her uneasily.

‘You want DVDs, Mr Brown?’ she asked automatically. These were among the few words of English that she knew.

The man stared at her, not uttering a word. What was he thinking? Xiao Mei dared not look into his eyes.

‘DVDs? I have many,’ she pressed on nevertheless, taking a handful of samples out of her bag. All the latest blockbusters.

The man took the discs in his hands and flipped through them quickly, clearly not really interested.

‘Which one you want?’ Xiao Mei asked, hoping for a sale.

He rubbed his dark brown hair and shook his head, saying, ‘I’ve no idea if these are of good quality. They aren’t always good.’

‘Good quality! Very good quality!’ Xiao Mei responded enthusiastically, with her thumb up, eager to persuade him.

‘Well,’ said the man, shaking his head again as if to make sure that Xiao Mei understood. ‘As I said, I’ve bought these DVDs before and they were all crap. I’ll have to try them at home before I can pay you for any of them.’

As Xiao Mei anxiously looked for words to respond, he stared at her again and asked, ‘I can try these at home now if you like. If they are all right, I’ll buy them.’

Xiao Mei nodded gratefully. She had been to his place a few times before. As she had described it to her co-workers, it was in a strange part of London called Rotherhithe, just one stop away on the underground. Feeling desperate to sell at least a few copies today, she saw no alternative but to go with him.

Xiao Mei’s co-workers watched her leave with the middleaged white man, disappearing inside Whitechapel tube station. They saw nothing odd about it. No one knew where he lived, because sellers kept their regular customers’ contact details a secret from each other, to avoid competition for sales.

Xiao Mei’s co-workers and relatives recalled that she had always blamed herself for not understanding customers properly. She blamed herself for not speaking much English. Without the language, this regular customer’s long, vacant gaze, his expressionless face and his tendency to repeat questions would not mean very much. This language barrier served to benefit Brown – it protected him from becoming recognised for who or what he was.

But even if Xiao Mei had been able to understand English well, how could she ever have known that this man had been reading a copy of Nigel Cawthorne’s Killers: The Most Barbaric Murders of Our Time that he’d borrowed from a local library? How could she have known that he was a convicted rapist? He was a fan and a determined follower of Jack the Ripper who murdered at least five women in the Whitechapel area in 1888. And how could she possibly have known that he’d also been studying the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ Peter Sutcliffe, who murdered thirteen women between 1975 and 1980.

Xiao Mei certainly had no idea that this forty-eight-year-old man sitting right next to her had brutally murdered twenty-four-year-old Bonnie Barrett a few weeks previously, in the very flat to which he was now leading her. Bonnie had worked in the red-light district of Commercial Street just down the road and she had been paid for sex by Brown. She was a single mother of a seven-year-old boy.

For him, Xiao Mei was a particularly soft target: a Chinese migrant without papers, trying to make a living in a much criminalised community. On top of this, she was selling counterfeit DVDs. She knew few people in this country and spoke little English. As her killer, Derek Brown, later said in court, he thought that ‘she would not be missed’.

That evening when Xiao Mei did not return to the Cannon Street Road flat to cook dinner with her relatives, they became alarmed. She knew no one outside their circle of new Chinese migrants; she would have nowhere to go after work but home. In the days that followed, Xiao Mei’s cousins scoured east London in a vain effort to find her, calling all their contacts and village friends. They couldn’t believe that she had just vanished. Weeks went past, and there was no trace of her. Eventually, they gave up hope. But no one reported her disappearance to the police, for fear of deportation.

Ming became more saddened as she carried on. She said she was very frightened on hearing from her flatmate about Xiao Mei’s death. Her body was never recovered, but the details of her brutal death eventually emerged during the trial of her murderer many months later, just after Ming arrived in England.

The murder had rocked the small community, and the tragedy quickly became ingrained in Ming’s mind. As a migrant working mother, Ming told me, Xiao Mei had been a victim of choiceless choices. Ming, too, felt that she was such a victim. Ultimately, she said, without capital there was no such thing as free will.

Ming was not alone in such sentiments. Over the past decade, an increasing number of Chinese women had been compelled to become the sole breadwinners of their families and had ‘chosen’ to migrate abroad in search of a livelihood to sustain their families. In China, economic reforms and the opening-up ( gaige kaifang) to the world market had dramatically changed – and lowered – the social position of women. The institutional framework that used to offer certain basic levels of security in women’s livelihood before the late 1970s has been taken away. Women have also become increasingly marginalised in the job market. Not only were women disproportionately affected by the mass redundancies from state-owned enterprises, they also received less state support than their male counterparts after being laid off, and they had less chance of re-employment.

As Ming said, women in China today no longer ‘hold up half the sky’. Gender equality has been much eroded under gaige kaifang. ‘We women have to fight for our own survival,’ she said.

Thus, today, women comprise a large proportion of Chinese migrant workers, and many have become the main earners of the family. But they still tend to migrate into female-dominated, female-specific occupations bound up with traditional gender roles. In Britain, more and more migrant women have been compelled to take up temporary work as carers, cleaners, domestic workers, masseuses and sex workers. In this context, Chinese women in Britain have found themselves at the bottom of the lowest-paid casual employment. The threat of exposure of their illegal status, job insecurity and the need to seek better options to improve income mean that these women are highly mobile, ready to change from one type of casual job to the next, seeking to maximise opportunity.

When Ming first arrived in Britain, she went searching for work in London’s Chinatown. There she met a woman of her age from Shenyang, who had been working in the catering trade for a long while and knew someone working in a Chinese restaurant in Elephant & Castle. She said they were looking for a kitchen worker, da-za (sorting bits: a kitchen porter). Ming immediately asked for her introduction to the restaurant manager and got the job.

To be near work, she moved to Elephant & Castle, an area which she found unpleasant and ‘stinky’. There was litter everywhere, she said, and the second-floor flat was terribly crowded, with ten of them sharing three rooms. But her flatmates all reassured her that it was the best place they’d found in London.

So Ming arrived at the Phoenix Tower restaurant – a name typical of a thousand others scattered across Britain – for her first job in England. It was a few bus stops away from her flat, and a few blocks away from a well known Chinese restaurant owned by a Mr Big in London’s Chinese communities. Mr Big, from Fujian, had set off his career by working as a people smuggler. During the peak of his business, he was moving 20,000 people per year. He accumulated his wealth and became head of a well known Chinese community organisation. Mr Big is obviously a popular man. Or at least this was what everyone told her on her first day in the kitchen. They said Phoenix Tower, with only twelve tables, is tiny in comparison with their rival restaurant. And their boss, a fifty-two-year-old originally from Hong Kong, is a nobody. ‘But big or small, the food these restaurants offer is more or less the same,’ Brother Li whispered to Ming. ‘This is called the guilao [ghost: a Westerner] food, unauthentic Chinese food made to fool the Westerners.’

Ming listened, amazed. ‘No wonder there was a smell of stale sweet and sour fish the moment I entered the restaurant. Guess it’s very popular around here.’

‘Definitely,’ Brother Li giggled. ‘For the locals, it is our national dish.’

Ming couldn’t help laughing at the idea, but quickly restrained herself when ‘Fat’ Fai, the chef, turned his head. She then murmured to Brother Li, ‘I haven’t the slightest clue about this food, though. We north-easterners don’t eat much that’s sweet.’

‘No worries,’ Brother Li smiled, pushing up his glasses. ‘Your job doesn’t involve much cooking. All you have to do is chopping and cleaning up after the others.’

So Ming started working, ten hours per day, six days a week, under Fai’s nose. Fai was known for always trying to exchange his ‘protection’ for sexual favours from female workers. A chef has a lot of power in a kitchen, deciding who stays and who goes. If you get on the wrong side of the chef, you’re on your way out, Ming explained. Fai constantly harassed her, both verbally and physically, but she had little means of avoiding him. If she moved away, it caused great offence. So she stopped saying no.

Ming felt as if she was prostituting herself – swallowing her pride when it was being trodden upon. Besides cringing inside at his crude groping and gestures, she also had to put up with a constant stream of invective from the Cantonese-speaking manager, for whom it had become a habit to abuse all the kitchen staff.

‘Bosses and workers can never sit on the same bench,’ Ming told me, quoting a Chinese saying. She knew that the two could never be equals. She’d had to lower her head while being exploited and abused. Sometimes she felt they were trying to push her to the limit, just to see how much she could take.

Brother Li told her that Phoenix Tower was a small, family run business, like many Chinese restaurants, that profited by squeezing sweat and blood out of its workers. These catering businesses had increasingly relied on asylum seekers and migrants without papers from China for their staff over the past decades. Wages were kept impossibly low and work conditions were punishing. Ming herself was earning £200 for a sixty-hour week. ‘Wages stagnate in this trade,’ Brother Li told her. ‘Take London Chinatown, for example: twenty-five years ago, the average wage there was just over £3 per hour for the waiters. Today it is barely £5, well below the national minimum wage – and the kitchen workers without papers always get less. Things seem able to remain the same for eternity.’ Brother Li shook his head.

And the workload increased for Ming. Soon she was asked to arrive an hour early to start her food preparation. Often, she was made to work an hour late, with no extra pay. Brother Li’s statement that ‘all Chinese restaurants are the same’ was no consolation. Every day she dreamt of giving up her job and walking out the door. She fantasised about spitting in their greasy faces and tearing off all the tablecloths during the restaurant’s rush hour. But instead she bit her tongue and kept her head down, busying herself with her duties and restraining her contempt.

One late night after a very long day, Ming caught the bus back to her flat, as usual. When she arrived home at 1 a.m., the streets had quietened down, and even the Chinese superstore next door had closed for the night. In their tiny room lit by a dim light, her room-mate Ying was still awake, sitting on her mattress and talking to a friend on her mobile phone. ‘Want some snacks?’ she offered, pushing a plate of duck towards Ming’s mattress. It was the leftovers from the kitchen where Ying worked. She was now an experienced fryer and was able to bring food home sometimes.

Ming nibbled the bits of duck on her plate. ‘What a hell of a day,’ she sighed, as soon as Ying finished her phone conversation. ‘I really can’t stand that place. The work is killing me. Just over three pounds an hour for all that bossing around! And I’m supposed to appreciate the favour and shut up.’

‘Join the club! Everyone’s doing tough work for shit money,’ Ying said, with an angry edge to her voice. ‘You just have to clench your teeth and get on with it, like everyone else. We’re all laobaixing [common folk] back home. If you never suffered a day in your working life in China, you wouldn’t need to come here, either. Am I right?’

A few minutes later, Ying’s impatience mellowed. She picked a duck bone out of her mouth. ‘You know, better-paid work comes with its own price,’ she remarked. ‘You want to know how to get the best-paid work in this country?’

Ming looked up at her and nodded.

‘Open your legs! A friend of mine has got herself a job in a massage parlour. She’s making a minimum of £150 a day! She moans about having a bad day when she earns even that. If there are less than six customers in a day, she gets insecure and calls me to ask if I think there’s a problem with her Chinese nose! Given all her “bad days”, she’s nearly paid off her debt, while I’m still struggling to keep this stupid job! Pity that I don’t have pretty legs to open!’

Ming lay on her bed, without saying a word. She didn’t want to reveal to Ying that she had actually thought about this option. The idea came to her on each of her bad days in the kitchen. Who wouldn’t want to pay off debts of 100,000 yuan (around £10,000) within a few months? She was desperate to send money home to her parents and to her seven-year-old daughter, Ting Ting.

‘I’ve seen the ads in the newspaper,’ Ming said.

‘Lots of Chinese girls sell sex,’ said Ying. ‘There’s a big market for foreigners in the sex trade here. Chinese massage parlours are nothing but ji-dian [chicken shops: brothels]. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a real Chinese massage parlour that only does massage. When you see the ads of massage parlours in the papers, they’re all brothels, without exception. You can tell by the language.’

Ying took out a Chinese newspaper and showed the ad pages to Ming, pointing out a relatively famous brothel: Red Tower. Seven Sisters (light blue line) underground station exit 1. Three minutes by foot. Newly arrived beautiful ladies from Asia. Elegant environment. Thorough service. Plus professional massage and foot massage. Open 3 p.m.–3 a.m. Young and beautiful ladies are very welcome to join us. Kind boss. Safe place. Weekly income can reach £2,500. For Chinese customers.

‘Two and a half thousand a week! How could that be possible?’ Ming could scarcely conceive of such earnings.