Apologies to My Censor (13 page)

Around the corner from the square was the town market, a heaving place where dozens of Jeeps were parked, loaded with goods, drivers standing nearby, smoking, waiting to make one of the many daily trips across the Mongolian border. We hired a taxi driver to take us around town for the day, a thirty-three-year-old ethnic Mongolian named Havar. We asked him questions and he answered in Mongolian, via Esso. Yes, there are Mongolian girls here, he said, “many, many girls.” Havar said the girls cost about 300 yuan—fifty-five dollars—for the night, but the price drops significantly depending on the their age and “experience.”

We asked Havar to take us to the brothels. He pulled up outside a police station around the corner from the red-light district, Golden Bridge Street. A large arch marked the street's entrance. We decided that the four of us together would attract too much attention, so Esso and I would go in first to see if we could talk to anybody, and Tom and Jim would go in later.

It was a bright afternoon and Golden Bridge Street was showing signs of life. In glass-fronted rooms, women of varying ages were curled up on couches, yawning and watching television. Some swept floors and cleaned windows lined with dolls and stuffed animals; others walked over to a grocery store down the street to buy cigarettes and bottles of green tea. Every few minutes, a taxi pulled through the tall archway at the mouth of the street, next door to the police station, to drop off a girl who had worked through the night.

I was nervous walking down the street, very aware of my own presence. We had not seen any Westerners in town, and there I was, tall and obvious, walking down a street lined with brothels in the middle of the day. I felt as though everybody was watching me, but when I looked around at the women in the windows, and the groups of men in leather jackets smoking and talking, I noticed that nobody was paying attention at all.

Esso, young-looking in her late thirties with long, straight black hair, stopped in front of a room where several girls lounged on stained couches.

“Do you want to talk to them?”

I hesitated. “I don't know. Do you think they'll talk?”

“Come on.” She grabbed my arm and swung open the front door.

The room was littered with ashes and cigarette butts. A puppy played with a chunk of chipped drywall on the floor and drank from a bowl of curdled milk. Sitting under a poster of a half-naked American blond, three young women smoked Esse Light cigarettes on two small couches.

The girls inside barely looked up when we walked in. It seemed as if they had just gotten out of bed, hair disheveled and wearing baggy sweaters and sweatpants. Esso told them we were journalists working on a story and that we wanted to ask them a few questions.

One of the women—chubby, with heavy makeup, green nail polish, and dyed auburn hair—shrugged. “Okay,” she said.

Her name was Alimaa. She was twenty-three. She told us she worked late the night before and was exhausted today. Two years earlier, in Ulaanbaatar, she and a friend were recruited by two men to work at a karaoke bar in Beijing. When she arrived in the Chinese capital, her recruiters told her she had to work as a prostitute. They made it clear she didn't have a choice.

“They took us to different rooms in a hotel and showed us Chinese girls who had been raped,” she said as Esso translated and I wrote in my notebook. “They said, ‘Take a look, this is what will happen if you don't do this.' ”

I took notes furiously, trying to capture all the details. This is exactly what we needed for our story, and we were getting it in the first interview. There is a certain numbness a journalist gets when reporting a story like this. You're transcribing horrors into your notebook, but not really processing it; it's like a surgeon desensitized to blood. I could hear Alimaa's story, but I couldn't feel it. Later, I would feel terrible for her and others like her, but for now I was focused on one thing: getting the story.

She went on. After Alimaa was brought into the hotel in Beijing, she slipped her passport in her boots and, later that night, escaped. For two days and nights, she hid at a construction site before a Mongolian contact in Beijing brought her to Erlian. Broke and with no place to go, Alimaa started working in a brothel. She had been in Erlian ever since.

Another woman in the room, named Gerlee, a twenty-two-year-old with a round face, rosy cheeks, and a faded tattoo of a heart on her shoulder, explained the economics of the job. She gave 30 percent of what she made to her boss, a pint-size Chinese man who came in and out of the brothel throughout the conversation, seemingly oblivious to our presence. The boss paid the rent and the girls lived in the back room. When I asked her if she felt trapped, Gerlee, who came to Erlian after a falling-out with her Inner Mongolian boyfriend, said, “I'm just looking for money. It doesn't make it good or bad.”

Esso and I thanked them and walked back to the car.

“That was incredible,” I said, sitting down in the backseat of Havar's car. “We got it.”

I relayed Alimaa's story, and when I was done, Tom and Esso went back into Golden Bridge Street to do more interviews while Jim and I went for a walk. Jim was eager for the soft afternoon light to hit so he could go back and get photos. I pushed out the uneasy feelings from what I'd just heard; I was experiencing the rush of knowing we had a good story. During our walk, I fell partway into a sewer and thought for a minute I'd broken my leg.

We spent that afternoon making trips in and out of brothels, and Jim went back alone to take photos. The rest of us sat in Havar's car, driving slowly up and down Golden Bridge Street, watching the scenes unfold on the street and inside the windows. The women posing, trying to lure customers. Men strolling by, hands in pocket, checking out the selection. It felt like we were undercover cops, and it was both thrilling and shaming.

Later, Havar drove us to the outskirts of town. There were dozens of apartment blocks, brand-new, sprawling, and bought with oil money. A high school had just been built and looked as though it belonged in Orange County, complete with a soccer field made with artificial turf. Erlian was a strange town, wealthy and depraved, and I felt the twisted pride of a traveler who has somehow ended up in a place he doesn't belong.

T
he next morning, while we were walking around the town square, the same two black-toothed Inner Mongolian women approached us. They had dark, leathery faces and sucked on sugar cubes.

“You want girls?” one of the women asked us via Esso. “I can get you some for three hundred yuan each. They can go to your hotel room.”

We said no and asked her if she knew how the girls ended up here. She said that trafficking was getting harder; in the previous year, border police had stopped traffickers bringing twenty-four women into China. Still, she said, the trade was thriving. “Many, many girls work here. Some girls know they will be working as prostitutes,” she said. “Some don't.”

The second woman brushed up beside Esso.

“Are you Mongolian?” she asked. “Can you find us girls? It's good business. If you can find us five girls, the brothel owners will pay you two thousand yuan each.”

Esso politely declined.

N
one of us wanted to take the night bus back to Beijing. We agreed to pay Havar 1,000 yuan—about $160—to drive us back to the city, an eight-hour trip. We drove past the Statue of Mongolian Beauty downtown and continued out by the new apartment buildings and the high school. Outside of town, we passed crude statues of dinosaurs—a brontosaurus, a T. rex, a triceratops—built to commemorate the bones found in the bed of a dried salt lake.

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.