An American woman accompanies two younger male friends to Shanghai’s sex worker marketplace, confronting complicity, loneliness, and the barriers dividing women.
Shanghai. The last hour of Valentine’s Day, 2018, five years into the New Era. I’m in a taxi, on my way to a brothel to watch two male friends pick up prostitutes. “Technically, it’s just a ‘marketplace’,” Wenfei explains. He’s the older of the two and the one I know best; I met him a few months ago at a Democrats Abroad event. “You meet the girls there and then take them somewhere else.”
Still. The closest I’ve ever come to seeing a sex worker is watching the Bunny Ranch reality series on HBO, a pedestrian affair set in the Nevada desert. Or an occasional peek into the open doors of the two-bit, street-side brothels wedged into the back streets of Chinese cities, distinguishable from ordinary massage parlours only by warm pink lights.
We careen through the abandoned streets of the French Concession, west towards Jing’an Temple. We turn right onto Fumin Lu, under Yan’an Elevated Road, and emerge into a commercial centre. The temple’s gilded roofs are wedged in between the Shangri-La five-star hotel, the Kerry Centre, the innumerable malls lit up, stacked and clustered together like gaudy gifts under a fake Christmas tree. Then, we turn left onto a side street. The lights darken immediately. The buildings become old and low, lane houses, relics and imitations of earlier Western invasions.
I’m in the front seat with the taxi driver, a frail old Chinese man. I wonder if he understands where he’s taking us. My friends are in the back. They’re telling me what I should expect, how the whole scene will go down. We’re talking as if this were an adventure, the story of “how-Sal-visited-her-first-whorehouse.” We’re all English teachers in China, literature majors with advanced degrees; we’re adept at dramatising and experiencing an event simultaneously. We pride ourselves on being progressive without being politically correct.
Both my friends are in their twenties. Wenfei is Chinese American, ethnically Asian; James is Euro American, white and blond. I’m in my early forties, but neither of them knows this; I’m a good-looking white girl who passes for a hip, chill thirtysomething. But when Wenfei texted me earlier in the night, inviting me out for impromptu drinks, I was grateful for the invitation. I was also grateful for his lack of surprise at finding me alone and free and willing to bike over, at the last-minute, to where he and James were having dinner. Not only is it Valentine’s Day, it’s two days before Chinese New Year. The city has been emptying out for a week, and I’ve spent the last several days filling up the time with as many activities as I can, stocking up in unhappy anticipation of the solitary week to follow.
Wenfei and James are finishing up gourmet pizzas and draught beers when I arrive at the pizza bistro in an area of the French Concession that would usually be crawling with expats. They’re talking politics, deploring the state of things under Trump, and they order another round while they wait for me to eat. When I’m finished, we head out to a whiskey bar on a nearby side street, a place that Wenfei has recently discovered but has trouble locating again as we wander about in the dark, still talking.
The bar is empty when we finally arrive, before eight, but fills up over the next hour. It’s an upscale, boutique establishment, fitted into the first floor of a lane house, one side taken up by a mirrored, well-lit bar and the other by crescent-shaped, faux leather booths. The crowd consists of young couples and groups of single men. Everyone looks Chinese except for me and James.
As we settle into one of the booths and call for the drink menu, we watch the couples ignore each other, studiously playing with their respective cell phones. Eventually, over the course of the night, the male in each pair will get drunk enough to start making loud, clumsy moves. “They’re all out on random Valentine’s dates,” James conjectures. “They probably just met online today.”
The single guys at the bar seem mostly gay. Four of them are sitting opposite our booth, their faces and hair as lux and gleaming as their clothes. Their backs are to us, but occasionally they turn and touch each other’s wrists and lean subtly, discreetly, into each other. James and I have a short debate about whether they’re really gay before he agrees that they are. In Shanghai it can be hard to tell; sexuality is discreet and everyone is well-groomed.
“Are you gay?” I ask James, who is sitting to my right. I’m sandwiched between the two of them. James has a slender, delicate face, a compact body and dresses like a preppie. I don’t know him very well; he is Wenfei’s friend and co-worker.
“No,” he says. “I’ve slept with men for money, but I’m not gay. I can’t stand sex with men, in fact—the feel of their bodies, the bristle on their chins—Ugh.” He outlines the shape of a man in the air with his hands, then shudders.
“Whoa—you’ve slept with men for money?” I repeat.
“Women too,” he replies.
“Really!” I exclaim. “For how much?”
“With men, over 3000 RMB an hour. “For women”—he sees that I might be interested—“probably at least 1000.”
“Wow, that’s expensive,” I say, even though it appears he’s giving me a friend discount. Then I add, jesting, “I don’t know if it’d be worth it.” James is attractive and seems nice, but I don’t feel an ounce of chemistry with him. I like Wenfei better, with his round face, mop of hair and shrewd, droll air. Although Chinese, he’s taller and bigger than James, slightly taller than I am. But the truth is that if I weren’t older than both of them, I’d be slightly out of their league. I could do better.
“You want to pay for sex?” Wenfei asks. “Why not just go to a club and pick someone up?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, although in fact I have been toying with the idea of male prostitutes for years, have asked other friends to give me tips on where to find them. Nobody seems to know, or if they do know they won’t admit it. “I know it’s not a problem finding someone to sleep with, but I want to sleep with someone I like, and I can’t find anyone I like. The men my age”—I don’t specify my age—“are shit, especially the Western guys in China. It’d be easier to pay for it than have to take an asshole seriously in my bedroom. At least it’d just be about me.”
“I know what you mean,” James replies. “It’s kind of a black-and-white thing. If you can’t have your ideal relationship, then don’t even bother trying with someone who’s not worth it. Just keep it strictly transactional.”
“Exactly,” I reply.
Wenfei assures me that finding man whores isn’t a problem. “What would you want?” he asks. “Like a three-some, kink—”
I think for a minute. “I guess just a big dick,” I say, feeling boring and unimaginative. I turn to James. “How’s yours?”
“It comes and goes,” he says. We laugh.
Two more couples have come in and the waiter asks us to squeeze close in our booth to make room. The booths are cavernous; three fit the entire length of the room.
“Look,” Wenfei says, leaning over to play me a video on his cell phone. In the video, he’s the camera man. He’s filming a slender young girl walking in front of him in what looks like an airport terminal, an endless white hallway recessing towards a vanishing point. “Walking” is the wrong word: she’s twirling and smiling and flirting for the camera as if Wenfei were directing her in a perfume commercial. She has long glossy black hair styled in loose waves; she is wearing a fluttery lavender dress. She is adorably pretty.
“That’s a prostitute?” I say, disbelieving. Wenfei nods. He has a sheepish but self-satisfied grin on his face.
“You slept with her?” he nods again.
“For how much?”
“5000 RMB for the night,” he replies.
“Good lord, that’s expensive,” I say. “No wonder you have to work so much.”
Wenfei slumps back down into the booth. “I don’t do it all the time—just every once in a while, for a treat.”
“Does your girlfriend know?” I ask. Wenfei has a Chinese girlfriend. I’ve never met her.
“Kind of,” he says with a shrug. “It’s kind of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of thing. She doesn’t like it, but—”
“But what?” I can’t imagine the kind of girl who would be willing to put up with that, but most Chinese women do. Chinese men are notoriously unfaithful.
“She loves me,” he says.
“Do you love her?” I ask. “You’re young—maybe you shouldn’t be settling down yet.”
“Yes, I do love her,” he insists. He sits up. He is the drunkest of all of us; he has been supplementing his whiskey samples with elaborate cocktails. Now he assumes an air of solemnity and begins telling us the story of how he fell in love. He met her in France, he says. They were both in summer school in Paris. It was a summer fling, and he was planning on dumping her before he left. They were on their last trip to the beach, in the south of France. At some point during their day on the beach, he got up to go to the bathroom. “I’ll break up with her when I get back,” he thought.
But when he was returning, walking towards her, he saw her standing alone in the sun and sand. She was sparkling in the sunlight. In a moment, his destiny flashed before him, and he knew that his fate had been sealed.
Wenfei waves his arms in solemn gestures as he tells this. He sounds like he is trying to be Proust or Joyce.
I feel impatient. “That sounds like a romantic fantasy that has nothing to do with her,” I say. “You probably don’t even know who she is.”
“What is your definition of love, then?” Wenfei asks, unoffended, as he subsides over his drink.
I think for a minute, try to define it. “Well, chemistry is important, but you can have animal chemistry with a lot of different people, right? So, you must be compatible on deeper levels: similar values, interests, personalities that mesh, etc.”
“She’s very smart,” James assures me. “She speaks five languages; they talk about all kinds of things.” Wenfei flips through his phone and shows me pictures of his girlfriend striking various wholesome, cutesy poses. She is a mussy-haired, nondescript, naive-looking Chinese girl. She looks like the kind of girl who might be awkwardly friendly with new people to compensate for her shyness and lack of social skills. The prostitute was way prettier.
“She’s cute,” I say half-heartedly. Wenfei has been talking throughout the night about how much he loves white girls, Korean girls, how attracted he is to his students. Clearly prostitutes are also part of his fantasy, a way of obtaining the unattainable, the illusive everything.
“Can’t you try to improve your sex life with her?” I ask. He shakes his head emphatically.
“She’s bad in bed?” He nods.
“She meows like a cat,” Wenfei confesses, smiling with embarrassment, his eyes glistening with drink.
“A cat?” I repeat.
He meows to demonstrate, curling his hands like paws and waving them in the air.
“Good Lord,” I say. We sit in silence for a minute. I suspect that Wenfei needs the security of knowing that someone loves him. He has already told us that his father was an asshole and his mother a tiger mom, both bent on getting everything they could out of him. A woman who meows in bed, who puts up with his philandering, probably soothes his wounded ego. A wave of disgust at human neediness and insecurity passes over me.
James gets up to go to the bathroom. Wenfei leans over and puts his hand on my knee.
“Sal, you are beautiful and intelligent and well-educated, but you are too conservative, too—” He searches for the word; in fact, Wenfei did not immigrate to America until he was thirteen. His English still bears traces of a Chinese accent, and he talks too quickly to disguise it.
“Classic,” he concludes.
“I know,” I say ruefully. It amuses me that Wenfei is judging me while I am judging him. I wonder which of us is right—do I need to loosen up, detach sex from emotion, or does he need to find someone who’s more of an equal, both in and out of the bedroom? At twenty-two, James seems to have the jump on both of us. He’s willing to whore and be whored out, but having done both already, he would prefer something more meaningful. Yet he is a young white male on the cusp of life. Wenfei and I have fewer options.
James has just come back and is standing in the aisle.
“We’re going to a marketplace now—you should come with us,” Wenfei says, looking up at James for confirmation.
“A marketplace?” I echo, looking at James as Wenfei gestures for the check.
“Yeah, a place to meet whores,” James says. “You should totally come and see it.” I realise that they have been planning this the whole night, that my talk has just happened to coincide with their real intentions.
“Only girls? Nothing for me?” I say, jesting.
“Not at this one,” Wenfei says. “We can do that another night.”
I ponder for a moment. “All right,” I say. I feel glad that the night isn’t over, relieved to be doing something adventurous before my week of enforced solitude.
In the taxi, they explain what is going to happen: they’ll look around a little bit, choose some girls, and then take them somewhere else. We’ll stay long enough to have a drink, give me a chance to look around.
Maybe I’ll get to talk to some of the girls, I speculate. “Some of them speak English,” James says.
“You know, you could whore yourself out if you wanted to,” James adds as we drive through the deserted streets. “It’s not that hard to find clients.”
“No, thanks,” I say. “I want to be on the purchasing end of those kinds of transactions.”
“Are you sure you don’t like girls?” Wenfei asks. He has already asked this, and I realise that he is hoping to involve me in an orgy. Perhaps this is why he invited me for drinks in the first place. “No, I don’t,” I repeat, irritated. “I like dick. It’s kind of a curse.”
We pull up in front of the “marketplace.” It’s on the first floor of an ornate lane house, the kind that is built up over a partly exposed basement, with a flight of stairs leading up from the sidewalk to the front door. Elegant red lettering spelling “Manhattan” is painted over the first-floor windows. I’m surprised that it’s advertised so openly.
“Oh wow, it looks dead,” James says. “Usually, the stairs are crammed with girls.”
“It’s the New Year,” I say. “They’ve all gone home to their families in the countryside.”
“Well, let’s try it anyway,” Wenfei says, paying the driver, who says something in Chinese as we get out.
“What’d he say?” I ask Wenfei.
“He said, ‘have fun at the whorehouse.’” Wenfei laughs.
We bound up the stairs, through a curtain of vinyl sheets designed to keep the cold from seeping in through the open door. The inside looks like a small club, dive-y but respectable, high ceilings dimly illuminated by red and white neon lights. The room is large and square, filled with high square tables and bar chairs. A bar runs along one side, dead-ending at a stage, where two young Chinese girls stand side by side in front of two microphones. One is singing jazz and pop standards in English while the other plays an acoustic guitar. Except for the poor quality of the music, it reminds me of the blues clubs I used to frequent in graduate school.
I don’t see any other women. A few foreign men lurk near the bar, and the rest are Chinese men who look middle-aged and middle-class. Nobody looks particularly old, creepy, or unattractive.
“Let’s try another one,” Wenfei says, backing out after a quick circuit. “This is dead.” We walk down the stairs and take a right at the street.
“Fuck,” James says. “I’ve never seen it like that—we may be out of luck.”
“I promise you,” he says to me as we walk down the empty street, as if apologising for robbing me of the authentic experience: “that on an ordinary night, the women would be spilling out of the door, crowding the stairs. We wouldn’t even make it inside before they grabbed us.” Clearly this is part of the allure of it, being mobbed by desperate women.
“They must all be home in the countryside,” I repeat. I imagine them sitting on low stools between their grandparents, eating at the family dinner table inside a ramshackle house in a mountain village. The idea fills me with unexpected pathos. “Are you sure you’re not exploiting them?”
Wenfei scoffs. “Exploiting them! They’re using us,” he says. “You should see all their shoes and handbags and shit. Why do you think they’re doing this?”
“But don’t they have pimps—”
“Oh yes, they have pimps,” he agrees. “But they still make a lot of money. They’re not hurting.”
I wonder how Wenfei knows this. “Do you ever talk to them?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says, but without elaborating. “You can talk to them yourself if you want,” he adds.
Judy’s façade looks like Manhattan’s. A few cops and security officers stand forlornly in the street, smoking cigarettes. We eye them and slip by without speaking. Inside, a lone Chinese boy sits on stage, playing guitar to an empty room. Wenfei backs out almost before we enter. “Let’s go back to Manhattan’s,” he says. “This is just sad.”
“We may have to work for it,” James says as we walk back to Manhattan’s, wrapping our coats around us to keep out the cold. “For once the supply is less than the demand.”
Once we’re back inside Manhattan’s, Wenfei and James escort me down the length of the bar to a table facing the stage. Wenfei goes to the bar to order drinks. Now that I’m at the front of the room, I can see a raised area off to the side where a few women seem to be tucked between men, although the tables recede into the shadows and it’s hard to tell. There’s also a side door where people are entering and exiting a well-lit area.
After a few minutes, a couple of girls materialise at the table of three Chinese men beside ours. I feel like I am at a wildlife reserve watching endangered animals trickle into a clearing. A third one joins them and seems to be facilitating the encounter. I wonder if she is some kind of madam, although she looks no older than the others. They’re all young and pretty, dressed like they’re about to attend a fashion show, not like hustlers on the street. I watch the middle woman pull the two girls closer to the men and then wander off. The men are middle-aged but decent looking, not greasy, overbearing fat cats.
After a laughing, whispered exchange, one of the girls seems to reach an agreement with one of the men. She attaches herself to his side. Another man whispers in the second girl’s ear, holding her by the arm, but she shakes her head vigorously, then shakes him off and walks away. I wonder what he was saying—suggesting some scenario too perverted for her tastes? Perhaps he was simply naming his price, and it wasn’t enough. I never asked Wenfei how the price is negotiated, whether it is pre-set or the women are willing to bargain.
Two more girls appear at the table behind us. Their unaided strategy seems to be to wander into the vicinity of a table of men and just stand there, gazing vaguely into space, purses tucked under their arms. I’m amused to see Chinese reticence cropping up in such an unlikely occupation. One of the girls is young and pretty, and the madam appears again, flitting around the table and talking vivaciously, and succeeds in attaching her to one of the men.
The other sex worker is plump and looks older, in her early thirties. She is wearing a skin-tight, see-through shirt over a dark purple satin bra. Her hair is lacquered like a fifties pin-up girl’s, shoulder length with a flip at the end, a thick bang plastered to her forehead. She is trying hard to be young but not having success at her table, and I feel a pang for her. I wonder what my value would be in a situation like this.
She wanders towards our table and establishes herself in my sightline.
“Seasoned!” James laughs in my ear, gesturing towards her. I feel a twinge of annoyance. I can’t tell if he’s considering her or not; tonight, the pickings are obviously slim.
“Do you want to talk to a whore?” he asks.
“No,” I say emphatically, offended.
“Are you sure?” he asks, disappointed.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I say. I’m beginning to feel a difference between their viewpoints and mine. I feel a sympathy for this girl, a distaste for aligning with them by objectifying her.
Wenfei brings back three rum and cokes. He puts them on the table while he and James intimate that they might need to circle the room.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell them, waving them away—“go do your thing.” I’m left alone with the plump girl. She is standing on the other side of our table, leaning her elbows on the back of the opposite chair, her purse tucked under her arm. She stands there for a long time, deliberately not looking at me. I wonder if she thinks I’m gay, that I’m also there to pick up women, or if she is just intrigued to see a foreign woman and wants to initiate a conversation. I feel a faint embarrassment—should I attempt to speak to her, strike up a conversation, show sympathy? I’m relieved that my limited Chinese forestalls any of these possibilities.
Instead, I studiously look away. A Chinese man has paused in the middle of the empty floor before the stage. He looks at me from across a short distance. He’s casually dressed, smoking a cigarette, around my age and attractive. I can see that he knows it and that he is looking at me deliberately, appraising the situation. I wonder again if I should do something, make a move, although I know that I won’t. I can feel an itching between my legs as I recognise the good-humoured lustiness in his eyes, as the chemistry circulates between us. It occurs to me to wonder if he thinks I’m a prostitute. I look away and he moves on; the plump girl has left as well.
Eventually Wenfei and James make a triumphant return. Maybe ten minutes has elapsed since they left, but they are now threading their way back through the room, leading two tall, beautiful girls towards our table. The girl in the lead is the tallest. In her heels, she is taller than both Wenfei and me. Her hair is parted in the middle and drops straight and long down either side of her face, like a Native American’s. At first I think, startled, that she’s white—Russian—but as she comes closer, I see that she’s simply had her eyes done to make them look rounder. She’s rimmed them with black eyeliner in Cleopatra style and has the air of an Egyptian queen. She looks at me without looking at me; her eyes are flat and expressionless.
It’s not until they’re close that they realise that Wenfei is bringing them to me, gesturing for them to sit at our table. They stop, refusing to come closer. I feel the same thing at the same moment: the ancient barrier—the good girl confronting the bad. Or perhaps it is simply a quick jealousy, or a suspicion of foul play in such an unusual situation.
I rise from my seat. “They’re not going to come as long as I’m here,” I say. “I need to go.”
“What? No!” James says. “Stop it, don’t move.”
Wenfei urges them forward.
“I’m telling you, they’re not going to come while I’m here!” I say, raising my voice. I get up again and try to leave. James and Wenfei hold me back. The girls vanish, and I sit down.
“Go get them—go get them!” I say. “Leave me alone.”
James and Wenfei disappear. In five more minutes Wenfei reappears, but without the girls.
“Get your stuff and follow me,” he orders. I get up, pulling on my coat and leaving our untouched drinks on the table. I follow him along the aisle between the bar and tables and then out the doorway, through the vinyl sheets.
The tall girl is outside the door, standing at the top of the steps. She is facing the street, her back to us. She is regal and gleaming in her red column dress, without a coat. Wenfei slinks up behind her and whispers something in her ear in Chinese. She doesn’t turn around or respond, but James and the other girl materialise beside us, and we go down the steps together, all five of us following behind her.
“I’m getting you a cab first,” Wenfei says, flagging one down. It’s now midnight, and there are several hovering around, waiting for the last lingerers in Shanghai. “What’s your address?”
“141 Yongkang Road,” I say.
“What?” he says.
I repeat it.
He repeats it again, stupidly, and I repeat it back to him. He doesn’t seem to be able to say it correctly; I wonder if he is drunk or simply flustered.
The others are getting into a cab behind mine, heading in the opposite direction. James looks over at us across the roof of the cab, waiting for Wenfei to join them.
It finally registers that this is happening, that they are going to go have sex with these girls somewhere else, and that I am going home alone. My adventure is over; I am being discarded, while their night has just begun.
“Never mind, Wenfei!” I say finally, goaded. “I’Il sit in front next to the driver and show him my address on my iPad.”
“Okay, okay,” he says.
I get in the taxi, and he slams the door shut behind me. The driver and I move away. I buckle my seatbelt and slink down in my seat, not looking back. As we drive out of the darkness, towards the lights of the thoroughfare, I feel neither ashamed nor disgusted but simply abandoned, and sad and sorry for us all.
