How Did Paul Siu Use Prostitution In Chinatown

Claire E. Sterk 's article Tricking and Tripping: Fieldwork on Prostitution in Era of AIDS ' published by Social Change Press in 2000 takes into account the patterns and procedures that anthropologists take into practice during fieldwork. She provides some useful insights and learnt lessons during her studies with prostitutes. She also provides a close and intimate account of their lives and mental state in their own words. Her findings are substantiated with proper examples in the accounts of the daily lives of these women. Unlike most student’s expectation of fieldwork as a leisure activity at some serene place, Sterk observes the pain associated with the lifestyle and brings into light some important patterns and procedures that anthropologists must consider while interviewing a research group.

Prostitution, sometimes referred to as “the world’s oldest profession” (Henslin, pg. 54), is defined by James M. Henslin as “the renting of one’s body for sexual purposes” (pg. 54). This arrangement, though illegal and socially deviant in most parts of the world, exists universally in many different forms (pg. 54). As a matter of fact, types of prostitutes range greatly in variety from call girls – who are said to be “the elite of prostitutes” (pg. 58), to streetwalkers – “who have the lowest status among prostitutes” (pg. 58), to sugar babies -young, physically attractive women who provide “rich, older men” (Kitchener, par.4) “…with attention (and sex) in exchange for the finer things in life” (par. 4).

Claire E. Sterk, the author of the article of “Fieldwork on Prostitution in the Era of Aids”

Beginning in the late 19th century and continuing to the early 20th century, many Chinese families struggled to gain social, economic, and educational stature in both China and the United States. In the book, A Transnational History of a Chinese Family, by Haiming Liu, we learn about the Chang family rooted in Kaiping County, China, who unlike many typical Chinese families’ exemplified hard-work and strong cultural values allowing them to pursue an exceptional Chinese-American lifestyle. Even with immigration laws preventing Chinese laborers and citizens to enter unless maintaining merchant status, Yitang and Sam Chang managed to sponsor approximately 40 relatives to the states with their businesses in herbalist

In the 1800s, after the Civil War (1861 to 1865), massive waves of new settlers migrated to the United States. May these were Chinese immigrants who sought to take advantage of the Gold Rush in California. Most of them were men, without family. Between that time, hundreds and hundreds of Chinese immigrants arrived, mostly in San Francisco, where they established a place called “Chinatown.” Establishing the place helped encouraged around four thousand Chinese women per year to immigrate to the United States, to be with their husband or father, helping Chinamen managing household. The gold attracted so many immigrants to California, and the desired for wealth attracted Southerners, who brought with them their racial attitude from the south. Work was well paying; a prejudice against Chinese was born. Hate and violence accompanied the competence against Chinese; and brutality against

The first documented Chinese woman to arrive in the United States was Afong Moy, in 1834. She was brought by white people to be displayed in the American Museum. Dressed in Chinese clothing, she was meant to display Chinese customs, manners, and lifestyles, showing the Americans how different a “celestial lady” looked from a Western woman. This spirit of Westerners viewing Chinese people as separate from themselves would go on to isolate Chinese immigrants as they continued to immigrate to America. The Chinese would continue to be thought of as inferior, or part of an “other” group by white settlers. Chinese women in particular were fetishized and demeaned -- looked upon as a whole as prostitutes -- when in reality they played many different roles in society and in

Chinese men began migrating heavily to California in the early 1850s in hopes of finding a fortune mining gold, these men, however, were largely unaccompanied by Chinese women (Hurtado 90). Out of 2,973 Chinese people in San Francisco, only nineteen of them were women. Chinese women came, just not with Chinese men. By 1960, there were nearly 600 Chinese women selling themselves in San Francisco, with less than 100 traveling for other reasons (Hurtado 91), White prostitutes also did not accept Chinese clients, though Chinese would perform services for Whites - indicative of the superiority felt by Anglos in relation to other races. Women of all races succumbed to prostitution, but races other than white made up the great majority of prostitutes (Hurtado 94). The

Lydia’s Open Door by American Anthropologist Patty Kelly is an intriguing case study about both the hidden and not so hidden aspects of sex work in Chiapas, Mexico. Her book proves the usefulness of ethnographic works where she engages with unconventional ways of knowing in order to determine the complex relationships that help to reproduce gender inequality. Lydia’s Open Door contextualizes prostitution within a political and economic framework revealing how it is impossible to diagnose one without the others. She uses both macro and micro-analysis to deconstruct the variability in how prostitution is practiced, regulated and perceived through space and time. Throughout her ethnography she discusses how globalization and

“There Are Plenty Of Women On The Street” focused on how prostitution was widely practiced in Philadelphia, PA during the Progressive Era. This article divulged how an investigation into prostitution during 1910-1918 in the Philadelphia area revealed how common the practice of selling sex for money was. The investigators found prostitutes working in dirty and indecent houses, massage parlors, saloons, and brothels. The number of women found and arrested in and around these places amounted to over 3000. The large numbers of women were collected from three areas located in Philadelphia: the Tenderloins, Seventh Ward, and Market Street. The Tenderloins was situated near the north of Philadelphia’s business district and was considered to be where prostitution was more rampant out of the other two areas. “In short, the Tenderloins accounted for between 75 percent and 80 percent of arrests for streetwalking in the city” (Kahan). Market

This article by Cheryl Butler applies Critical Race Feminism to the issues of prostitution and sex trafficking in the United States. In doing so, Butler explores the debate on prostitution and sex trafficking through an intersectional lens, and thus acknowledges the role that race and class play in prostitution in America. She fully considers prostitution from a critical race perspective, i.e., one that considers how race and gender intersect with other systems of oppression together to marginalize people of color in America. She proposes policy changes that may help address prostitution from a position of intersectionality.

Professor Margaret L. Boittin’s research mainly focuses on areas such as Chinese law, human trafficking and prostitution. In the article Abuse and the Legal Consciousness of Se Workers in China, she outlines the lifestyle of a prostitute and all the major obstacles that follow. Boittin helps the reader interpret the relationship of Chinese sex workers to their society and laws. The article puts importance towards the legal consciousness of Chinese sex workers and through which events their relationship with the law is shaped. The author uses methods such as legal consciousness throughout the article to finally reveal how marginalized individuals understand their relationship with the law.

“The sex industry is not only characterized by different sectors but by status and economic hierarchies across them. Generally speaking, women working on the streets are among the lowest paid and socially stigmatized, with the recent expectation of women engaged in sex-for-crack exchanges and/or work in houses. Women working through escort service or as call girls are at the high end” (Miller & Jayasundara, pg. 466, 2002).

As one of the oldest industries in the world, prostitution used to be legal in China (Jin, 2005). After China was liberated, the government strictly banned prostitution yet it is still rampant nowadays. The society consider it a city disease. Cities needs large sum of migrant workers to develop, however, they don’t have sufficient economic ability to bring their spouses to cities and satisfy their sexual demands. Therefore, they became the major customers of this industry (Liang, 2012). Personally, I think the pros of legalizing prostitution is stronger than its cons, and it certainly should be taken into account by the government. In this essay, the pros and cons of legalizing prostitution will be listed, namely, making the industry easier to be

Thai women are not always lured into the sex trade for reasons that are associated with force or kidnappings. Thai women look at the potential that the sex industry could provide; women seek for the potential to make enough money to support their families and expunge their debts. It is therefore an appealing occupation where women can make a median monthly income from sex work ranging from 5,825 to 7,950 baht. By this, it is important to compare a typical Thai salary of a decent occupation such as a chef or construction worker, in which earnings are around 6,000 baht per month. In many cases, “women might end up as prostitutes because their parents had to sell them into slavery or because their impoverished husbands might so use them. By the middle of the second millennium B.C., prostitution was well established as a likely occupation for the daughters of the poor” (atd. In Parrot and Cummings 6). The women who are targeted as best candidates for the illicit trade are driven by the need for work. Victims seek occupations and fall in the hands of recruiters who sell them lies, and or at times the parties force them to become a personal slave. For example, victims like Rei from Thailand knew that she would have to be a prostitute in terms of an appealing salary. Rei grew up in southern Thailand and had a hard time obtaining a job after completing twelfth grade. She heard many women who were going to work in Japan; she also knew of agents in her neighborhood that could

Prostitution is one of the oldest professions that have widely been practiced around the world, and the Philippines is no exception to this. With the advent of Spanish colonists in the late 1500s, Filipina slaves were sold as “exotic sex objects” or prostitutes to European brothels. During the early 1940s, many Filipinas in Manila and surrounding towns served as “comfort girls” to provide sexual favors to Japanese soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army serving in the country and in the Pacific region. Today, with the emergence of information technology and global travel, the age-old profession has begun to operate on a technological scale, and sex workers, mostly young girls, have moved not only to the big cities but also online. To be specific, a new form of prostitution among Filipina schoolgirls, called Prosti-tuition, has surfaced recently in the country.