A night on the streets with the city’s social workers reveals the lure of quick money is fuelling a sizeable and shadowy sex industry

“Nobody wants to be a sex worker,” says Ms Chen, fidgeting on her chair. For the 31-year-old prostitute, it is a way to make more money and create a better life than she enjoyed in the mainland.

She sits in a small, untidy room in one of the oldest hotels in town, in the Avenida Almeida Ribeiro district, usually known by its Chinese name, San Ma Lou. From outside in the hall, about two dozen other women peek in, suspicious to see a reporter. They are all waiting for customers.

The hotel is the first stop on the weekly route of the outreach team of the Association of Rehabilitation of Drug Abusers of Macau. Every week the team go around the city dispensing condoms and giving health advice to sex workers, especially on HIV prevention.

The women warmly welcome the outreach team and are especially eager for their free condoms. Women inside the rooms rush out to get their share.

Unlike condoms, the presence of a reporter is not appreciated. When asked for an interview, most run to their rooms, while the rest refuse outright.

Discreetly, only Ms Chen (not her real name) agrees to chat in a secluded room.

She wears a revealing outfit and bright red lipstick. Coming straight from a small village in Sichuan, she exchanged a life surrounded by poverty for what she thought would be a better one in Macau.

Ms Chen was not duped. She understood she was coming to the city to become a sex worker. She followed a friend’s advice and took up the offer.

It is a matter of money. In a typical month, entertaining about five men a day, Ms Chen can earn close to MOP20,000 (US$2,500). In her hometown, her best prospect would be finding a part-time factory job, earning only a fraction of that.

“I could not really support my family,” she says. It is all she will say about her relatives. Questioned further, she tenses up. “If they knew what I do here, they wouldn’t let me come back.”

Ms Chen comes and goes from Macau on tourist visas. She always stays at the same hotel when working. “In the street is more dangerous,” she says. She adds that abusive customers sometimes come to the hotel but so far she has been lucky.

“Some customers get violent. I saw a girl with finger marks on her face.”

As the interview continues, Ms Chen becomes emotional. Eventually, with her eyes swollen and close to tears, she says: “The biggest problem I have is to be a sex worker, to face the reality and make a living. [But] I have no time to be upset.”

Hard numbers

Macau is well known for its sex industry. Prostitution is not illegal but several related activities are.

Soliciting is a crime but the law states prostitution is allowed as long as an individual engages in it in a private place. Organised prostitution is illegal.

Anyone managing a brothel is committing a crime. Even so, there are plenty in Macau, as well as saunas and massage parlours where sex services are within easy reach of customers, both locals and tourists.

In one brothel shut down by the police last month, it was common for prostitutes to charge customers from MOP600 to MOP1,000. They would receive MOP200, the rest going to the madam or “mama-san”.

Estimates place the annual revenue generated by prostitution globally at close to US$180 billion. China is considered the world’s biggest market.

The shady way Macau’s sex industry operates makes it hard to assess how much money it makes. There are no studies or statistics on its economic value.

To count the number of people it involves is also hard. In 2007, the Judiciary Police identified almost 2,000 sex workers, among them two minors under the age of 15 and about 200 between 15 and 18. Some estimates put the number of sex workers in Macau at 5,000.

The prices also vary widely, from MOP50 in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods up to MOP1,500 at the city’s five-star hotel-casinos.

The government has a laissez-faire approach to the sex industry. It has taken no measures to reduce demand by targeting customers.

The police have been accused of turning a blind eye to criminal practices, although recently the authorities have been more active in raiding brothels, getting their phone numbers from flyers distributed in the streets.

Filial piety

The outreach team of the Association of Rehabilitation of Drug Abusers continues on its rounds. They visit five hotels and guest-houses in the San Ma Lou area, distributing condoms to dozens of women.

The team is familiar with the prostitutes, as they enter only those places where they are welcomed. But they obey one rule: when a customer stops by, the team has to leave discreetly.

It is a similar scene at all five hotels. Between 10 and 20 women of various ages watch television, chat or paint their fingernails in a common area, waiting for customers. In general, they wear revealing clothes and heavy make-up. In the more upmarket places, some are elegantly dressed.

One of the hotels in San Ma Lou is distinguishable by its fashionable-looking women. As soon as the outreach team steps in, the women sitting in the reception area jump up excitedly to receive their condoms.

Among the two dozen or so women, all from the mainland, are two particularly striking examples, Ms Chow and Ms Lee. They agree to be interviewed, but on one condition: that they get extra condoms.

Ms Chow (not her real name) is 23. She refuses to say where she is from, other than “from a farm village, in the mainland”. She first arrived in Macau a few months ago and since then has been coming back and forth on tourist visas.

Following the recommendation of a friend, she always stays in the same hotel. “I don’t like to go from here to there,” she says.

She explains that her family is one of the reasons she is here. She sends them money regularly but she has never told them how she earns it.

Ms Chow says the money to help her family makes her work worthwhile. “Depending on the number of customers, I get up to MOP20,000 per month.”

Dealing with an average of 10 customers a day, Ms Chow has met men from all walks of life. “I’ve had bad clients who didn’t want to pay after the service and got violent,” she recalls. “If I can’t get the money, I just ask the client to go.”

Asked why she does not call the police, she hesitates, then says assertively: “I would like to have more protection from the Macau authorities when these things happen.”

There is a clear lack of trust between sex workers and the police. Prostitutes fear arrest and deportation, since most are not residents. And there have been reports of police officers collecting protection money.

Just a job

Everything about Ms Lee (again, not her real name) is carefully thought out, from head to toe. Her hair is flawlessly combed, covering her eyes, and she wears a black and white dress that follows the curves of her body. She smiles but reveals very little.

Like Ms Chow, she will not say where she comes from. She says she became a prostitute in Macau because it was difficult to find a decent job in her hometown.

But unlike Ms Chow and Ms Chen, she came to Macau without knowing she would become a sex worker. She was aware there were big casinos in Macau, so she hoped it would be easy to find a job in the gaming industry.

But things did not go her way. When the opportunity came, she did not hesitate to join the sex industry. “It’s also an occupation. It is not a shame,” she says confidently. “The customers have needs. They give me money and I give them sex.”

Ms Lee says she too, needs to support her family in the mainland. “My parents were working hard and now they can rest a little bit. I send them some money.”

She declines to say how old she is or how much she earns. She adds she has never encountered violence in the course of her work.

The outreach team leaves San Ma Lou and heads to the north of the peninsula.

“Usually the team only goes to small hotels and the streets,” says the president of the Association of Rehabilitation of Drug Abusers, Augusto Nogueira.

“We don’t enter the saunas and massage parlours. We leave that work to Zi Teng, because I think they have a better communication scheme with them.” (See the story in this MB Report).

The association focuses mostly on sex workers from the mainland because there is no language barrier.

The outreach team arrives in the Iao Hon district, where the poorer sex workers are usually to be found, in narrow, dark streets, concealed between tall buildings. Tonight, they are hard to locate. “There are a lot of policemen in the area. I think they are hidden,” says one of the team.

Before finishing their rounds, the team passes through the ZAPE area. Again, there are few sex workers on the street. The only one that the outreach team approaches rebuffs them. “You’re disturbing me,” she says abruptly and heads off to approach a potential
customer.

Street of happiness

Prostitution is far from new to Macau. The city’s historical link to the sex industry is reflected in some of the old street names.

Rua da Felicidade means, in English, Happiness Street. What is today one of Macau’s most visited streets originally earned its name from what used to go on there from the second half of the 19th century up until the late 1940s: prostitution.

Rua da Felicidade was Macau’s red light district, lined with brothels and seductively clad sex workers announcing their services. Half a century ago the government started work to preserve this historic area and what was once a place for singing, gambling and sex is a now tourist haven.

The sex industry, however, has not moved too far away. In the vicinity of Rua da Felicidade there are still brothels and guest-houses where prostitutes ply their trade.

By Luciana Leitão / Photos by Luís Almoster