Girls for sale by any other name
There is more than meets the eye to many bars and karaoke lounges. Sure, you can buy songtime. You can buy drinks, and food. But best of all, you can hire girls… legally. This writer goes undercover to find out how.
Girls for hire, nice or not
This Saturday night, Sasha (her professional name), will not get home earlier than six in the morning. After a night of tireless smiling, excessive drinking and covert chatting with customers at a karaoke lounge, her hair will smell of cigarette smoke and beer. She would have had over forty cigarettes, and her breasts will hurt from being squeezed a tad too roughly by drunk men old enough to be her father.
Sasha is a Guest Relation Officer (GRO), but she goes by a slew of other titles including Public Relation Officer and Entertainment Hostess. Where she works, they all mean the same thing: Girl For Sale.
Time for sale
When I went undercover to find out how the sex trade works at the bars where girls like Sasha work, I found out quite a few things. Firstly, the drinks in these places are very expensive. And secondly, the GROs are essentially the bar’s employees, and they work for commissions on drinks sold. Nonetheless, they are welcome to earn whatever they can on the side… encouraged to, even — after all, if the men come back, they have to buy more of those expensive drinks, right?
The first place I visited hit me with its smell: damp, sleazy and cheap. There were cockroaches running around under the dilapidated sofa sets. It was on the second floor of a row of shop-houses, with no windows that I could see. It hadn’t seen the light of day in years.
As I stood at the entrance, nervously twirling my car keys in my left hand and switching my mobile phone to “loud” mode with my right, my eyes adjusted to the dark lighting. An attractive Chinese girl approached me from the bar, twinkling her smile. She was wearing what seemed to be the uniform for the girls working there: a short – and I mean short – maroon cheongsam (also called a Mandarin dress) with a name-tag that said her name was Yvonne, although I seriously doubt that.
She asked me if I would like a public seat or a private room (this was a karaoke lounge). I politely declined her invitation to look at the prices for a private room, and instead I made my way to corner of the room which I thought gave me a good vantage point of the whole bar. I seated myself on a sofa that sunk to the floor and ordered a drink.
The first thing you learn about places like this is that being relatively young and good-looking means nothing next to having a lot of money. I found that ordering USD10 beer was not enough to get someone to ‘entertain’ me. So I decided to ask for a USD250 bottle of Scotch, and was suddenly treated with a little more respect. The hostess who brought me the Scoth made her offer: USD10 for an hour of her time.
Lisa (the hostess) was in her late-thirties, had way too much make-up on and had a penchant for cracking her knuckles. Up close, she looked haggard, tired and sad — cigarettes, booze and a sunless existence will do that to you. I wondered how long she could continue to work there… or anywhere else, for that matter.
Street Walker in Hong Kong.
Asked if she has ever been offered money to have sex with them, and Sasha starts fidgeting with her collar.
Apparently, Lisa was the only girl who could speak English well enough to entertain a foreigner. However, she didn’t fit my research needs, so she was replaced by Candy.
Candy was twenty-two with a short hairdo and enough natural flush in her cheeks to not need rouge. She was skinny, though. The cheongsam hung off her shoulders like a shirt instead of hugging her figure like it should. At eleven o’clock, she was already slurring on Chivas, courtesy of a group of men in the forties who seemed to be having a reunion.
Her efforts to make me comfortable only succeeded in making me exceedingly fidgety. She patted me on my knees and hands and flirted blatantly. Conversation was stunted, but animated — I nodded to her Chinese, and she nodded to my English. GROs are trained conversationalists, and they get you chatting about your pet fancies in no time. Also, because they meet so many people, they can be surprisingly knowledgeable about current issues, and share their opinions freely… if the customer wants to hear them, of course.
I paid her the USD10/hour rate, but was sharing her with the Chivas men. Still, she seemed a lot happier to be with me than with them, although that could be wishful thinking. Nonetheless, when I gave no indication that I was going to buy more of her time, Candy drifted back to the Chivas group. She smiled at me, as did the gentlemen who were buying the drinks. One of them reached around her and spanked her bottom, drawing laughter from his friends. Even in the darkness I could see her blush, and a pained expression flickered briefly across her face as she sat down next to him. They lifted up their glasses, and toasted to peace, prosperity, and love.
I glanced casually around, and saw other men at other tables eyeing the proceedings intently. Seemingly like me – single and lonely – they waited patiently for Candy to pay some attention to them.
But that wouldn’t happen until they bought her time… and a bottle of Scotch.
All in a day’s work
I had seen enough. For my next stop, I decided to head into the city, where the lounges were rumoured to use pest control services to tackle their cockroach menace and the girls apparently spoke real English.
I was not dissappointed. Upon the recommendation of the Yellow Pages, I went to a place holed up in a shop-office complex. It was dimly lit, but smelled much nicer than the last. And as soon as my first bill came, I understood why: USD25 for a pilsner. This was one place where I certainly could not afford to order a Single Malt.
Undeterred, I turned on my journalistic charm and convinced a junior manager that I was doing an Executive Karaoke Lounge review (that’s what they like to call their establishments) for a travel magazine, and that I would be grateful if she would show me around.
Next thing I knew, my beers were on the house. Lucky me.
Again, not wanting to restrict my viewpoint, I took a small table in a corner (the only one available), and let my eyes and ears adjust themselves to the surrounding. The first thing I noticed was that the girls were dressed in very smart pantsuits. Also, the lighting for the place was very clever, with the walkways lighted up from the floor, but the table and sofa areas sufficiently dark so that everyone remained anonymous to everyone else. The sound system was much better, too. Everything seemed to indicate a much better work environment for the girls.
On an out call.
The first to come up to me was Sasha. She was in her late-twenties, with long, black hair and a nice-looking face. Not exactly pretty, but pleasant. And, wonder of wonders, she spoke English.
It was Sasha that I decided to engage as my subject for the evening, since she was matured enough to understand what I was doing, and could at least say something other than, “Do you want another drink?”
It turns out that Sasha wasn’t always at the ‘exclusive’ place, but began her time as a GRO in a much cheaper joint out of town. A ‘talent scout’ found her there. Apparently, in ‘exclusive’ places, the ability to speak English is quite valuable because of the expatriate community in the city.
But did her life change?
“Customers here are richer and more used to getting their way,” she says, with what seemed like a smidgen of regret. “In my old workplace, they would back off if I told them to. Not here, though.”
Sasha came to the city ten years ago to study. Through friends, she discovered the joys of clubbing and partying. Soon, her money was gone, and she flunked her exams. She had to look for a part-time job to be able to continue her education.
“I just couldn’t tell my parents that I’d blown everything on clothes and booze,” she says.
She needed something that would leave her free during the day so she could attend classes — a day job was out of the question. Her first job was as a waitress at a disco, but it wasn’t enough to support her lifestyle and her education. It was then that she was offered a job as GRO at a karaoke lounge.
“The guy said that the job function was more or less the same, except that I would have to be more ‘intimate’ with the customers,” recalls Sasha. “Since it was nearly double the pay, excluding tips, I took it.”
‘Intimate’ turned out to be more that she bargained for. The hours, longer. On most nights, her job simply means getting customers to buy the most expensive drinks on the menu by pouting at them, acting cute, dancing with them and suffering the occasional fondle and bad joke. But there are bad nights, which she prefers not to talk about.
“It’s the regulars that I don’t like,” Sasha sighs. “They give so much business to the place so they think they own you. And they don’t tip. Not anymore.”
A hard day’s night
Asked if she has ever been offered money to have sex with them, and Sasha starts fidgeting with her collar.
“Only every other day,” she replies. “It’s called ‘toilet service’ around here.”
‘Toilet service’ is the act of oral or full sex literally done in the lavish and well-spaced rest rooms of these outlets. There is also strip dancing: for a price, some GROs will do the full Monty for customers. But Sasha refuses to do anything more than let them fondle her in the open. It isn’t hard to go from Girl for Hire to Girl for Sale, and she does not want that to happen.
“My colleagues say that the first time is the hardest, but that it gets easier as you go along,” says Sasha. “You’ll be rolling in cash — at USD50 a go, the money is good. But you’ll also be no better than a prostitute — I don’t want that.”
The lounge does not take a cut from this money — it is a strictly private transaction between the customer and his new ‘friend’, done in the comfort of the lounge’s plush ‘lavatory’. The only money that passes hands between the bar and the GRO is a low basic salary, plus commissions from the beverage sales.
It is a fine business model. The bar is happy because of the repeat business (at super-high profit margins, I might add). The customers are happy because it is legal. And the girls are happy because it is both.
Technically, then, being a Guest Relation Officer is not illegal. It’s a loophole in the system. The owners can claim complete ignorance, since the money changing hands is between ‘friends’ and they get nothing. The girls are willing participants, and can choose for themselves how much — or how little — they want to lease out to the strangers who visit them: USD10 for a fondle, USD20 for a strip dance, USD50 for a ‘toilet service’. And although the management does not provide rooms, only an idiot would presume that they do not know what is going on.
Not all GROs are lavatory prostitutes. Some, like Sasha, are just trying to make a living. They don’t sell sex. They just lease their time and allow a few caresses here and there. Still, her future looks pretty bleak. She never finished college. But there is one hope for her: the possibility of getting married and leaving it all behind.
“Even though the customers at this Executive Lounge are rich and usually have girlfriends of their own, there are still proposals,” says Sasha. “There always will be in this business.”
She knows of two of her peers who settled down with customers and started families. Granted, their husbands have not stopped visiting GROs, but at least they don’t have to worry about what they will do after forty.
“At the most, I can only do this for another ten years… if I still look good,” says Sasha sadly.
“Is that time enough?” she asks me.
I cannot help but think of Lisa, my hostess at the earlier place. Was she, too, waiting for her prince charming?
“Sure it is,” I lie. In ten years time, Sasha will probably need to lease a lot more than her time to earn a living.
Girl for Sale soon. Enquiries within.
