Mona Lisa Wo Yao Ni

Kitty corner from the Hua Shi Bai Business Hotel a block from the Dandong Railway Station is a big picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with all her famed enigmatic smile, at once seductive and innocent, occupying the façade of the second and third floors of the corner building. This is an advertisement for prized tiles, a rather strange brand name for a fancy interior design material.

At nine in the evening, our 3-star hotel room telephone rang and I asked my 16-year-old roommate to answer since none of the hotel staff spoke English in this Liaoning city across the Yalu river from North Korea (maybe, there are English speakers in the 5-star hotels by the river since not only are there English billboards, the signage pattern from street to store front is bilingual in an economy trying to serve the English-dominated global market).

After a couple of words, he handed the telephone to me. An English speaking male voice at the end said, “Would you like to have company for the night, sir?”

This service offering has become customary in many hotels around the world, though it usually starts with an in-house massage service promo. My solicitous 73-year-old host, a veteran engineer supervisor with a state-run dairy service, understood and discreetly offered to pay for the cost. I did not feign surprise because I wasn’t, though I minded my manners and declined the offer.

Not too long ago, I wrote about the “Ladies of Shenyang,” and the inordinate number of workers coming from the three provinces of Manchuria (Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang) as well as Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces near Shanghai in our Saipan bars and clubs. I suggested that since these places were where most of our garment factory ladies came from, with occasional stragglers from Shenzhen between Guangzhou and HK, and Chengdu in Sichuan, many of them lured into paying exorbitant fees for promises of working in the U.S. on fake three-year contracts, especially prior to the industry’s sunset in 2005, the demographic change into predominantly Chinese among sex workers is not a surprise.

The verb “shanghai’d” not only referred to what happened to able-bodied male workers lured into inebriation in the wharves of Shanghai only to wake up in the high seas heading toward fields in California, it also referred to the practice of Jiangsu and Zhejiang fathers selling their “valueless and burdensome”’ daughters into bonded servitude to traders in Shanghai and Tianjin, the trade evolving into actual kidnapping of young girls to be sex workers in historically libertine Manchuria. The notorious comfort women established by the Japanese for ces was, at the start, ethnically sensitive—Japanese ladies for the Nippons and Korean ladies for the Hanggul—but given the nature of the service, it swiftly deteriorated into crimes of involuntary human trafficking of the worst kind.

A recent bestseller from the prolific Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho is an engaging novel titled Eleven Minutes, which opens with, “Once upon a time, there was a prostitute named Maria.” Not unlike many of our Saipan ladies of the night, Maria turns intentionally clinical and objective about the profession and makes it work for her in Switzerland. Coelho, however, follows the romantic pattern of a medieval morality play (the religious allusion re Maria is not accidental) of the Dulcinea led astray by fate but meets her destiny and live happily ever after.

A current movie, The Girlfriend Experience, offers a more realistic portrayal of the profession, using the neutral and preferred term “sex worker,” by members of the profession who, in some settings, actively lobby for safer and healthier working conditions, a more cooperative structure of employment and benefits, etc., not dissimilar to union demands in other professions. It is by no means a purely pro sex-work propaganda, though given its subject matter, I do not expect to see it in our Saipan Hollywood theatre anytime soon. On the other hand, Google “escort service” in any major city anywhere and the high end of this trade is evidently qualitatively well-staffed.

A colleague who followed my House of Horus series termed it “salacious” compared to my musings during the Lenten season, meditating on images of the Triune formula of the Christian deity and the ecclesiology of its piety. But on HoH, I did urge a non-judgmental and amoral perspective (as contrasted to “immoral”) on the practice and profession, something that is difficult for many people who live in neat two-universes and lead split personalities.

I was reminded of a colleague from outside Topeka, Kansas. A Methodist and a Rotarian, he was vehemently opposed to the establishment of a watering hole at the county line on the grounds that it would encourage alcoholism and prostitution. Where else would I bump into him but in one of the gentlemen’s club in Topeka? “I do not mind the business, or the services they bring, but I’ll be darned if I will have it in my neighborhood,” he zealously exclaimed.

Well, in Dandong, I am certain the Mona Lisa smile is proffered at various places after 9pm. And I am equally certain, many are paying not for quality tiles but for quality time; it would not surprise me if genuine pleasure abounds. As for the meaning of wo yao ni, ask a Chinese friend. I said ask, I didn’t say tell; let’s keep your virgin face intact.