I had trouble articulating my feelings to my friend, a Black-Puerto Rican woman born and raised in Manhattan. Finally, I landed on something tangible: Would non-Asian Americans care less about this because massage workers are part of a marginalized subset of the community? My friend, who had never been to one, affirmed my fears: “Aren’t they all sex parlors?”
In response, I described to her the yearlong sabbatical I took from journalism to help open a restaurant, where I also worked as a server, spending a good portion of my cash tips on different Asian masseuses to soothe my aching muscles each week. Their job, like mine, was very physically demanding, helping client after client. With my rudimentary Mandarin, I could only exchange a few words: My back hurts a lot. That’s fine. Thank you. When I spoke to them in Chinese, I could sometimes sense a softening. But ultimately we remained alien to each other. “Who gives these women massages at the end of their shifts?” I wondered. It is low-paying, grueling work done mostly by immigrant women, often middle-aged, who, in my experience, have never exhibited an inclination to play the temptress.
In Asia, massage is legal, normal and necessary. In America, it’s stained by sexism, imperialism and sex trafficking. Now I’ve learned from news reports that trafficking in illicit parlors pervades thousands of locations around the country. The masseuses earn only a fraction of the service fee; most of their money comes through tips, which is used to pay off debt.
I’m a Gen Xer originally from an upper-middle-class Southern California suburb, a veteran journalist trained to compartmentalize feelings from fact. I’m also a Chinese-American woman long inured to being accosted, assaulted and attacked in public, often with racist and sexual overtones. People don’t expect me, an Asian-American female, to be angry. They expect me to embody the clichés: submissive, quiet, inconsequential, dutiful, exotic object of fetishization.
The day after the shootings, Pim Techamuanvivit, a Thai restaurateur in San Francisco, tweeted, “I can tell you the best way to see the insidious prejudice against Asians, especially Asian women, is to come spend a service with my Thai host, then come back the next night to see my white host working the same position.” The tweet seemed to suggest a social experiment of sorts, one where only minorities know the result.