Part of the massage industry is built on hate crimes against Asian women - The Washington Post

[massage]

My clients were not employees at established, legitimate massage businesses — they worked at illicit businesses, in which a plethora of fraudulent practices took place beyond human and sex trafficking.


I regularly attended police raids on massage businesses in a large Midwestern state to provide both basic and continued advocacy for the women there: language interpretation, access to legal representation, health services, food and water during hours of police questioning. While some of these raids focused on arresting “Johns” for partaking in prostitution or else cracking down on business owners for fraudulent practices or human trafficking, the vast majority of the time, the women ended up in jail themselves. Part of my job was to pick up these women from jail after their release; often, this was my job because they literally knew no one else in the state.


While it was often acknowledged by law enforcement that the women were probably victims of exploitation, if not human and sex trafficking, many of the raids I attended were still carried out in a manner that further victimized and traumatized the women. Once, this meant pushing all of the women into the street first thing in the morning, shivering in their nightclothes. Another time, two Asian women at a parlor raid were held in the back of a police car, handcuffed, while one sobbed and began to have problems breathing. In both instances, local media had arrived, and the women struggled to maintain anonymity.


Treatment of this kind and then subsequent arrests of women were common despite the fact that almost every woman I spoke to had experienced some form of violence herself, almost exclusively at the hands of a White man at a massage business. Not once had I heard of a woman reporting the violence she experienced to the police. And it was understandable: Most interactions they had with police — or interactions they knew of — resulted in their arrest, and sometimes permanent confiscation of their IDs, cellphone and electronics, credit cards and cash. Many told me that the violence they experienced was their own fault, for falling for the lies of a trafficker or exploitative employer. They thought that reporting it would cost them deportation or loss of legal status; they didn’t speak English, and they didn’t know whom to trust, or where to go.


My clients never spoke of how histories, systems and institutions had laid the groundwork for their exploitation. Instead, they blamed themselves. Their words surrounded themes of fear, humiliation, shame, distrust and disbelief. As advocates, this made our work all the more difficult — it was hard to build rapport and achieve some level of trust for working together. Time and time again, I would speak with a client one day and she would be gone the next, her cellphone disconnected. Through other women, I might learn she had gotten on an overnight bus to New York or Chicago. Months and even a year later, she might call me with a familiar situation: She had been arrested again in a massage parlor raid, in another city or state. Some of my clients found ways to leave the industry, showing immense willpower, strength and resilience. Others tried just as hard but ended up in the same situation. The systems that maintain this industry also make it nearly impossible for women to escape it.


The fact that Asian women in some massage businesses today have been silent about the constant racism and violence they experience does not mean it doesn’t happen. While I sat with them for upward of six or eight hours as police conducted questioning and investigations, these women told me horrific stories of the violence they encountered within the windowless walls of massage parlors. This included verbal, sexual and physical abuse. For the perpetrators of this form of violence, their choice of location is not random. Those men chose windowless rooms, chose Asian women at massage parlors, chose victims who could not speak English. They chose victims who were undocumented, who had no family or friends around, who often lived and slept in the very same massage room where the men violated them.


While generalizations and stereotyping can be harmful, I did see clear patterns in how illicit massage businesses function. Typically, that includes payment in cash below minimum wage, with no health care or other benefits provided. It includes confiscation of passports and other valuable papers. It includes deductions in payment to cover rent, water and electricity because the woman was living in the massage parlor, even though these were business expenses and she was given no other option. It includes controlling and surveilling women’s movement by limiting access to transportation, limiting access to Internet and controlling and chaperoning weekly grocery trips. One of the most common forms of control was via debt bondage: Women would owe an exorbitant amount of money in exchange for being placed at a spa, working months to back pay this debt. My clients would have no options to leave their supposed employment and seek another situation. Emotional manipulation was common, as almost all the women spoke no English and had limited or no social contacts outside of their employer’s management.


Despite the overwhelming incidence of exploitation, harassment and violence at these sites, jokes about Asian massage businesses continue to be a regular part of American pop culture. When we speak up about this, my Asian female friends and I have been told to “lighten up” and have a sense of humor. I was stunned into nervous laughter when once, during a raid, White male police officers joked about me “working” at the business. Multiple times, police officers profiled me and assumed I was indeed working at a spa and initially denied me entry to help my clients. More than once, as I tried to communicate the needs and concerns of my clients — which was my job — I was told that I upset police officers who thought I was trying to tell them how to do their own job. I didn’t speak up then. I only made sure to be more friendly, to smile more, to speak less, and to appear more “cooperative” to these White, male officers.


But now, the events of the past year and especially the past week have pushed me, like many Asians and Asian Americans, to find a new voice to speak on behalf of my community. I am still afraid of being judged for speaking my mind, as an Asian American woman, about racism and violence targeted at Asian Americans. I worry that speaking out will be misunderstood and misinterpreted in light of other social justice struggles. I often find myself explaining that Asians and Asian Americans do experience racism, though perhaps in ways that are not as well understood in mainstream society. Massage spas are one of the most blatant examples of this.


This last year, I have been constantly inspired by Black Lives Matter activists, leaders, youths and all those calling out individual and institutional racism and violence in our society. I am both hesitant and hopeful as I write this now. Previously, it seemed like not speaking out about violence experienced by Asian women was imperative to doing my job well — a necessary part in maintaining the professional relationships critical to gaining access to raids on spas. Now, it seems imperative to do the opposite and speak my mind. The illicit Asian massage industry rides on a wave of objectification, sexualization and exploitation of Asian women, one that our society makes light of and then condones, over and over again. These spas, and the violence they inherently allow for, are in our neighborhoods, next to our stores, our restaurants, our schools. To me, there is no question if the Atlanta shootings were a hate crime. The question is whether we are willing to look at the deeply entrenched racism in our society and realize that there’s more than one violent form of hate crime out there.