White Saviors “Rescuing” Asian Women & Who They Truly Serve:
Thoughts on the Massage Parlor Raids in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District
I know that beneath the story of creating a new Chinatown/International District that is amenable to the increasingly white, non immigrant and affluent cultural sensibility of Seattle, lie also the stories of recent migrant Chinese workers for whom Chinatown/ID is both an abode and a place of work. I know the tall lady who leaned her back on the wall of the massage parlor window where neon lights flashed “OPEN,” who told me she could not read my Chinese language flier. “I am not good at reading,” she said sheepishly in Mandarin, her head cast down. “My daughter is though! I can bring it home to read.” I remember too the harsh scent of garlic on the hands on the massage parlor worker who kneaded my back at the end of a long work day, sappy 90s Chinese pop playing in the background that brought me back to a familiar space. I wanted to ask him to wash his hands, and also, was he doubling as a worker in one of the restaurants in the vicinity coming in to give massage during his break time? How else could the smell of garlic be so strong?? And once, I did ask. It was when the hands of another massage parlor worker emitted that forceful stench of cigarette smoke. “Excuse me,” I asked in Mandarin, “Could you wash your hands?” To which the lanky man with the floppy side bangs giggled, and apologized profusely, “I am so sorry! Good that you asked. We are all Chinese, no need to be too polite. It’s my fault. I will go wash my hands now, OK?”
I frequent massage parlors in Chinatown/International District in part because of the draw of affordable massages after long work shifts on my feet, and in part, because the massage parlors are also a place of cultural familiarity.
I arrived in the US eighteen years ago as a first generation college student, wide eyed and excited about my fancy university scholarship, curious about this country that we were told to aspire to our whole lives. I am the child of my mother, a masseuse. I had spent many boring afternoons after school sitting in the salon doing my homework silently while my mother worked her magic on the faces of her customers, promising ageless skin-whitening beauty, marketing the traditional chinese medicine herbal cream she and my father concocted in our living room. Before traditional chinese medicine herbs became the new naturopathic medicine, or the new organic, my parents were mixing and grinding herbs for facial creams and powders. Selling dreams of chemical-free light beauty norms was my family’s livelihood. She told me when I left home, “Use those skills wherever you are. Everyone loves massages, especially facial massages!” In one of our conversations after my arrival to the US, my mom, always the entrepreneur, suggested that I convert my university dorm room into a massage space. “Put up posters in your school. Charge $30 a person for an hour. I will mail you the massage book again so you can revise. Those white people will love it. You won’t have to do those low paying jobs.”
The 18 year old me protested. Mom, they will think I am a prostitute, or something, I respond. Asian women giving massage in private rooms is just sketchy!
“Why sketchy? What’s the difference between a white lady giving massage and you? You charge less and it’s in your family! We mail you the herbs too! No artificial ingredients or chemicals. Why you want to sell coffee instead of massage? You make less money for more time, it’s stupid.”
My youthful years mistook this pragmatic indignation for an uncouth sensibility. I was a college student scaling up, not yet another Asian female masseuse. In those early years, I felt a perpetual unnamed inferiority, unable to measure up to the cultured, intelligent air my university classmates and their families exuded. My mother and her antics were a constant reminder that I did not belong of that world.
So instead, I took on a work study job, selling coffee to sleepy college students at the cart outside the lecture halls for $6 an hour. After school I worked as the only Asian barista at the coffee shop on Wickenden Street. I learned to make the lattes and mochas and a lot of small talk for $7/hour. I was thankful to be like all my other classmates, just another regular college student making ends meet.
A choice I could afford, with the luxury of age, the English language, and a desire to reinvent myself. A choice inaccessible to many other immigrant women.
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Chinatown/International District serves many roles — as a place of imagination and nostalgia, a place of livelihood and an abode. White America wants it to be the land of late night bar runs, slanted “asian font”, appropriately ethnic and yet accessible to white sensibility: a smooth fusion with a foreign edge. For some Chinese Americans, it is a land of nostalgia and resilience — places their elders and families were raised, at at a time when Chinatown was a redlined district where ambulances and firefighters never arrived, where they now own real estate property in while living in the distant majority white suburbs. Some of these folks who experienced Chinatown before the Chinese became integrated as model minority in the American racial hierarchy, have a lot to say about who is authentically Chinese or not, who has access to Chinatown as cultural home, marking their legacies on the boundaries of Chinatown, Japan Town, Manila Town, Little Saigon as if lives and ethnicities were not more intertwined and intermixed back then and now. Chinatown/International District is also the workplace of many immigrants — those who work the massage parlors, the restaurants and the kitchens; It is also the living quarters of many people, some in homeless encampments before they were displaced in the the mayor’s big sweeps, others are Asian elders who find company with one another as they gather weekly outside the ACRS food bank, or stroll along Hing Hay Park. I have been endearingly called “Little Comrade,” by one of these elders whom I encountered while working my shift as a nurse in the nearby hospital. Mired in her delirium and dementia, our common tongue brought her back to the cultural references of her homeland. Chinatown/International District is a place where lives unfold — work, shelter, legacies and identities.
Enter the massage parlors.
Massage parlors are a contentious presence. In recent years, approximately 24 massage parlors sprung up in Chinatown/International District within the eight block radius. The prevailing theory is that in 2008, as a result of the Great Recession, Chinatown/International District, like the rest of the country, saw a loss in renters and began to accept less desirable leases. Massage parlor rentals were exactly that, undesirable but yet necessary in a dismal property market. The US government’s biggest bail out of Wall Street with a $700 billion economic package in 2008 coincided with economic measures across the Pacific, albeit one of a different nature. The mainland Chinese government put forth a stimulus package to the tune of 4 billion RMB (approx $600 billion USD) for the Chinese population, aimed at infrastructure projects and public welfare spendings. These financial allocations had the effect of expanding the Chinese consumer market domestically, expanding the middle class and effectively also creating some surplus capital to increase liquidity in the world market.
Perhaps one could say, that Chinese-owned massage parlor rentals and proliferations across American cities at a time when all other businesses were breaking their leases, could well be a local analogy for how China’s domestic economic policies in 2008 prevented the further decline of the Great Recession in US — an uneasy but necessary alliance.
Would it be too ludicrous, to say that it is also on the backs of these workers that the 2008 recession-era Chinatown/International District continued to make rent?
China’s income inequality follows a story not uncommon to capitalist development — the rise of the middle class in China coincided with the increasing poverty of the rural population and their displacement into the cities, earning China the moniker of “factory of the world.” Chinese capital flowed into the US in the form of real estate acquisitions, but also, in the form of easy businesses like massage parlors. To staff these parlors, the owners had no shortage of working class, poor women chasing the American Dream, some being duped to enter the US to work in massage parlors, some choosing (or not) within the constraints of options, to do sex work. Women, in China or elsewhere, charged with the responsibilities of elder and child care, share a common experience of having to do what they gotta do. Would it be too ludicrous, to say that it is also on the backs of these workers that the 2008 recession-era Chinatown/International District continued to make rent?
Wealthy Chinese migration brings along with it also a trail of working class Chinese people who service them — from wives, to caregivers and other forms of gendered labor, including massages and sex work. Yet, class differences, poverty and possibly desperation are reduced, simply and derogatorily into “promiscuity.”
An elder Chinese man I encountered at a Chinatown cafe said of massage parlors, “Those Northeastern girls [in the massage parlors] are the most promiscuous. Those from Hong Kong and Taiwan have more dignity. The Northerners will do anything you tell them to.”
By “anything,” he meant massages that stretched into happy endings and other forms of sexual interactions.
By “Northerners,” he meant women from the Northeast/Dongbei region, otherwise known as the Rustbelt of China. Many massage parlor workers whom I met over the years, came from that region. Coincidentally, the Dongbei region is also the classic case study for the “breaking of the iron rice bowl” — where massive restructuring of the Chinese economy took place in the era of market reforms, privatizing previously state owned enterprises. The consequence is millions of workers losing lifetime employment and benefits, subsequently thrown into a flexible, volatile and low paying labor market. Poverty-driven displacement leading to migration, to try one’s luck in the US. None of this is particularly unique to China but it is not the story that arises when we encounter Chinese migrants in our home areas.
Beneath the story of Chinese wealth and capital, of Chinese tech workers in Amazon and Microsoft, lie also the story of Chinese migrants, many female, from poorer regions of China into the heart of Seattle’s Chinatown massage parlors. Wealthy Chinese migration brings along with it also a trail of working class Chinese people who service them — from wives, to caregivers and other forms of gendered labor, including massages and sex work. Yet, class differences, poverty and possibly desperation are reduced, simply and derogatorily into “promiscuity.”
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Being an immigrant Asian sex worker is a state of exception under the rules that make Asians the Model Minority.
Class contempt expresses itself as a constant judgment of poor people’s morality. Add patriarchy and racism to the mix and we will always have poor women of color who are judged to be promiscuous and greedy first, before they are seen as people exercising their agencies and making sensible decisions in the spectrum of choices before them.
For a racial category, Asians, who have been designated the success story, granted model minority status in the American racial hierarchy, another mechanism is at work. Its sustenance as a myth depends on mandatory submission to the notion that the American Dream pays off, that hard work and submission to existing rules lead one ultimately to success and assimilation. It is hard then, for dominant discourse to grapple with the reality of immigrant Asian sex workers doing (illegal) sex work in America. Furthermore, dominant white supremacist discourse also has it that sex work is demeaning and undesirable, a form of labor poor and desperate Asian women have to do out of necessity in their backward, poverty-stricken homelands where patriarchal culture and values are abound, but not when they arrive on the white and enlightened land of opportunity. When white America says, “you are in America, act like it,” what they are saying to immigrant Asian women is, drop the nasty sex work that you do back home, get clean, and get a goddamn proper job.
Being an immigrant Asian sex worker is a state of exception under the rules that make Asians the Model Minority. For that reason, it can only be explained through coercion and trafficking. Asian women’s choices of sex work over other forms of undesirable jobs, can only be explained as them being victims of sex trafficking. It does not matter that Asian women choose sex work, as challenging as it is within our cultural contexts, because it is the least worst option among the other undesirable forms of wage work that non-English speaking immigrant Asian women have access to. The land of opportunity fails in its promise of wealth and upward mobility. The low pay and stress of working in other service sector jobs such as cleaning or restaurant work make sex work a viable alternative.
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What does a raid do for her, and the many like her?
We are surrounded with snapshots of people, of situations, devoid of their contexts. Massage parlors in particular, strike that chord for many — dingy Chinese living quarters filled with helpless victims of sex trafficking, waiting, pining, for the white savior to rescue them from these squalid conditions, fulfilling our wildest Orientalist fantasies.
These rescue tropes sell. But not only do they sell, they also justify police expenditure and the logic of community policing. A police department that is scrutinized for its police brutality of Black and Brown folks always needs a facial uplift from another thankful, grateful community. What is a more heroic story, than rescuing a bunch of fearful Asian women from squalor and violence? Never mind that we will never know the women’s stories. It suffices that we know they offer gratitude to the police force for their momentous rescue.
In the most recent raids in Chinatown/International District, the Seattle Police Department has made sure to remind us that they have spent three years of close collaboration with the FBI to rescue Chinatown from its own vices. The recent raid targeted 11 massage parlors and arrested 26 people.
The officer falls short of calling it “organized crime. ” The reports call the massage parlor business owners a “network” that span the west coast from LA to Seattle.
Where does a network of lowly paid workers and business owners who share contacts and travel voluntarily end, and a smuggling ring begin?
Where does wage theft of workers who choose to offer a range of sexual services voluntarily, end and human trafficking by force, fraud or coercion begin?
Undeniably, there may be cases of human trafficking, where massage parlor workers were held against their will, coerced, by force and fraud into the work they do. The reports on the recent massage parlor raids remain vague on the actual statistics. More often however, there are immigrant Asian women who engage in various forms of sex work for low wages and long hours, who feel forced not by their single employer, but by their economic circumstances, language inaccessibility and fierce racism and classism of dominant American society. The unquestionable legitimacy offered to the Seattle Police Department in its rescue narrative, obliterate the fact that the issue is more complex. This blanket acceptance in public belies the fact that for many non-English speaking immigrant women, massage parlor work and a range of sexual services are work they engage in, because opportunities are not abound for them.
I recall a massage parlor worker who told me how she didn’t want to work there. Everyone assumes that I am a sex worker and I get harassed all the time, she says. However, working at a grocery store and a restaurant did not allow her to bring back enough for her and her child. It also caused her a lot of stress and anxiety to have to interact in English with the customers. It just wasn’t worth it.
What does a raid do for her, and the many like her?
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It is hard to talk about neighborhoods and police activity in Seattle without addressing the gentrification the city is undergoing. Hyperbole in describing danger and violence has always been a tool to justify police presence, and to make neighborhoods more appealing to those who trust the police. Massage parlors are not desirable in neighborhoods, not because they are dangerous, but because they are a sore reminder that the inhabitants of the neighborhood are not wealthy and legitimate in the white, proper, middle class kind of way.
The SPD raid of the massage parlors coincide with yet another major event in Chinatown/International District. The groundbreaking ceremony of the new Koda condominiums, marketed above $1million/unit, took place around the same time, alongside the development of the new Marriot hotel, and the sale of the building that the historic Bush Gardens now stands. In order to claim Chinatown/International District as a desirable location for rich Chinese capital, white tourists and properly housed, clean customers, other undesirable elements need expulsion or cleansing by the SPD. Capital isn’t committed enough to wade through the scents and sights of the real people who live and work in Chinatown/International district, especially those who reek too much of the Chinese immigrant experience in all its layers, with all its uncouth sensibilities rolled into one.
