The Marmot’s Hole

The Dong-A Ilbo ran a series of pieces today on Korea’s latest export to the United States—prostitutes.

The English section was kind enough to translate one of them, but alas only one.

The most moving one—and the one that was translated, talks with 15 Koreans women locked up in a detention center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The women were busted during “Operation Cold Comfort,” a major crackdown on Korean sex shops on the East Coast.

Poor lasses seemed to have gotten a terrible fright with ‘dem scary U.S. cops with their guns and all busting in to raid their places of employment.

Why did they come to America, of all places, to peddle their asses? Well, according to the girls, once you’re past your mid-20s, it’s hard to make money whoring in Korea. But Americans, stupid creatures they are, couldn’t tell how old Asian women were, so they could make 20,000-30,000 U.S. dollars a month. Or so they’d heard.

One of the 15 enterprising women was a middle-aged woman who represented an intriguing synthesis of Korea’s hooker exports and Koreans’ craze for sending their children overseas for study. The 40-year-old woman with a middle-school daughter came to the United States —alone— in May on a tourist visa to prepare to send her kid to a U.S. school. She went to centers specializing in overseas study, but heard it cost more than 30 million won a year. So our entrepreneurial mother set out to make a bit of coin before bringing her daughter over.

One of the 15, a 58-year-old woman who did the girls’ cooking and cleaning, died of late-stage cancer while in custody.

Another of the 15, a 62-year-old woman who also did cooking and cleaning, was there to help her son, who was studying music at a U.S. university. Having come to the country 5 years ago, she theoretically lived in a one-room apartment with her son, but was so busy she only went home once or twice a month.

Three of the girls engaged in sex trade-related work prior to coming to the United States. Most of the girls claimed they got into the business after failing to find legal work in the country. They did say, however, that they’d seen many girls around them who’d come to the United States to flee Korea’s two-year-old Special Law on Prostitution. But not them, of course.

Only one of the girls claimed her passport had been taken by the pimp after her arrival in the United States, and none of the girls claimed to have been locked up or confined. The girls made varying amounts of money, although one made 20 million won a month (to put that into perspective, I make somewhere between 2 and 3 million a month). Some of the girls had sent the bulk of their earnings to their families in Korea.

A spirited and clearly merchantalist-minded 35-year-old working girl said, “I know people curse us for disgracing the country. But poverty was incurable. With the Korean economy a mess, each of the girls here remitted some 10,000-20,000 U.S. dollars a month.”

Well, at least they’re bringing in more foreign exchange than Daewoo.

The biggest tear-jerker was a 38-year-old woman. She ran a business in Korea, but when trouble struck, she came to the United States on her lonesome. She began peddling her ass to earn money for a plane ticket so she could go to Korea for the Chuseok holiday. Crying, she said, “I promised my husband and son that I would prepare with my own two hands the ancestral rites ceremony for my parents-in-law this Chuseok…”

No, I didn’t make that up. It’s in the Dong-A Ilbo.

Another 40-year-old ho lent to people around her some 20,000 of the 30,000 U.S. dollars she’d made, but now facing forced deportation, the likelihood of her getting paid back was growing slimmer and slimmer.

Meanwhile, it looks like some of the newer forms of prostitution in Korea are already being exported to the United States. Among these is the bangseokjip, a form of prostitution that took hold in Korea following the Special Law on Prostitution. Girls rent an small apartment in residential areas, and clients visit for booze and sexual services.

Besides the bangseokjip, there are the trusty massage parlors fronting for prostitution. According to the Korean embassy in the United States, 90 percent of these places are owned by Koreans.

According to the Polaris Project, a U.S. civic group dedicated to eradicating human trafficking, there were some 85 massage parlors in the DC area alone, and about 1,000 places nationwide employing Korean prostitutes.

Cal State professor Timothy Lim, quoting U.S. government figures putting the number of Korean women who enter the country through Canada at 400-500 a month, claimed there were some 5,000 Korean women engaging in prostitution in the United States.

A Korean-American who lives in Los Angeles said that if you go to public phone booths in Koreatown, you can often find fliers with the phone numbers of Korean women written on them.

A report by the NIS, the Korean intelligence agency, estimated the number of Korean prostitutes in the Los Angeles area at 200-300, although the number shoots up to 1,000 if you include women doing it part-time.

One NIS official, apparently taking off from tracking North Korean agents, said Korean girls with nowhere to go after the enactment of the Special Law on Prostitution were being lured to the United States by Internet cafes and word of mouth claiming they could make 20 million-30 million a month in the country. He said most start off their U.S. league careers on the west coast and then move east.

Great, New York gets the used hos. Go figure.

U.S. authorities look at the issue of Korean prostitution as one of human trafficking and human rights violations. They are particularly concerned about how the recruiting and smuggling of the girls have become organized. A recent report by U.S. immigration authorities summarized the process as follows:

1. Recruiters in Korea and the United States recruit girls looking to take care of their families and provide them with transportation funds and money for other expenses;
2. They provide the girls fake passports and smuggle them in to the United States through Canada or Mexico;
3. In the process, the girls accumulate ten of thousands of dollars in debts;
4. The girls get to work under the watchful eyes of the smugglers or pimps;
5. Their passports are taken away, and the money the girls make is used to pay off their debts. To keep them from fleeing, they are threatened with being reported to immigration or having their families in Korea informed of their chosen profession.

The girls interviewed by the Dong-A Ilbo, however, said passports would be taken or girls confined only when recruiters/smugglers paid for their entire trip over, and they’d hardly seen such cases.

They also said that most of the clients at the so-called bangseokjip were Korean, but 95 percent of the massage parlor clients were locals.

BTW, the Korean consul general in Washington is apparently a very busy man thanks to this issue, which according to him not only tarnishes the reputation of the local Korean community, but could also be a roadblock to Korea being included in the U.S. visa-waiver program.