Ten Chickens in a Row

After three in-flight meals and five in-flight movies, I am finally in Hong Kong. Consider traveling for 20 hours and sitting by an extremely talkative Chinese man who continually ate roasted sunflower seeds, it was not a bad trip. (He did offer me some, and I resisted the temptation. It just seemed to be a strange place to munch on sunflower seeds). Kevin met me at the airport. He is one of those lucky few who never gains weight no matter what a lifestyle he leads. It was really nice to see him after 2 years. We were good friends back in middle school and after all the supposed “growing-apart”, we still manage keep our friendship across the pacific ocean to this day. After all, with whom can I share such an old story of skipping night class, climbing out of the gate of to watch two movies in a row?

Last time Curtis and I were in Hong Kong two years ago, we were on our way back from Australia. The city does seem to be unable to change anymore physically, especially the downtown. Every inch of real estate has been exploited while a significant vertical expansion has already been achieved. Neon signs have already saturated and people barely have anywhere else to go. What did change was probably a mentality after it became part of China. The mysterious physically and psychological boundary of mainland and Hong Kong is long gone. Now one can get around by speaking mandarin without being looked down upon. As a matter of fact, mandarin is so hot now that many people try to learn it because they can have more employment opportunities, especially in the service industry. People from mainland are now all over Hong Kong for all sorts of purposes. So the city became more national in a sense.

Over dinner in a street restaurant, Kevin and I talked about random stuffs and we came upon the subject of sex. He disagreed my opinion that sex is still a taboo in China. Maybe gay sex but definitely not straight one. I had to pay attention to him. After all what do I know about the real deal in China nowadays, not mentioning sex? He told me that in Zhong Guan, a city between Guangzhou and Sheng Zeng which he is familiar with, prostitution has become a completely open item on the hotel menu. He said that one can order ten chickens ( they call female prostitute chicken, male, duck) from the entertainment department. They will come to the room, line up in a row, strip naked, move around to show the 3D view. The client will choose one. The chosen one will bow and say “thanks for choosing me”. The other nine will also bow and say “hope you will choose me next time”. The image of that polite commerce of sex-trade is both ridiculously grosteque and inappropriately satire. I am not against prostitution. As a matter of fact, I think since we can not remove the oldest profession from our society, we should legalize (Amsterdam is a very good example). That is not the case in China. Prostitution is illegal here, yet there are many Chinas and Zhong Guan is a different china straddled in capitalism and socialism, : in certain area, it probably gets the worse of both. Kevin told me those girls are all from poor villages inland. I can not imagine them not to be exploited or abused. The question becomes darker when I start to consider how many of them are volunteers and how many of them were trafficked and put in the job by forces.

What stuck me more was how the majority of Chinese trained themselves to live with all the ridicules like this and view them as part of the normal fiber of the society. Maybe it is a good way to survive I suppose. When one feels powerless or irrelavent to change, one has to adapt, which may includes telling a story sometime about the ten chickens in a row as a prove that sex in china is no longer a taboo.