"We have a lot of assumptions about who they are": On the women of Taipei's red light district
Interview with Sinee Teo, a Singaporean missionary who works with former or current sex workers; plus, book club on Alexander Chee's Edinburgh
We’re honored to share this interview with Sinee Teo, a Singaporean missionary who has worked in Taipei’s red light district for fourteen years.
As a staff member at Pearl Family Garden, Sinee works with mostly elderly women who are former or current sex workers or employees at “teahouses.” We first heard about her through her friend and roommate, Cindy. We met both at the Episcopal Church. Michelle was lucky enough to visit the Pearl, where she was struck by the warmth, ease, and sense of community.
Sinee has been busy speaking about a new book composed of oral histories from the women of the Pearl called Serving Tea: Stories from Wanhua’s Red Light District. It was released in Mandarin last month; it will be released in English at the end of the year. Sinee shepherded the book from its inception through to its realization, commissioning the writer, Shine Lee (李玟萱), and helping the women featured tell their stories.
In this interview, which took place over the course of three conversations, Sinee talks about how women end up in sex work, the legal landscape that has shaped their lives, and how her relationship to faith has changed.
In Taiwan, sex work is profoundly stigmatized. Sinee’s work goes a long way to helping people rethink their prejudices and assumptions. If you’re in Taipei, you can hear her speak at New Bloom on the Saturday, July 8.
Albert: How did you hear about the Pearl?
Sinee: I first met the founder, Tera van Twillert, a Dutch woman who’s been in Taiwan for over thirty years. She arrived in 1993 and spent fourteen years in a church doing homeless ministry in Wanhua. Most of the homeless were men; she wanted to work with women. She opened the Pearl in 2008 and I joined in 2009. I didn’t know anything. I had no idea about the people, the ladies who came there. I didn't even know they were all middle-aged or elderly.
Michelle: Tell us a little bit about the women you work with.
Sinee: Their lives are unbelievable and dramatic. You could write their stories into a novel or a movie. One woman, who goes by the pseudonym Liyun in the book, wanted to be a singer. Back then you needed a license. She got one and was performing around the same time as Teresa Teng. She thought she was going to make it and she was very excited. She started touring to perform. But she was only sixteen at the time, and she was raped. This guy and his friends chased her down. He tried to keep her in a hotel for days. She called her dad, but her family decided not to call the police because of the stigma involved.
Then she became pregnant. Her father struck a deal with the guy: “If you marry her, I won’t put up a big fuss, I’ll just marry her off to you.” The guy agreed and they had two children. He made her work in a jiu dian (酒店, a bar or a tea house often associated with sex work) as a hostess. He was taking all her money, all the gifts from the customers. So she came up with an escape plan. She convinced him it was better for them to divorce, because that way she could go and make him more money. He didn’t realize she really wanted to leave.
After they divorced, she ran away. Then she fell in love with another guy and found out later that he was married. She tried to kill herself at Yehliu Bridge (野柳). The police saw her and stopped her. It’s incredible to think about: the police didn’t stop her from getting raped, but they stopped her from killing herself. Then she jumped from the sixth floor of a building. She survived.
A fortune teller told her that she needed to go to America. So she went to America and lived in Flushing for ten years. She can speak a little bit of English. Today she looks back on that as the best time in her life. But she had to come back because her son was killed by some of his classmates. She was devastated. She couldn't do anything for three months. She also had to take care of her mother, which was a fraught situation because she’d never had a good relationship with her mom—you know, 重男輕女· zhong nan qing nü [a traditional Chinese idiom about how parents value sons more than daughters]. She was always getting punished and beaten. But she came back to Taiwan to look after her mom.
She ended up in the business she had left, the jiu dian. It’s a complicated business, and it’s easy to get cheated. Your customers come, you drink with them, they say, “I’ll pay next week,” and you end up footing the bill. You don’t earn any money. And you can go heavily into debt.
Q: How did you meet her?
A: We visited her at a teahouse and left a business card. We didn’t hear from her for a while. But then she just suddenly remembered us and called. She was tired of her lifestyle and wanted to leave. But she didn’t have any money. She wanted to train to be a caregiver. She said she needed 5,000 NT ($161 USD) to do so, so we connected her to a social worker. She trained and got a job at a nursing home.
We thought that would be the happy ending, right? But because of some of her habits—she was a heavy smoker, for instance—one person at the nursing home didn’t like her. So she had to become a substitute worker. Basically the nursing home said, “We’ll call you if someone goes on leave.” But she was living in a place with poor phone reception, so she didn’t get most of those calls. That was the end of that job.
Then she started doing handicrafts with us. The Pearl has a program that teaches women to make handicrafts, which they can then sell. That became her main source of income. When you look at her life now, it's the most normal it’s ever been. I think of us as friends. I don’t think of her as a beneficiary of our program—it’s a mutual relationship.
Michelle: What is Liyun’s daily life like?
Sinee: On a normal day she might come to the Pearl, visit her friend in the park, or go to medical appointments. She also spends a lot of time playing the lottery. She’s always trying to pick numbers, researching them, looking for patterns. I’ve asked her why she spends money she doesn’t have on the lottery; she says it gives her hope. Maybe one day all her problems can be solved. She comes to the Pearl at least a few times a week. She also spends a lot of time watching the TV — she calls the TV her lao gong [slang for husband]. She tries not to think about the past.
Michelle: How did she respond to the book?
Sinee: Over the course of the writing process, she’s seen her story laid out a few times. Each time she’s said, “This is nothing, this is one-tenth of the real story.” Even when we read it out to her, it feels like someone else’s story, and she wants to brush it off, dissociate. I can understand that.
When she first came, it was so exhausting to talk to her. She said no, no, no to everything. Or “I don't care what you think.” It was frustrating. She was trying to pay off her debt to the National Health Insurance in monthly installments. But if you tried to give her advice, she’d say, “I know everything! Don't tell me anything!” She’d shut down the discussion and said the only way to solve it was to buy a lottery ticket.
I said, “Why don’t we try praying about it and asking God?” She scoffed and said, “Bu ke neng—no way. Nothing will drop from the sky.” Then one day she came and she showed us a letter. You know the company that sells lottery tickets? They have to give to charity every year, and they said they'd help people who have to pay off health insurance. She’d been chosen by the company. She said, “從天上掉下來的, it fell from the heavens.” It was a miracle for all of us. I thought, God really has a sense of humor!
She’s improved so much. She was manic and high-strung, always in a hurry. Now she’s much calmer. She prays a lot and cares for others. She’s memorized Psalm 23 and 19, the Lord’s prayer.
Albert: How has working at the Pearl challenged or changed the way you think about faith or missions or God?
Sinee: I do wonder about suffering, about why all these horrible things happen to people. Once in a while you could say they made bad choices, but more often it’s really not their fault—it’s the people around them, their circumstances. I just ask God, why them and not others? I’ve never had to go through anything close to what they’ve experienced.
The thing is, most of the women who come to us don’t ask these questions. They don’t think their circumstances are unfair. None of them ask, “Why me and not someone else?” They expect suffering in their life. They think, If it happens, I’ll deal with it. Sometimes I think it’s a Chinese sort of philosophy—This is my life, this is my fate.
Michelle: Is that the framework in which they understand suffering?
Sinee: There’s this idea of reincarnation and past lives. I’ll often hear, “It’s because of my past life that I suffer. I must have done something wrong.” One woman will say, “It’s because of my past life that I had to be a prostitute in this life. I hope in my next life everything will be okay. I’ll pay off all my debts in this life so my next life will be better.”
When I hear that, I just feel so sad. That sort of thinking robs people of hope. If we improve the situation now, does that mean we’re not paying off this debt? They think they to suffer in this life so the next one will be good. If you suggest to them that they don’t have to suffer, they don’t accept that that’s possible. That’s one thing about becoming a Christian—you don’t have to worry about being reincarnated!
Michelle: You’re a missionary. Does it matter to you if the people you’re helping don’t believe?
Sinee: I’m not the sort of missionary who conditions help on conversion, or who gets upset if someone hasn’t become Christian. But I do think some people have belief systems where there’s not much hope. They spend a lot of money on baibai [a sort of prayer in Asian religion], and I say to them, “Look, if you can connect with this God I’m telling you about, you don’t have to pay for your sins in this life or past lives. Someone has done it for you. Isn’t that good news?” It’s not that I think they’ll immediately believe or anything like that. But I think they do sense some difference. They’ll always say, “When I go to the Pearl, I don't have to spend any money. I don’t have to pay—you’re always giving, nobody demands anything from me.”
The idea that there's this God who loves and cares for you, that’s a huge comfort. It’s a comfort to me, and for their situation even more so. When you’re suffering, God can be so much realer. When you’re not suffering, you can try to reason and intellectualize a lot of things. But some women really talk to him like a friend or a father. I don’t know—there’s something about their prayers. It isn’t like the jargon we hear in church. Even what they call him… I remember a lady who used Taiyu [Taiwanese] and called him “baba.” [Sinee breaks out into Taiwanese here.] I found that very powerful. I don’t even call my dad that. I don’t even have that close a relationship with God. To me that intimate language can feel very cringey. But many women at the Pearl don’t have problems connecting emotionally.
Albert: Do you see common threads in how people end up in sex work? Or does everyone have a singular path?
Sinee: One thread is family. Of the twelve women in the book, two were sold into prostitution by their parents. Several had to turn to it because of a failed marriage. Other threads are poverty, lack of education and schooling, and lack of family support. Due to lack of education, they don’t have a lot of choices. They don’t know how to get help. Back then it was expected that families would sacrifice one child. One of our ladies was in prison in China. Another one had very serious schizophrenia after pregnancy.
Michelle: Could you tell us more about the legal history of prostitution in Taiwan?
Sinee: It’s a long one. The tradition of teahouses and hostesses dates back to the Japanese period, of course, as the authorities allowed geisha houses and brothels to operate in certain districts. Wanhua (艋舺) was designated a red light district, and at its height there was a brothel with over sixty rooms and almost six hundred women working there.
At first the KMT tried to ban prostitution, defining it as an immoral practice encouraged by the Japanese occupiers. But they soon had to reverse course, as there were so many single men who had come as refugees. So the KMT registered and licensed prostitutes, which spawned a teahouse and coffeehouse culture through the postwar period.
In the 1980s, during Taiwan’s democratization, prostitution became a central political issue. A coalition of NGO activist groups—spearheaded by the Presbyterian Church—rallied around the issue of child prostitution. In particular, they discovered that many indigenous children were often sold or kidnapped into sex work. In 1987, activists organized rallies in Wanhua to protest these problems, which led to broader calls to criminalize prostitution outright.
But people were divided about whether to ban prostitution in general or only child prostitution. It got really complicated. In 1991, the law changed. Previously both clients and prostitutes were fined if caught, but now only prostitutes were. This put extra burdens on marginalized women. In 1997, then-mayor of Taipei Chen Shui-bian banned prostitution in Taipei. There was a grace period until 2001, but after that it was criminalized in Wanhua. There are still special zones in the rest of Taiwan that allow it, but the last legal brothel closed during the pandemic.
After this, many sex workers organized rallies to protest the change in the law. The most famous activist, Guan Hsiu-chin 官秀琴, known as 官姐, killed herself. I feel so sad for these women. I understand that from one perspective they’re sex workers trying to fight for their rights and that they see it as a labor rights issue. By criminalizing it, you take away the only thing they can do.
Still, what if there had been other choices? The government tried to compensate them by giving money to do small businesses, but it’s not easy to learn those new skills. Most of the ladies now depend on social welfare. Once they reach sixty-five and qualify, it improves their lives a lot.
Albert: What do you think justice would look like?
Sinee: A lot of people ask what I would do with a million dollars. I would set up a fund that gives these women a pension, that gives them a sense of dignity and stability in their old age. I can’t fathom somebody being in their sixties and still having to do sex work. I hope they can have other options.
Michelle: You once told me that you personally support decriminalizing sex work. Do you still feel that way?
Sinee: Our official position at the Pearl is that we have no position. Because we're Christian, we can't say we want to decriminalize sex work—the church would be up in arms.
For example, in the process of putting together this book, I was talking to a very famous person in the Taiwanese church. He said, “Why do you want to make this book? What if somebody reads it and wants to go to Wanhua and find a prostitute?”
I thought, “What? What do you think the book is about??”
[a totally aghast, incredulous look on all of our faces]
Albert: That’s one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.
Sinee: For most Christians it's a simple issue of morality, but it's a lot more nuanced than that. Could there be some women who choose sex work? Yes. But for most of the women I know, it wasn’t much of a choice. I don't want anyone to have to resort to sex work, to be bought and sold as an object, to be subjected to exploitation.
Some countries have made it legal to buy sex; some have made it illegal to buy sex but not illegal to sell it. Whatever the legal position, we should not further penalize women in prostitution.
That's why Taiwan's constitutional court ruled in 2009 that the previous law was unconstitutional. It penalized the women but not their customers. The judges had hoped legislators would decriminalize the sex trade, but due to electoral pressures the opposite happened. In Taiwan, it's illegal to buy or sell sex outside designated zones—and there are currently no such zones.
We need to provide women with options to leave the sex trade. For those who cannot or do not want to leave, we make sure they have access to medical and social services.
Albert: How do the women find you?
Sinee: We attract a lot of people from the neighborhood because we’re on the first floor. People pop in and ask, “What’s this?” Some people bring their friends. We have activities, meals, and so on.
Albert: How do you see your work as a Christian feminist?
Sinee: [laughs] I don’t think of myself as much of a feminist.
Albert [surprised]: Often people see Christianity and feminist work at odds, but I see yours as a clearly feminist project. You're centering women, you're centering women’s stories, you’re thinking about trauma and repair. Why don’t you see the work as feminist?
Sinee: I understand that feminism and sexual liberation are two different things but nowadays they're so intermeshed that I can’t identify. When I watched Sex and the City in college, I thought, This isn’t feminism. They’re still in a sort of prison, looking for validation from men. If this is feminism, I thought, I don’t want anything to do with it. And feminism is so often celebrated in materialistic and capitalistic terms—I find that very alienating.
My primary identity is "child of God." I don't have to prove that I'm as good as or better than a man. I find that freeing.
Michelle: I respect how you choose to describe your beliefs. But the painful experiences of these women emerge from patriarchal circumstances. And isn’t some of the work you do indebted to the work feminists did to create a path? I hope you’re not offended—I’m just arguing because I feel comfortable with you!
Sinee: Why did people become nuns? They didn’t want to get married. There was feminism before there was feminism. It wasn’t just for religious reasons: they wanted to gain control of their lives. In faith there’s enough freedom for us all.
In Christianity there’s freedom for you to remain single. You can be a single woman. At least for me, I didn’t feel any pressure. Compare that to non-Christians; they have to tick off all these boxes—they have to get married, have two kids, buy a house. I know it isn’t like this everywhere. But in my church you don’t have to care what other people think.
Albert: Do you know whether underage sex work is still prevalent in Taiwan?
Sinee: I don’t think so—at least we don’t see it in Wanhua. But we do see ladies in their twenties. They tend to be from Southeast Asia. There are always handlers or bodyguards watching over them. We did outreach with a person whose wife is Vietnamese; she could speak to the ladies, but the ladies are wary because someone’s always watching. Once in a while police will do a raid and say they’re all undocumented immigrants. Those are the ones we can’t really reach.
Michelle: Could you tell us about the process of creating the book?
Sinee: We commissioned a writer, Shine Lee (李玟萱) to interview the ladies. She spent two or three hours with each person and just let them talk. She recorded everything and went home and prepared a transcript. Then she came back with questions about the timeline. It took her three years to write the book. In that time I really didn’t pressure her. I thought, Whether this book happens or doesn’t, I’m okay.
I found Lee through her first book, which I read and thought was very good—she had interviewed ten homeless people and reported what they said. I thought we could do the same thing for our ladies.
Michelle: What was your role?
Sinee: I asked the ladies for permission, sat with them during the interviews, and went through drafts with them. Whenever the writer had questions, I was a go-between.
Lee said that interviewing men was very straightforward. They talked about their failures, their problems. But our ladies were much more reserved. They felt their past was shameful. They didn’t want to talk about it. I got the sense that with her first book the writer didn’t have to worry about the reaction. But for us that’s a real concern. We prepared our ladies. Before the book was launched, we had a retreat and performed a ritual where we committed everything to God.
Last week we had a lunch where they shared what they had felt reading the book. A lot of them know each other but didn’t know the full story. After reading it, they were more understanding and compassionate with each other. They have grown closer because of it.
The photographer and illustrator are volunteers of ours, and we’re very proud of that!
Michelle: What is the (Protestant) Christian community like in Taiwan?
Sinee: In Taipei it’s very middle-class. When I share these stories, some people are shocked. One person in her thirties said she’d been told that if you studied hard you could go to university. Her mother and mother-in-law both went, and she took it for granted that that’s how it used to be. She realized these women were the same age as her mom but simply hadn't had the same opportunities. They didn't even have a chance to study. It wasn’t a matter of “applying yourself.” And this made her reconsider her assumptions. I think the Church is still struggling to understand people who are different from us.
Michelle: You got a full scholarship to read economics at Cambridge University. Could you tell us a bit about that?
Sinee: Academically I can’t tell you what I learned, except that the vindication of Keynesian economics in recent times makes me happy to be connected to him in some way. When I was in school, Milton Friedman and the Chicago school dominated economic thinking. At Cambridge I learned basically three things: 1. You can get away with anything if you’re brazen enough; 2. It’s good to be thick-skinned—I used to watch TV in pajamas in the common room while others came back from the formal hall in academic gowns; 3. All the problems faced by the UK can be blamed on the Oxbridge cabal that runs the country.
Michelle: After graduating you went to work at a venture capital firm and then a telecom company. How did your parents respond when you left all that to become a missionary?
Sinee: My father didn’t support me at first. He told me, “We’re not a rich family. How will you support yourself? Why can’t you do this when you’ve made more money?” My reaction was, “Oh no, not another guilt trip.” But they eventually came around.
[Note: we include below an excerpt from her writing.]
Michelle: What do you hope readers get out of the book?
Sinee: In the media you have two extremes. One is that the teahouse is very innocent, a place where old people go to drink tea. That’s how people whitewash what women have gone through and still go through. The other extreme is that it’s bad, evil, dirty. Especially during COVID, when one of the teahouses became a suspected source of infection, that narrative circulated.
I hope to show people a realistic picture of why our ladies are in the position they’re in. The teahouse is not a wholly innocent place. It’s a very complicated environment. There’s a transactional relationship. Some old men need company, and these ladies need to make money. Teahouse work and sex work can also be two different things.
We have a lot of assumptions about who they are. But from what I've seen, it’s just not easy to change your life. They’ve gone through a lot of trauma. They have chronic illnesses. It’s hard to get out of prostitution, and they need a lot of support. In old age they need even more.
Sinee has written elsewhere about her family’s response to her work:
The day before I left [for missionary work], Daniel Wong, the National Director of OMF Singapore, visited us. Dad complained to him, “We’re not a rich family. Who will look after us in our old age? She’s our only child.” Then, to my horror, Dad started crying. It was the second time I’d ever seen him in tears.
Several years later, my mother explained that Dad was upset because his hopes for me to lead a safe, secure, comfortable life had been dashed. I was a straight-A student who had received a scholarship to read economics at Cambridge. In contrast, Dad had grown up in a poor family. His father had passed away when he was in primary school. His mother couldn’t afford to send him to university. He’s always been very frugal—unlike many middle-class families in Singapore, we’ve never had a car or a domestic helper or “upgraded” to a bigger apartment. In fact, aside from teaching, he’s never had any other job.
You can read more of Sinee’s writing here and here.
Book Club: Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh
It was so wonderful to talk to everyone about JoAnn Tompkins’s What Comes After. Our conversation explored the Quaker faith, social currency in high school, the origins of violence, and community restoration. Our next book club is on Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh and it takes place Friday, July 28th at 6 PM EST / Saturday, July 29th at 6 AM Taiwan time. You can reply to this email for the zoom link.
As always,I learned so much from this article.. I look forward every week to receiving your email. You enrich my life!
Beautiful and inspiring interview.