Every day, the newspaper’s print version carries two or more pages of classified advertisements in the “massage” section. My way into the hidden world of illicit massage was through the American Chinese newspaper World Journal ( 世界日報 shìjiè rìbào, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the U.S., with a stated daily circulation of 350,000). You can get a non-sexual massage in these places, but that’s not how they make their money. Most of the parlors use “SPA” or “Massage” in their names, added to Angels, Asian, Jade, Good Girl, or some other suggestive word. You can find them in strip malls, apartment buildings, office towers, and suburban houses. Unfortunately, in much of the reporting, the women were an afterthought, while police struggled to acknowledge, as Vanity Fair wrote last month, “that immigrant women of precarious status, hemmed in by circumstance, might choose sex work.”Īccording to the nonprofit anti-trafficking organization Polaris Project, there were more than 9,000 illicit massage parlors in the United States in 2017, mostly staffed by Chinese women, aged 35-55, with at least one child. Kraft was only one of hundreds of people implicated, but his status in the sports world brought national attention to the case.
But as I learned over the subsequent months, low-profile Chinese women of humble origins and modest appearance are the backbone of the illicit massage industry in the U.S., which generates $2.5 billion revenue annually. Many of these women are mothers who left home to support their families, arriving in the United States without the faintest idea of what they would do to make their American dream come true.įor many Americans, their awareness of Chinese massage workers in America begins and ends with Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner whose visits to Orchids of Asia Day Spa were made public after a police sting early last year. If I had not read their charging documents, I would never have guessed that these matronly Chinese women were accused of being involved in the sex trade. Illicit massages in America - a $2.5 billion industry One was even wearing a large brimmed pirate’s hat.īut all of the defendants were here on the same charge: prostitution. The other women in the room - white, black, and Latina - were completely different: They were dressed flamboyantly, with showy nail polish and lipstick.