Red, Yellow, Selling Bed Fellows

by Audrey Samuel

Photos by Christyna Fong

One day before visiting the Mekong Delta and having five days behind us, the sixth day was a different kind of serious. Following a visit to DRD, the whole lot of us ran under heavy torrents of rain to find ourselves back at Mai Vy Hotel, drenched and hurriedly preparing for the sixth and last session with Mr. Nicolas Lainez, a Ph.D. candidate in social anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and a research manager at the leading Non-Government Organization (NGO) Alliance Anti-Trafic (also known as AAT), with branches in Vietnam and Thailand. Given the lack of a venue to house the entire group of us, we all sat on the floor in the hotel lobby and completed a round of introductions before delving further into the reality of human trafficking and how Vietnamese sex workers tend to steer towards wealthy destinations like Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore.

Mr. Lainez started the discussion by explaining the circumstances that led him from cinema and film studies to become a professional photographer taking pictures of prostitution and human trafficking, and finally ending up in an anti-trafficking NGO while completing his doctorate in social anthropology. Mr. Lainez explained to us how Vietnam is one country, among others, in which women and children are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation and other forms of labor exploitation. While he was a photographer, he realized that there was a problem with the the production of victimizing discourses by anti-trafficking actors from the aid sector. Because Mr. Lainez was mostly dealing with the communications and marketing departments of these organizations, he soon came to realize that he was just fabricating and repeating the picture that he and his clients – aid organizations, media, donors in Western countries, had in mind to instrically appeal and pull at generous heartstrings. He came to realize this by working with NGOs who invited  him to construct predictable and emotional images about the situation of the women, children and sex workers as simply victims of exploitation rather than presenting the reality of the situation and the real lived experiences of these people. That was when he decided to resume academic studies and undertake field research to bridge the gap between the perceived assumptions and the reality of the mobility and labor conditions that women, children and in some cases men from Vietnam came into contact with as migrant workers in Southeast Asia.

The difficulty of managing fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation has been an experience and adventure when he spent fifteen months in Chau Doc; the border between Vietnam and Cambodia in the province of An Giang at the Mekong Delta. He also spent seven months in the Vietnamese shanty towns and red-light districts in Phnom Penh, and he finally spent 5 months living in the boarding house of Vietnamese sex workers in a red light district of Singapore. In his findings, he observed that Vietnamese women do not go to poorer countries like Cambodia, as this used to be the case in the 1990s, and rather prefer to go to Ho Chi Minh City, and from there they would proceed to richer countries like Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia or Singapore as the compensation is much higher than that from underprivileged countries. Mr. Lainez also mentioned that he will be moving to Singapore to finish his dissertation writing. He then went on to brief us about the NGO AAT he works with.

The NGO Mr. Lainez is affiliated with was the first to establish in Vietnam (2001) to address issues of women and children sexual exploitation, as well as human trafficking. Compared to other organizations like Caritas, this NGO is a rather small group. However, it is the leading project in Vietnam on human trafficking, as they have been there since the early development of the issue of human trafficking in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia. AAT also works closely with other organizations in the region, as well as with partners from the Vietnamese government (Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs; Vietnam Women’s Union, Ministry of Public Security). In the early and mid 2000, several anti-trafficking projects began to mushroom in Vietnam because funding for this type of initiative was available, and thus it attracted international aid organizations like Care Vietnam, Oxfam-Québec and Save the Children. However when the funding had decreased partly due to the global financial crisis and the redirection of funding to other priorities like environment, many of these projects have ceased. 

AAT runs different projects to assist sexually abused women and trafficked women who are looking to rehabilitate their lives. AAT sponsors two shelters managed by the Ho Chi Minh City Women’s Union in HCMC and by Vietnam Women’s Union in the Mekong delta. They welcome sexually abused women and children and offer rehabilitation and reintegration services. By doing so, AAT also shows to the Vietnamese government that the sex-workers and drug-users can be victims and not only “social evils,” as stated by the Government. 

Therefore, instead of taking these sexually abused women and children to moral and reeducation centers sponsored by the Government, like it used to be the case in the 1990s and early 2000a, these victims have nowadays the chance to be sent to specialized shelters. This is presented as a long advocacy project where the centre is dedicated to solely to helping these women recover and reintegrate themselves into society as fully-participating members through psychological support. The NGO also coordinates projects with Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia to repatriate trafficking victims. In Malaysia, for instance, AAT works with the NGO Tenaganita based in Kuala Lumpur.

Mr. Lainez went on to explain his methods of conducting research and the obstacles he faced when trying to get research subjects to open up about their experiences. Some women, a minority in his field investigation,,were caught in limbo- cases where they were duped into accepting job opportunities in Singapore only to later be cheated. One such case he encountered was Tuyêt from the Long An province, who took up a similar kind of opportunity. She was lured with a promise of well-paid job that could bring her 2,000. The middlewoman who brought her to Singapore delivered her to a pimp who claimed the payment of 2000 USD. Tuyêt found herself in debt and , and she was forced by the procurer who kept her to work in the Singapore sex industry until the full repayment of her debt.

In his research report, Mr. Lainez also mentions that the aim of his research in Singapore was to follow the transnational movements of Vietnamese low-skilled women across the Southeast Asian region.  As such there is an evident grey area in social sciences research concerning first, sex migration to prosperous countries by women from Southern Vietnam, and second, the legally vague area surrounding selective immigration policy and unlicensed sex work in Singapore. Although the men and women in Vietnam migrate voluntarily to work in construction, fishing or manufacturing sectors in Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the Middle East, some of them end up in exploitative professional situations (forced labour, debt bondage).

‘In Search of” travellers signing off with a picture of the last formal session.

The session ended with us feeling grateful for the knowledge that had been passed to us, the group of 20 now aware of the many issues that face both sex workers and anthropologists. This session also concluded the last in the series of formal sessions for the Saigon trip, evoking bittersweet feelings of an impending end to our trip.

Audrey aka Godrey, a 27 year-old, transgendered heterosexual studying International Studies and Writing at Monash Malaysia with Bipolar-Disorder Type II from Penang. Caught saying: "Judge me, I dare you!"