Teaching English to prostitutes in China

By Robert Vance

“Quite a few of your English students are prostitutes,” a friend told me today as she recounted a conversation that she had with her hair stylist recently. “The guy who cut my hair told me that many of your training center’s female students come to him two or three times a week to get their hair done before they go to work.” She went on to explain that according to the hair stylist, some of my students sell their bodies at night in local hotels where there might be as many as 200 prostitutes gathered in one establishment. Other students work as “high class” prostitutes providing sexual services to just one or two likely married men in exchange for a place to live and a monthly stipend.

I was not surprised by this revelation. The foreign staff at my training center in China had suspected for months that some of our female students were involved in the sex profession in order to make a living in a city where even decent paying jobs for uneducated people are hard to come by. The tuition at our school is extremely expensive making it almost impossible for anyone with less than a middle class income to attend. I just have too many female students in their mid 20’s who are living quite comfortably in this city with no family and no job. It simply does not add up.

Some of my students do claim that they have a job but the information is often sketchy at best. The answers are often similar as well. “I work in sales” is a common response as well as “I do business for myself” or “I work for a Japanese company.” Usually, it is made clear that more information about the job is not forthcoming.

Other students claim that they have a ‘rich’ boyfriend who is supporting them to go to school. Information about where the boyfriend lives or what he does for a living is also often vague. They are simply not interested in talking about these relationships.

I previously wrote a piece entitled Why Prostitutes in China are Learning English in which I suggested that learning English could help ‘ladies of the evening’ in China to find other lines of work. Unfortunately, I think I was a little too naive in my optimism. The Chinese education system has been saturated with English schools so much so that that acquiring proficiency in English is no longer a surefire way of obtaining a good job in China. If anything, prostitutes are learning English in China so that they can better communicate with foreign clients. After all, the foreign demand for sex services is an important key to the thriving success of prostitution in China. Recently, I came across a lengthy message board thread full of ex-pats in China giving each other advice on how and where to pick up girls. Learning English may not lift a girl in China out of a life of prostitution but it certainly can improve her prospects within the business.

Knowing that I may be teaching English to prostitutes does not alter the way that I view students in my classes. If anything, I feel sorry for these women who are victims of an overpopulated and corrupt culture that only seems to favor the few lucky ones who have money or connections. The rest of the population are left to ‘fend for themselves.’ Some make the right choice and some do not, but for too many in China, life is still all about survival.