TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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One
night in Yangon
Jessica
Von Wendel
As far as
we understood our local friend was taking us to karaoke in Yangon, Burma.
We arrived at what looked like a huge country
club. Decorative lights hung everywhere
and music was playing. As we walked in
and went up the stairs we looked down at the central stage. A woman stood singing a Burmese ballad. We sat down on puffy seats.
I looked around and saw only men. Then
my friend explained that this was not
karaoke in the Japanese sense. He had
lived for ten years in Japan
and knew what we were probably expecting. He
wanted to show us what Burma was becoming. *Click
here for short movie of the club scene.
In Burma
there has been a recent backlash of the sex trade with Bangkok. Many Burmese women are trafficked over the
border, but the
prostitution
houses of Thailand
are beginning
to emerge in Yangon itself. He clarified the whole process to us. A man can pay money to request a song. If he sees a girl he likes he pays around
five US dollars, which is a large amount of money in Burma,
to buy the girl a boa-like
garland or a tacky hat similar to a sombrero. At
the end of the night the man who paid the most for the
girl takes her
home or to a hotel. As I watched all the
girls perform a dance number, I looked at each one individually. One girl was dressed in Catholic school girl
attire with her midriff exposed and pig tails, but the majority of the
girls were
primarily covered in modest ball gowns and cocktail dresses. Burma is still fairly
conservative,
evidently this holds even when it comes to prostitution.
I asked my
friend how old he thought these girls
were. He said if you asked them they
would say 22, but most were probably around 17 years old.
They primarily come from local villages on
the outskirts of the city. Some had
energetic faces and smiled a lot, but most wore blank expressions that
were indifferent
to the fast beat of the music or the context of the song they were
singing. In Monique Skidmore’s article
“Darker than
Midnight: Fear, vulnerability, and terror making in urban Burma”
she explains that “the vast
majority of Burmese she met survive by adopting a blank exterior
persona:
listless eyes in wooden bodies.” This is
exactly the bank gaze that I saw on the women in this Yangon
karaoke club. These women must adopt this
persona even more than the average Burmese citizen, because in addition
to
living under a totalitarian military dictatorship they also face sexual
exploitation on a daily basis. At
the end of the number, the girl with the most garlands and hats was
seated on a
thrown and crowned like a prom queen.
I walked
away
from this experience completely amazed by
the aristocratic openness of the sex trade. Still
the women at this Yangon
club
exhibited a distance in their faces that is universal to many sex
workers. They seemed unaware that they
were performers
in a surreal world. In the Yangon sex trade, women don’t just sell their
bodies down
some dark alley corner, but actually go through an application process
to be
exhibited on stage and compete in a beauty pageant where garlands mean
survival.
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