CHAPTER 1
The Geography of Vice
Spatial Dimensions of Clandestine Sex Work
During the interwar years, a busy market for unregistered sex work animated the shadows of Tonkin. Traffickers smuggled women and girls from rural areas to the cities and provincial capitals, from lowlands up to highland border towns and to military bases. Mẹ mìn (old lady kidnappers) fanned the countryside looking for naive young women and girls to lure into accepting work in the city; they drugged or kidnapped others. Mẹ mìn took women and girls to urban areas for the purpose of selling them to brothels or out to Hải Phòng’s port, where they sold their victims to gangs of Chinese traffickers. Junks dodged customs officials among the thousands of islands dotting Hạ Long Bay; small ships carrying trafficking victims hugged the coast, from port to port, all the way to China, where the victims were sold to brothels, dance halls, or men looking for a wife.
Meanwhile, back in Tonkin, droves of peasant women and adolescent girls voluntarily set out for the protectorate’s urban areas, provincial capitals, border towns, and military bases in search of income. Some stayed only for the short periods between harvests; others remained for the long term or permanently. Many of these migrants ended up joining the intimate labor force, whether intentionally or through manipulation and trickery. To avoid ruining their reputations by officially registering as sex workers, most worked on the black market. They operated in annexes to registered brothels, out of their homes, in dance halls and ả đào singing houses, or in one of the many seedy boardinghouses that sprung up to cater to the sex industry.
In the margins of the sex industry was an ultrasecretive market for underage girls. Some daughters and orphans were sold into the sex industry; in other cases, migrant girls arriving in the city seeking work and shelter were tricked or forced into sex work. Men looking for underage girls surreptitiously approached market vendors, itinerant flower vendors, or rickshaw pullers, the latter of which played a particularly crucial role in the clandestine sex industry.
Clandestine sex workers of all ages crisscrossed the city streets. In the late-night hours, sex workers hunted for clients from the back of rickshaws. Men hailed rickshaws and then solicited the puller to find them an underage girl, and madams called on pullers to transport underage girls to secret locations to meet customers.
Sex workers looking to avoid harassment by the colonial vice police fled to the provinces. They set up camp near military bases, coal mines, border towns, and train depots to profit from the large male customer base at these sites. Others stayed close to the cities, enabling them to access city amenities and benefit from the wealthy urban customer base. They moved their operations just outside of the colonial-governed cities and provincial capitals, forming a ring of illicit sex work in the suburbs. As a result, de facto “entertainment neighborhoods” developed in the suburban areas outside of Hanoi, Hải Phòng, and the provincial capitals.
This chapter explores the relationship between space and the evolution of the black market sex industry. The physical, political, economic, and urban geography of the interwar years all shaped this industry. The physical geography provided hiding spaces, routes, and barriers for smuggling women and girls. The political geography created spaces of legal order and disorder, which sex workers, their managers, human traffickers, and clients artfully used to their advantage. The economic geography made for places of need and places of opportunity, leading women to migrate in search of a better life—sometimes afforded through sex work. And the urban geography, marked by the rapid growth of big cities, simultaneously attracted migrant sex workers and provided a substantial customer base.
Tonkin’s Landscape
The geographic and political landscape of Tonkin enabled traffickers and clandestine sex workers to evade colonial police. Tonkin bordered China to the north, mountains leading to Laos to the west, the French protectorate of Annam to the south, and the South China Sea to the east (see figure 1). For centuries, there have been established trade routes—through the highlands in the west, south into Annam, and by sea—connecting the Viet people and other ethnic groups in Tonkin and Southeast Asia. Traffickers used these established land routes to transport young women and girls from the highlands to the lowlands, from the countryside to the cities, and across the border into China.
Inside the administrative boundaries of the French protectorate, Tonkin was mostly mountainous highlands to the north and west, with a lowland valley that formed the Red River Delta, which opened to the sea on its eastern border. Among the cases of sex work that I was able to track, the overwhelming majority happened in the lowlands, with the exception of military bases and border cities, for reasons discussed later in this chapter.
FIGURE 1. Tonkin
The most salient feature of Tonkin’s geography was waterways, which served as the basis for much of its transportation in the lowlands. Operators within the clandestine sex industry used these riverways, ports, and islands to smuggle kidnapped women around Tonkin and north to China. At roughly 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) long, the Red River starts in southern China and flows through Tonkin. To the northwest of Hanoi, the river branches into tributaries, forming waterways that make up the Red River Delta, a lowland floodplain in the western coastal part of northern Vietnam. The delta itself forms a triangle whose legs extended from the inland to the coast and whose third side runs along the coast, with Hải Phòng as its northernmost point. The network of waterways connected villages with each other and with the big cities and, as they flowed southeast into the Gulf of Tonkin, provided access to the coast. At the northern portion of the Gulf of Tonkin is Hạ Long Bay, home to almost two thousand small limestone islands. Covered in jungle brush, many of the limestone islands had caves. Traffickers easily evaded maritime police by hiding among the islands and taking cover inside the caves.
During the colonial period, the treaty structure that determined the degrees of Vietnamese sovereignty over Tonkin in turn shaped the landscape of the sex industry. In June 1884, the French and Vietnamese governments signed the Treaty of Huế, also known as the Patenôtre Treaty. As discussed in the introduction of this book, the treaty established Tonkin and Annam as French protectorates, meaning that they were indirectly governed by France and Vietnamese law prevailed in most domestic situations. Initially, Vietnamese viceroys appointed by the court in Huế administered the provinces, and villages remained under Vietnamese imperial law. In 1897, the colonial government took control of selecting the Vietnamese officials for the royal government while still maintaining indirect control. Villages and provinces were under the legal jurisdiction of the Vietnamese emperor.1
A royal ordinance of October 3, 1888, ceded the cities of Hanoi, Hải Phòng, and Tourane to France. As French concessions, these cities were subject to direct colonial rule, and French law prevailed. Military bases were also subject to French law. As a result, Tonkin was Vietnamese territory with proverbial islands of French rule.2 Under French law, the sale of sex was tolerated and loosely regulated in the French concessions, but beyond the city limits sex workers were free to operate outside of colonial law. The suburbs thus would become a major site for clandestine sex work.
As the French colonial government established control over Tonkin, it developed the region’s transportation infrastructure. The state improved existing roads and canals while also building new ones that connected the provinces to Hanoi, the capital of Tonkin and, by the 1890s, the administrative seat of Indochina. In 1887, the colonial government began developing the port of Hải Phòng, which expanded opportunities for international commerce. In the 1890s, under Governor-General Paul Doumer, construction began on the railway linking Hanoi to Saigon. In 1902, the railway connected Hanoi to the sea by way of Hải Phòng. Two years later, the state began the construction of the railway connecting Hanoi to China, in Yunnan. These transportation-related innovations facilitated the migration—voluntary or forced—of women and girls around the delta, from the countryside to the cities, out to the port, and north to China. Improved roads enabled sex workers to become more mobile, making it easier for sex workers to flee the vice squad or abusive bosses. The labor force required to build and maintain the roads, railroads, and port provided a large customer base.
However much transportation was being developed in Tonkin, the provinces still lacked reliable transportation infrastructure for the most part. Rural areas continued to rely on dirt roads and waterways for transportation, thereby influencing trafficking patterns. Of the more than 250 cases of smuggling of women and girls that I examined, I found that human-trafficking activity decreased significantly in rural areas during the spring and summer months, while city abductions maintained the same rate. This is likely because spring and summer saw the highest rainfall, leaving dirt roads muddy and waterways flooded and difficult to navigate. Moreover, because summer months are the harvest months for rice, women were employed and families would have been less likely to resort to selling their daughters, who were needed to labor in the fields, during that season.
The Red River Delta
Poverty, overpopulation, and environmental disasters in the Red River Delta led women to migrate around the delta or into urban areas, where some joined the clandestine sex industry. The majority of the sex workers whom I identified in my research came from the rural areas of the Red River Delta, notably the overpopulated areas of Tonkin—Nam Định and Thái Bình in the southern area of the delta as well as Hưng Yên, which was inland. (see figure 2).3 The poverty that these women were escaping was caused in part by the overpopulation of the delta.
Fertile land, as well as colonial medical and technological advancements, made the Red River Delta the most densely populated area in
FIGURE 2. Red River Delta: Migration of sex workers
Indochina. Irrigation projects led to larger harvests, and French-built dikes allowed for food to be transported for famine relief. Moreover, with medical and technological advances, French colonialism contributed to a population increase in Tonkin. French medical advancements included smallpox vaccine and malaria control.4 The French colonial government also introduced sanitation technology, which decreased the mortality rate of previously deadly afflictions such as cholera and plague.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the delta experienced considerable population pressure, but there was little expansion of cultivated lands aside from minor irrigation projects.5 By 1921, the more heavily populated areas of the Red River Delta had a population density of 800 to 1,200 inhabitants per square kilometer.6 In 1931, even the rural areas of the delta had a population of 6,500,000, or 380 inhabitants per square kilometer.7 The delta, approximately 15,000 square kilometers, consisted of just 0.2 percent of the total land of Indochina but, with almost 7.5 million inhabitants in 1936, contained 32.6 percent of Indochina’s total population.8 By 1945, the population per square kilometer of the Red River Delta was double that of the Mekong Delta, and the Red River Delta had become one of the most densely populated areas of the world (see table 1.1).9
Table 1.1 Population of Tonkin
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