On the Move for Love

Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea

Sealing Cheng

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780812222777
• eBook ISBN: 9780812206920
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the Korean War, gijichon —U.S. military camp towns—have been fixtures in South Korea. The most popular entertainment venues in gijichon are clubs, attracting military clientele with duty-free alcohol, music, shows, and women entertainers. In the 1990s, South Korea's rapid economic advancement, combined with the stigma and low pay attached to this work, led to a shortage of Korean women willing to serve American soldiers. Club owners brought in cheap labor, predominantly from the Philippines and ex-Soviet states, to fill the vacancies left by Korean women. The increasing presence of foreign workers has precipitated new conversations about modernity, nationalism, ethnicity, and human rights in South Korea. International NGOs, feminists, and media reports have identified women migrant entertainers as "victims of sex trafficking, " insisting that their plight is one of forced prostitution.Are women who travel to work in such clubs victims of trafficking, sex slaves, or simply migrant women? How do these women understand their own experiences? Is antitrafficking activism helpful in protecting them? In On the Move for Love, Sealing Cheng attempts to answer these questions by following the lives of migrant Filipina entertainers working in various gijichon clubs. Focusing on their aspirations for love and a better future, Cheng's ethnography illuminates the complex relationships these women form with their employers, customer-boyfriends, and families. She offers an insightful critique of antitrafficking discourses, pointing to the inadequacy of recognizing women only as victims and ignoring their agency and aspirations. Cheng analyzes the women's experience in South Korea in relation to their subsequent journeys to other countries, providing a diachronic look at the way migrant issues of work, sex, and love fit within the larger context of transnationalism, identity, and global hierarchies of inequality.

PART I

Setting the Stage

Chapter 1

Sexing the Globe

To understand the experiences of Filipina entertainers serving a U.S. clientele around U.S. military bases in South Korea, one necessarily has to grapple with the global forces that brought these disparate groups together. Equally, if not more important, how are women’s sexuality and labor both premises for their deployment and sites of agency to negotiate within globalized hierarchies of race, class, and gender? In very broad terms, gijichon is what Denise Brennan, following Appadurai’s idea of “ethnoscapes,” calls an individual “sexscape.” Drawing on her study of sex tourism in a Dominican town, Brennan suggests that “sexscapes link the practices of sex work to the forces of a globalized economy”¹ and are characterized by travel from developed to developing countries, consumption of paid sex, and inequalities. Gijichon as a sexscape has been subjected to a distinct set of forces from sex tourism—most prominently cold-war geopolitics, post-cold-war economic liberalization, and intraregional labor migration in the 1990s. How do these processes of globalization shape individual experiences in gijichon? How may these experiences generate new insights into women’s mobility, sexuality, and labor in the transnational field? This chapter discusses the framework this ethnography uses to explore these questions.

Global Forces in Gijichon: A Brief History

U.S. military camp towns in the Asia-Pacific region, in countries such as South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, are a legacy of cold-war politics. GI clubs in the Asia-Pacific region are the progeny of a global network of U.S. military bases² established as part of U.S. policy to contain communism and preserve U.S. geopolitical interests. Military stationed both onshore and offshore have access to the R & R facilities around the bases. Prostitution has been a key component of these R & R sites.³

The Korean Peninsula is still technically a war zone, as there was only a truce but no peace treaty to conclude the Korean War (1950–53). U.S. military forces landed in southern Korea as an occupation force in 1945 at the end of World War II, ending Japanese colonial rule. The number of U.S. forces accelerated with the Korean War, and the Mutual Defense Treaty (effective 1954) formalized the stationing of U.S. troops in South Korea. This led, during the poverty and homelessness of the postwar years, to the rise of boomtowns around U.S. military bases, settlements that catered to the needs of U.S. military personnel for livelihood and included shopkeepers, club owners, and prostitutes.

The number of U.S. military personnel in Korea has been heavily tied to foreign policy agendas in Washington, D.C., and to concerns of a North Korean attack in Seoul. In 1971 the number of U.S. military personnel in South Korea decreased from 64,000 to 43,000 in conformity with the Nixon Doctrine, which aimed to reduce U.S. military involvement in Asia. In 2000 there were 37,000 U.S. military personnel at 120 military installations in Korea. This number was reduced by 9,154 as of May 2006, as part of the restructuring of U.S. forces in the Pacific. The 2004 agreement between the U.S. and South Korean governments laid down plans to drastically reduce the Yongsan Garrison in central Seoul as part of the long-term goal to downsize U.S. troop presence in South Korea.⁴ When President Lee Myung-bak took office in 2008, he confirmed that U.S.-Korea relations would be placed at the center of his foreign policy. The U.S. and South Korean governments agreed to keep the number of American troops at 28,500.⁵ Thus, the continual presence of U.S. forces in Korea was assured, despite civilian groups’ calls for their withdrawal.⁶ Obviously, these governmental decisions regarding the presence, reduction, and redeployment of U.S. military forces in South Korea are central to the lives of those in gijichon and figure importantly in nationalist discourses in Korea.

In her study of gijichon women in the early 1990s, Katharine Moon makes an observation that forebodes the changing ethnoscape of gijichon. The Korean women Moon talked with in 1992 noted that the average GI could not afford to keep up with the high prices in the Korean economy and was no match for a Korean man in this respect, as the latter would “drop hundreds of dollars” in a bar. The U.S. dollars GIs had at their disposal had become “measly” and “ridiculous”⁷ at a time when the Korean Peninsula had become home to the tenth-largest economy in the world⁸—an astounding economic advance from the war-torn country of the 1950s. For Korean women, the desirability of GIs as clients for a dependable income or a comfortable future began to decline with the rise of South Korean economic power.

Since the mid-1990s foreign women, predominantly from the Philippines and the former Soviet Union, have entered the clubs to fill vacancies left by Korean women. Mr. Shin was a gijichon club owner who had been in Songtan, the gijichon right in front of Osan Air Base of the U.S. forces in Korea, for fifteen years when I interviewed him in 2000. He was also chairman of the Songtan branch of the club owners’ organization, the Korea Special Tourism Association (KSTA). He claimed to have come up with the idea of bringing Filipinas to work in the clubs to make up for the crippling shortage of Korean women. In 1990 he brought in some Filipinas on a trial basis, and the results were satisfactory to the KSTA, which then obtained permission from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to bring in foreign women on E-6 (entertainer) visas in 1996. Diversification at a time of increased economic liberalism was, in Mr. Shin’s view, favorable: “The American soldiers get fed up with women from only one country. We are thinking of getting women from other countries to come.”⁹ During my fieldwork, women from mostly the Philippines but also Kazakhstan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka were working in both Dongducheon and Songtan. In 1999 club owners had to pay $1,300 for each entertainer recruited through the KSTA, followed by around $300 per month as salary for each woman in their employ. By August 1999 the KSTA alone had brought in 1,093 women, mainly from the Philippines and Russia, and had pocketed a total of $1.6 billion in agency fees.¹⁰ From my visits to most of the clubs in Dongducheon and Songtan, my estimate of the number of Filipino entertainers in Korean gijichon in 1999–2000 was 600.

Migrant entertainers enter into particular niches in the structure of the entertainment industry in gijichon, which has four broad levels. At the highest echelon are clubs and bars, usually with female entertainers who accompany customers for the price of a “ladies’ drink” (some women may provide sexual services for an additional payment). Second in importance and price is street-level prostitution that usually relies on older women to solicit clients. The third level consists of “contract marriages,” in which women play the role of wives for GIs during their stay in South Korea and receive monthly allowances in return. Independent streetwalkers, who are very few in number, make up the fourth level.

Foreign women work only in the clubs, which most GIs visit for drinks, music, dance, shows, and/or female company. Club owners need young women to work in the clubs to attract GIs. Other jobs in gijichon are less profitable and are usually taken by older Korean women. Some of the Korean women who enter into “contract marriages” may also be working in the clubs as madams. Waitresses and cleaners are usually but not always Korean women who used to work in the clubs in their youthful days but could not make it as madams or club owners. Other older Korean women work as vendors, going from club to club selling GIs stuffed toys, flowers, and little souvenirs, which the GIs then give to the Filipinas.

Clubs attract GIs with their duty-free alcohol (around two dollars for an imported beer), music, shows, and women entertainers. Since 1998 Filipinas have been present in most of the clubs. Only the larger clubs have shows and are usually available on Fridays and Saturdays. The divide between clubs that served only blacks and those that served only whites, which created serious problems in the 1960s and 1970s, has been much eroded, though segregation still existed in Dongducheon in 2000. There is still a club that white GIs tend to avoid—the Black Rose, owned by an African American and his Korean wife. Some clubs specialize in Latino music and attract a more Hispanic following.

For those who are interested in female company, a “drink” for a woman costs ten dollars and usually entitles the customer to around twenty minutes of the woman’s time—for conversation, dance, or lap dancing. VIP rooms are found in some clubs, and a customer may bring a woman into the room (with her consent) for around half an hour if he buys the woman four drinks. A customer may pay a “bar fine” to take a woman out of the club. Depending on the time of the month (more expensive on paydays) and the length of time desired, bar fines range from one hundred to three hundred dollars. “Bar fine”—a term that has been used in the sex trade in the Philippines—was introduced into gijichon with the arrival of the Filipinas. “Short time” and “long time” were terms commonly used by the Koreans before that. The women usually get 20 percent of the money. Whatever happens in the VIP room or on a bar-fine outing is subject to negotiation between the woman and the customer.

In the 1990s the profile of customers extended from U.S. military personnel to include foreigners on business trips or working in nearby factories, as well as Koreans. Korean men often visit these clubs because of the exoticism of foreign women. With greater spending power than GIs, and usually extravagant spending habits (drinking bottles of brandy rather than beers and giving tips more eagerly than GIs), these Korean men are often a more important source of revenue for gijichon clubs. This is particularly true in Songtan, where Koreans are basically free to enter all the clubs, while clubs in Dongducheon—particularly those with strip shows and sexual services available—follow more stringently the “foreigners-only” rule.

The labor shortage in gijichon that led to the introduction of migrant workers echoed the much larger-scale problem in the manufacturing sector, especially in what were commonly known as “3D” (dirty, dangerous, and difficult) jobs. Since 1991 an estimated 222,000 production jobs of all skill levels could not attract domestic workers. The problem was particularly serious for low-skilled jobs in plastics, electrical machinery, and commercial fishing. This need for cheap labor has thus been partly filled with the introduction of “industrial trainees”—not “workers”—from developing countries under restrictive terms. The globalization initiative (segyehwa) under President Kim Young-sam in 1993 came in on the heels of the burgeoning economic growth, market liberalization, and, finally, democratization that characterized the period of rapid industrial and financial development over the previous three decades. As Korean capital also found its way into many developing countries, foreign laborers entered South Korea as flexible workers.

The introduction of these foreign workers took place within the development of intraregional migration in Asia starting in the late 1980s. A shrinking labor force and robust economic growth in industrial economies such as South Korea and Japan have been drawing migrant workers from developing countries in the Asian region.¹¹ The first significant influx of Filipino factory workers to South Korea took place after the signing of the Republic of the Philippines–Korea Economic and Technical Cooperation Agreement and the Korean Scientific and Technological Cooperation Agreement in 1986. Following the introduction of the “industrial trainee” system, the Agreement for the Promotion of Investment was signed in 1995, boosting overseas investment and exchanges of technology and labor. These measures by the Philippine and South Korean governments opened the official door for Filipinos’ entry into Korea for work. In 2004 the Philippine government estimated that a total of 47,150 Filipino citizens were in South Korea, 9,015 of whom were irregular migrants.¹²

Forged out of cold-war geopolitics, gijichon came to participate in global capital’s search for flexible labor in the late 1990s. Not only do gijichon clubs participate in the transnational network of labor recruitment, but they also adopt new ways to manage these ethnic others and increasingly serve an ethnically diverse clientele. Even though gijichon is largely a marginal site in the larger Korean body politic, the globalization of its sexual economy provides important insights into South Korea’s regional integration and global engagements.

Sexing Power in the Globe

In Okinawa, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand, on the “morning after” the cold war, local people have “woken up” to the consequences of economies dependent on military prostitution and the international tourist industry. Activists have overcome spatial displacement by attempting to forge links between communities in Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, and Okinawa, where local women have suffered from the displacement of military sexualities onto the exoticised figures of Asian women. . . .

The time has come to start thinking about what is at stake in “sexing the globe.”¹³

With a focus on the construction of female bodies and the male gaze, the feminist scholar Vera Mackie builds her examination of sex tourism and its linkage to military prostitution in the Asia-Pacific region to highlight the need for a “systematic analysis of “sexuality and international relations.’ ” She analyzes the feminization, orientalization, and subordination of Asian women in the “scopophilic metropolitan gaze” (in regional centers such as the United States, Australia, and Japan) through a close reading of textual material: advertising, films, and books about Western men’s travels to the region that naturalize racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies. These are important insights. To be aware of the pervasiveness of these representations is important for grasping the cultural construction of sexuality and desire that pervades our everyday lives. The phenomenon that Mackie is addressing has much resonance for this study. In 1992 U.S. troops withdrew from the Philippines, meaning the end of the R & R facilities in the former U.S. colony. A few years later Filipinas began to migrate to South Korea to work as entertainers in GI clubs. The commodification of Asian women’s sexuality has persisted. History seems to be repeating itself. However, for the Filipinas who migrate to South Korea, this ethnography suggests, everything is new.

I cite Vera Mackie here for what I see as the productive tension embedded in this brief excerpt from her conclusion. On the one hand, its critique of the “metropolitan gaze” echoes with much academic and nonacademic work that emphasizes masculinist instrumentalization of women’s bodies. Katharine Moon (Sex among Allies) has shown in careful detail that gijichon women have been deployed as diplomatic instruments in the U.S.–South Korea relationship, maintaining a “release” channel in the overall engineering of masculine desires in the military, which include male bonding, fraternity, and the objectification of sex and women as masculine “needs.” Other scholars as well ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Angel Club
• Part I. Setting the Stage
• Part II. Laborers of Love
• Part III. Transnational Women from Below
• Part IV. Home Is Where One Is Not
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Acknowledgments