It is now time to move on to the most common image of a sex worker in Taiwan—that of a woman in a brothel. Doze Niu’s (鈕承澤) Monga (艋舺) is a film made in 2010 about the Monga district of Taipei during the 1980s. Ning (Ko Chia-yen) is a young brothel sex worker who matches the stereotypical images of Monga. When one thinks of the district, one calls up images of gangsters, Snake Alley, and the red glow of the nearby brothels. This image of brothel prostitution comes closest out of any of the films in this thesis to the western imagination of prostitution. The scenes of Monga could easily be in a western film attempting to depict the exotic East.
However, Doze Niu is not from the West, and he is not Orientalizing Monga. He is playing up the exotic angle slightly, but for a different purpose. His film is similar to Hou’s 1966 story in that it is a bit nostalgic. In an interview titled “Days in the Wild” Doze Niu explains that he took inspiration from his childhood, which is meant to lend authenticity both to the movie and to the director by making them look true and tough using the imagined gangster lifestyle. About his past, he says, "I was bullied when I was young and then made friends who solved problems for me and gave me a sense of security. In our teenage years, our emotions overwhelmed logic and reason. We only knew we didn't want to be babies but our minds weren't that clear. We drifted away from our families just to make a point – som[e]thing which proves how naive we were" (Chen 2010). His interview statement that “we didn’t want to be babies” contains
implications about what a teen thinks a grown man is supposed to be like, however in retrospect he realizes the naiveté of these so-called manly qualities. His film has a similar message.
Even with this explanation, it is easy to look at Monga and think it is romanticizing a
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cliché of gangster life and prostitution. Therefore, in order show the true genealogy of the film, it will be contrasted with the brothel prostitute character of Bai Mei (Hsiao-fen Lu) in Tung
Wang’s (王童) 1983Days Looking at the Sea (看海的日子). This film also covers a very common conception of a prostitute, but in rural Taiwan. She is the sex worker which Au (2012) is crusading against when she discusses the young aboriginal girl who is sold to a brothel at a young age by her family.
These two films begin with brothel prostitutes, but contrast with each other in virtually every other way. One is urban and one is rural, one is positioned by global power and one by local power, and each are governed by the different norms of what will here be called “gang law”
and “family law.” Much of their difference can also be explained by their different times. Monga is about the 1980s, looking back from the present. Days Looking at the Sea is about the 1970s, looking back from 1983. Both the years in which these films were made and the years they are about change the messages of the films.
So these films appear to be completely different, and furthermore this thesis is centered around post-2000 films to see the roots of present-day sex worker characters, so what is the connection between the two? Well, Days Looking at the Sea is part of the genesis of Monga, in that the difference between the two explains the evolution of the moment which Monga focuses on. More than that, though, the meeting of the main character and the prostitute in Monga is a mirror to a very similar scene in Days Looking at the Sea. There is no definitive proof that Doze Niu is consciously making a visual tribute to the earlier movie, but it is almost certain that he has seen it. If he has not, and did not make the parallel consciously, it is all the more reason to note the similarities, because it points to a common cultural imagination of the sex worker.
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Echoing the Past, Contextualizing the Future
The scene in Days Looking at the Sea5 centers around Yin Yin, one of the prostitutes who is close to the main character Bai Mei. The scene is contextualized by a drunken client with a mess around his mouth trapping Yin Yin against the wall, and Bai Mei coming to her rescue by taking the client in her place. The madame of the brothel scolds Yin Yin for it (in a way which very much points out that the madame controls Yin Yin’s body as commodity), but a new client walks in the door and the madame recognizes that he is young and hesitant, and convinces him to go with the new girl, Yin Yin. In the next scene she enters her room with a basin. Posters of famous models decorate her shabby walls covered in tattered wallpaper which has been plastered on. The new client waits awkwardly while she crosses the room and sets down the basin with downcast eyes. The client says that it looks like she has been crying. Yin Yin denies it, but then throws herself to the bed, crying. The client hesitantly reaches out a comforting hand, and she interprets his action as telling her to start taking her clothes off. He stops her and says, “This time you’re not in a good mood. We don’t have to do it, no problem.” She thanks him and he says they can just talk. Then he says if she wants him to, he will come back again. She says, “You’re a great person. How can you come to this place?” He answers, “Huh? Good people can’t come here? Then I’m a bad person. What’s your name?” Time is passed by a short scene of Bai Mei finishing with her troublesome client and vigorously brushing her teeth, then Yin Yin and her new friend exit her room. She asks if he will come again, and he says he will come often. In fact, this scene is a flashback to tell the story of how Yin Yin met her husband who Bai Mei has just met on a train along with their new son, who is a source of great happiness for the couple.
In Monga, the scene starts in a similar way, but it is told from the client’s perspective.
5All translation for this movie is my own.
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That client is also the main character of the film, Mosquito (Mark Chao). Mosquito’s new gangster friends take him to the brothel as a sort of rite of passage, but he is nervous. His other friends handle themselves with familiarity in the dim environment lit with a red glow, and seen through the cage-like decorative metal bars on the window. The madame of this brothel is similarly a calculating salesman and middle-aged, but she has a more urban look. Like the madame in Days Looking at the Sea, she holds a cigarette as she compliments the customers and makes her sales pitch. Like the client in the above scene, Mosquito shows hesitation, and the madame again recognizes it, saying, “First time, huh?” and echoes some of the same lines as the other madame—“Auntie will find you a pretty one.” This time, the abusive client is Mosquito’s friend A-po (Huang Teng-hui), who brushes aside Ning’s (Ko Chia-yen) hair to reveal the birth mark on her face and says, “Fuck! You scared the shit out of me. Auntie, how can you sell this kind of product?” He continues to harass her and reels his fist back, threatening to dig her eyes out until Mosquito steps in and says he will go with her.
The next scene shows Ning wringing a cloth out in a basin with downcast eyes. The shadow of a fan in her window slowly spinning gives the room a shabby feel and a poster of a model can be seen decorating the wall behind Ning, which is plastered with tattered wallpaper (all visual parallels to the above scene). Mosquito is there waiting and after a moment says, “Did you go to Show Shang Elementary School? Didn’t you always carry a lunchbox in a washing powder bag?” Like Yin Yin before, she denies his first attempt to comfort her, saying, “You’re thinking of someone else.” His next question brings up a parallel conversation to the one about good and bad people in Days Looking at the Sea; he says, “You…Why do you want to be a hooker?” She answers, “What about you? Why do you want to be a gangster?” He does not have an answer, and they sit awkwardly for a moment with the shot framing them from the front as
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they sit on the bed with an uncomfortable equal space between the sides of the screen and between the two of them. After a moment, she begins taking off her dress starting with the shoulder straps just as Yin Yin did, expecting that this is what the client wants. He stops her, asking if they can just talk first. In another parallel, he asks her what her name is, but instead of answering she says, “Whatever.” As he says his name is Mosquito, the sounds of sex bleed through the walls. He pulls the ear buds for his Walkman out of his pocket and closes the unnatural space between them, then the soundtrack plays “Making Love out of Nothing at All,”
by Air Supply as the camera pulls away above the two listening. After a cut, Ning hands her tickets in at the front desk and now the grating on the window, instead of forming a cage-like appearance, forms red hearts over Ning as she calls to him through the window to tell him her name. The scene fades out as he walks away through the crowd and the Air Supply song ends on the words “…making love out of nothing at all.”
While these two sequences are very similar, they are used to achieve entirely different goals. This difference is another way to express the idea that cultural conceptions of sex workers may be clichéd, but the sex worker characters themselves are unique people positioned in
different historical moments. In both scenes, pity is initially evoked by an abusive client. To stop there and say that these films are victimizing prostitutes to fulfill cultural expectations would be disingenuous.
Days Looking at the Sea: The Powers of Adoption, Family Law, and Patrilineality
Days Looking at the Sea takes place in a fishing harbor town (literally Yugang in the film) during the 1970s. This decade is the later part of the “industrial era” in Taiwan, and the period of shift from agriculture to industry could be said to have ended with the 1970s, after which a new
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social and economic period began to develop (Government Information Office 2005). This means that the fishing economy shown in the film (mostly depicted in scenes of decaying boats beached on the shores and local salesmen sitting in shops filled with products from the sea in the beginning of the film) and the later move to an agricultural setting were both declining ways of life in Taiwan. This has an influence on the main character in the film, who is an adopted
daughter, sold to a brothel, and makes her living off of fishermen. All of these things are artifacts of an agrarian lifestyle, and the form of sex worker she depicts is likely one of the last of her kind—later sex workers would need to migrate to more urban areas, and this is where Monga picks up. The money and power were to shift away from the laws of the rural farming family and toward a more global and industrial setting:
However, during Taiwan's transformation from an agriculture-based into an industrial-based economy, it encountered a number of socioeconomic problems. The principal issue was the employment of labor no longer needed in rural areas. When the agricultural sector's peripheral productivity fell, the ROC government took the initiative to develop foreign trade and establish export-processing and industrial zones to absorb the excess labor. Since providing employment opportunities for the huge labor force was a matter of crucial importance, the government encouraged the development of labor-intensive export industries. As a result, foreign investment poured in to capitalize on the island's inexpensive labor. (Ibid.)
If the assertions of this thesis are correct about these socio-economic changes influencing power relationships, there should be evidence found in the law. And indeed a change occurred in Taiwan during the industrializing period which directly reflects the shift of power from being family regulated to being controlled by globalized liberal economics (the quote is quite long but important proof for this point):
At the end of 1967 there occurred an important incident whose discursive effects were to deepen the perceived crisis of national culture. An article entitled ‘Rest and Recuperation for America’s Fighting Men’ — featuring a photo of two Taiwanese women accompanying an American GI taking a bath in a hotel in the Beitou red light district — appeared in the 22 December 1967 issue of the US Time magazine. Although the services provided in Beitou were no secret, the nation was nonetheless shocked by this revelation. Expressing moral outrage, the press saw this exposure to the world of Beitou prostitution culture as shaming a nation predicated upon Confucian propriety and morality. Responding to public moral outcry, the police managed to track down Yu Ruiqing, one of the women prostitutes in the photo, and charged her with offending public decency under the criminal law (He 1968). They were able to track down Yu because she was a licensed prostitute. Most importantly, what she had done was completely legal
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and the judge disallowed the case (Taiwan Daily 1968a). But throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Time picture event continued to be cited by the press as evidence of national shame.
In the immediate aftermath of the Time scandal, Chiang Kai-shek presided over the Sixth Annual Meeting of National Security held on 9 January 1968, laying down guidelines for social reform which aimed to ‘get rid of the decadent trend affecting guomin, reinforce spiritual mobilisation and cultivate invisible form of military power’ (Chiang, cited in Wang 1969: 190).Of the eight points mapped out in these guidelines, six pertained to the call for a lawful and ordered society in general, outlawing sexual immorality in particular, with the other two relating to the promotion of legitimate entertainment and the establishment of modern moral guidelines for guomin’s daily life conduct. Significantly, these guidelines were taken by the government as constituting an important part of its Cultural Renaissance Movement, a national campaign launched in 1966 to counteract Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution which aimed at ‘revitalizing’ the Confucian ethic, namely, the moral tradition of the sage-king.
These guidelines led to yet more regulatory changes. While stopping the licensing of category three PTB [Particular Type of Business—a Taiwanese governmental term for sex trade businesses] (along with brothels and dance hall/night clubs), the government also decided to regulate the non-PTB as PTB by thoroughly inspecting all the leisure/pleasure businesses premises. (Huang 2006: 244-245, brackets my own)
From this passage it can be clearly seen that previously the commodity of sex workers was controlled by the government—licensed as a “particular type of business”—and this was fine for maintaining the imagined moral level of the community, using the moral distinction to keep “good” girls in their family and regulating the “immoral” girls who lacked a “respectable family” (all of this is introduced in Chapter 2). However, when this power dynamic shifted, both from rural to urban (described in the above cited article as a “tidal wave of sex” due to a rapidly increasing urban population) and from local to global, the methods of power and regulation needed to adapt. Suddenly, licensed prostitution was no longer considered a moral course of action as the control of the commodity had slipped out of the hands of the police and into the hands of urbanites and international actors (brought to the attention of the international community by the American GI, and later, as the article states, Japanese sex tourists).
So again, Days Looking at the Sea being the story of a more rural prostitute, positioned in a fishing town, is a story that was fading. In the film this tension is felt by the protagonist as she realizes that she is getting old and time is running out. Interestingly, her response is actually to grab hold of the fading agricultural lifestyle while she still has a chance.
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In the scene from Days Looking at the Sea described in the beginning of this chapter, the abusive customer is there for the dual purpose of making Bai Mei into a dynamic and
empowered character and adding contrast for the story of Yin Yin, who is able to make a happy life with a son and good man who also happens to have visited the same brothel that day. The elements of empowering Bai Mei are an intricate path through the film concerning many factors, and since after Days Looking at the Sea Taiwan’s society shifted once more, hers is a story of gaining power over her own body commodity in a way that would no longer apply after her time—“One needs to study what kind of body the current society needs…” (Foucault 1981: 58).
The placing of the abusive customer in the film has two purposes. The first is to make Bai Mei dynamic and empowered. Bai Mei comes to distract the client from the new Yin Yin,
showing that she is more experienced and that sex workers develop skills to handle problems that come up in their work lives just as any other worker does (O’Neill (2001) notes this about many of the sex workers she interviews). This is not to say that prostitutes can cope with anything and never have to do anything undesirable—there is a bit of martyrdom or self-sacrifice happening here, as illustrated by the scene where Bai Mei applies a liberal amount of toothpaste to her toothbrush and vigorously scrubs her mouth. However, even this is not there just for the sake of it. It is part of the background of Bai Mei’s character.
Later in the film, Bai Mei visits her adopted family for her step-father’s funeral. When she arrives, the funeral is already in progress, and her siblings are kneeling in their burlap funeral clothes. She asks her step-mother why they are not holding the funeral the following day, as she was told, and her mother says that her siblings are busy with their work in Taipei and this is the only way. However, it is clear that the family has purposely excluded her from the funeral, and not allowing her to wear the funeral clothes and participate leaves her symbolically separated
Later in the film, Bai Mei visits her adopted family for her step-father’s funeral. When she arrives, the funeral is already in progress, and her siblings are kneeling in their burlap funeral clothes. She asks her step-mother why they are not holding the funeral the following day, as she was told, and her mother says that her siblings are busy with their work in Taipei and this is the only way. However, it is clear that the family has purposely excluded her from the funeral, and not allowing her to wear the funeral clothes and participate leaves her symbolically separated