By kevinjamesgardner and Ethen Lieser

She steps onto the bed. Her toes sink into the flesh beneath my buttocks, causes my back to arch. Two hands grip my deltoids, contracting and releasing with authority. Slicing chops to the mid-back follow. Every strike eases my anxiety. Blissful. Each finger and toe is properly pulled and cracked. Every pound, clench and stir of her hands vibrate through my body. Invincibility of youth has indeed returned.

Gennifer Hirano. Photo by Drew Wiedemann (www.eyeshot productions.com)

There, on the corner of the bed, I see a condom.

Welcome to the world of massage, that warm, fuzzy area where intimate touch can morph into sexual healing. Many have experienced good muscle therapy that climaxes in physiological pleasure — on purpose or by accident. In cultures around the world, it’s quite common when masseurs and masseuses provide massage services to men.

Here in California, however, it’s still considered “lewd” behavior. The law doesn’t stipulate which muscles can or can’t get massaged — but it does prohibit sexual touch for money. This causes trouble for Asian massage parlors (AMPs) here in the Bay Area, and for the Asian Pacific Americans who earn their living in them.

AMPs employ large numbers of first-generation immigrants — mainly Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai — who bring more than just the value of their labor. They exploit Western male stereotypes of Asian women as subservient, exotic, with soft hands and nimble fingers, making AMPs more sought after than other massage parlors.

DO YOU WANT THE WHOLE MASSAGE?

Back at the massage parlor: Without any sappy welcoming lines, the bouncer — a husky Southeast Asian male — immediately points to a woman and apathetically asks, “Is this one OK with you?”

“Yeah…I guess.”

Needless to say, there isn’t too much guessing.

Sheila,* strapped in a satiny white miniskirt, propels herself off the couch after hearing her signal, like an Emmy nominee expecting to win — all the while keeping a gazing grin in my direction. She leads me down a narrow hallway, snaking past washing machines and dryers and a granny-style lunchroom where several masseuses tend to a plate of fruit. A young Asian male with a pile of neatly folded cloths and bed sheets flutters past innocuously.

"In here,” Sheila says, quietly like a schoolgirl, pointing to one door in a row of 15 or so, systematically arranged like in a tanning salon. She slowly opens the door. The room is no bigger than a Motel 6 bathroom, and a futon-like mattress takes up most of the space. Scents, oils and creams lurk near the toilet and bathtub.

“So what do you want?” Sheila asks.

“Uhh? A massage. The $50 deal.”

“Do you want the whole massage?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want the whole massage?”

I flip through my bills. “I only have $100.”

“No more? $200.”

“$200! I don’t think I have that much…”

Sheila doesn’t seem angry as she returns my budget-conscious self to the card-playing women in the waiting room. Like firefighters on call, six shiny-legged APA women impatiently lounge on faux leather couches around a coffee table. It’s 3 a.m., the streets bare, the lights dim — this is their happy hour.

Suddenly, their eyes tweak toward me. They stare at me as if I have cold hard cash tattooed all over my body. It’s their duty, their calling, their fiscal health, to get it out of me.

“How about her?” I ask the noticeably disgruntled bouncer.

“Fine.” He points to Helen,* a recent 25-year-old Chinese immigrant. Bursting with fruit-flavored confidence, Helen grabs me by the hand and escorts me to another tiny room.

“How much money you got?” Helen asks. I finger through my five precious twenties, hoping for a little Mother Theresa pity.

“You got forty more? We got credit card machine.” I pause for a moment. “Do you take Mastercard?”

“Sure we do,” says Helen, pulling her shoulder-length hair back into a ponytail.

GETTING IN

Like many of her fellow masseuses, Helen immigrated to the United States from China three years ago. She works in a massage parlor in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. She handles four to five customers a day over the course of one shift lasting 10 or more hours. She never worked in parlors back in China, but she thinks she’s one of the best here. “I know how to give massages,” she points out, in an industry whose primary aim rests on sexual release for “tips.” Helen doesn’t like her job, but it beats earning $7 to $10 an hour in a restaurant, or a factory, or a nail salon. “It’s terrible,” she says, “but you have to do something.”

A masseuse can make anywhere from $50 to $150 in tips plus her commission from the standard $50 massage, although it’s unclear how much of that she actually gets to take home. With four to five customers a day, that’s still enough to support a family.

“In China, the people are poor, and everybody needs a little money,” Helen explains. “This is how I make mine.”

For many AMP workers, their extended family structures make financial independence critical. “They have a relative or some family members here,” explains Jackie,* a Chinese American waitress at a Korean bar near the Tenderloin. “They’re obligated to pay their way.”

Jasmine* is a Korean bartender who has been solicited to work for AMPs. “Often the girls are the only people capable of holding a job in their family, especially if you don’t speak English or know your way around,” she offers. “They’ll work for awhile and make enough money to support their whole family. Selling your body is the only way you have to go.”

The trend is to start in the massage arena, work and save, then start your own establishment — either another massage parlor, a nail salon or a mom-and-pop type of store.

“I know that many will work at the massage parlor, save money, and manage to set up a small business or purchase an apartment, ” adds Ann* from Hanaro, another Korean bar in the Tenderloin.

LEGAL LOOPHOLES

In capitalizing on certain forms of male entertainment, AMPs represent an extension of some Asian cultures that tangle horns with local restrictions. “In Japan and Korea, there are accepted practices concerning the services of women when it comes to entertaining men,” suggests Charles,* a middle-aged Korean barfly who has been in the States for a couple months. In Korea, the massage parlor industry blossomed after the war when local residents and American GIs regularly used its services. Though the idea and infrastructure of massage parlors have since sprouted all over the Bay Area. Charles points out differences he notices in their American counterparts. “Korean girls in Korea throw themselves at you and really are explicit about what they will do for you for free,” he says. “Here in America, the girls are younger, but more reserved — it’s less common for a girl to do as much servicing.”

And less tolerated by public officials, thanks to state law. At the same time, however, San Francisco enjoys a long history of AMPs dating back to the 1960s, that is sanctioned through official licenses and permits. As a result, local law enforcement authorities find themselves in a sticky mess — a schizophrenic conflict of interest, simultaneously licensing and busting massage venues and workers, and sometimes taking dear “johns” (customers) along for the ride.

This conflict of interest came to an ugly head in March 1999 when SF Weekly reporter Renata Huang uncovered the SFPD vice crimes division raking in tens of thousands of dollars in “restitution” from women arrested in massage parlor raids. According to Huang, most were arrested just for being on the premises and weren’t actually caught giving or soliciting sex. To have charges against them dropped, the arrested women had to pay negotiated amounts of money directly to the vice unit, a scheme which had the blessing of San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan’s office. Huang reported that immediately after the Weekly broke the story, and as the police department and the DA’s office scurried to abolish the arrangement, financial records and official accounting never materialized.

In addition to licenses for the parlors themselves, individual massage workers must buy $200 permits from the vice squad as proof of actual massage training, then wear them while working. The permits resemble state photo I.D.s with detailed personal information, including social security/driver’s license numbers. Many wonder how safe it is to require women to wear such personal information while giving massage to complete strangers.

EUPHEMISMS

San Francisco currently has 82 officially operating massage parlors, and an estimated 10 or more extend throughout the East Bay, together employing several hundred people. According to the City Permits office, 95 parlors have closed over the past 10 years — although not all of them were connected with police involvement.

But many were. According to Rita Wong of Asian Health Services, a parlor in Berkeley, Calif. was shut down a few months ago after police allegedly went inside and found condoms, thereby making an association with sex and putting the masseuses out of work.

Police usually clamp down on specific parlors in response to neighbors’ complaints about public nuisance — considered by some a euphemism for private and commercial concerns about property values and development. In reality, the massage parlors around town seem pretty quiet, behind closed doors, compared to the usual drama unfolding out on the streets.

“[Shutting down parlors] is not an indictment of the massage industry,” according to San Francisco Assistant DA Tim Silard, “or the women who work in it.” Silard adds that the DA’s office hasn’t seen any massage parlor cases come in over the past six months, and that the city is shifting its focus toward the demand side of the sex industry. “We’re arresting just as many johns as sex workers — it’s more evenhanded.”

But not as hands-off as officials’ attitudes toward other providers of massage and related pleasures. Technically, massage parlors are similar to other in-call locations that call themselves spa, tanning, health and relaxation centers where physical and sexual health sometimes converge; those kinds of places, however, aren’t being regulated or busted by vice squads. Other venues offering romantic opportunities without even throwing in a massage, such as the five commercial sex clubs in town, aren’t regulated by the police, but instead follow Department of Public Health guidelines.

When asked whether the authorities unfairly target massage parlors — and in San Francisco that means Asian — a DPH official declined to comment. The impression is one of cultural profiling.

Inspector Ed DelCarlo of SFPD vice crimes division also acknowledges that individual entrepreneurs, including massage providers, who advertise in the papers and on the Internet — the most lucrative form of intimacy for hire these days — do not fall under the same scrutiny. DelCarlo refers to the adult entertainment Web site of lovings.com, located here in San Francisco — and featuring an interesting “blond boy/Asian girl group action” team named Jack and Jill — as an example of perfectly legal activities. “You and I know it’s prostitution,” DelCarlo remarks, “but they don’t call it that, and that protects against legal prosecution.”

MASSAGE-PLUS

AMPs don’t call it that, either. Some consider it sensuous stress-reduction, a kind of massage-plus.

“Massage is like when people go to the sauna or hot baths as a way to prevent stress,” explains Dawn Passar, a health educator at St. James Infirmary in San Francisco. “If you have a hard day at work, whether you have a family — it depends on whether it’s vertical massage or horizontal,” she offers.

Proposed new legislation to transfer regulation of the massage industry from the police to the Department of Public Health (DPH) has been pending for about four years, and currently awaits action in San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano’s office. This will accrue real benefits such as allowing the fees collected from massage parlors to go into community health services, according to Dr. Jeffrey B. Klausner, DPH Director of STD Services. “This is a high priority for the health department,” Klausner adds.

A second legislative proposal would protect exotic dancers through labor laws in strip clubs. “We’re still remaining optimistic because we have a new Board of Supervisors for both pieces of legislation,” adds Johanna Breyer of St. James Infirmary, and one of the organizers behind this initiative.

Neither Silard nor DelCarlo believe California will decriminalize sex work — considered a misdemeanor under section 647b of the state’s penal code — any time soon. “So, given current state of the law, how do we focus the resources of the law, health services, etc. to provide safe housing, service, support and recovery for the women and girls?” Silard asks. “Is the best way to deal with it through the legal system? I don’t know.”

Silard thinks massage parlors are rife with the potential for abuse, and that we should look at whether women are being forced into sexual activity, coerced in one way or another. These working women, however, seem perfectly capable of making their own life decisions in light of any economic, social and other pressing circumstances.

“The ones who come to work in the massage industry choose to do this,” confirms Passar. “Massage is a supportive, women-run working environment that is mostly Asian.” Most AMPs are run by APA women, and younger masseuses often share their clientele with the older ones. Passar isn’t sure why so many Asian women work in massage here. Perhaps it represents a kind of cultural tradition, a passing down of business within the community — similar to nail salons.

As a fourteen-year-old girl back in Thailand, Passar ran away from home and right into a massage parlor. “I just walked in,” she remembers. “When you’re a kid, you don’t think, you just do it.”

She lasted there about a week before moving on to go-go dancing, where she eventually met her GI husband and returned home with him. When she divorced him eight years later, she didn’t know anything about alimony, wasn’t able to read or write, and had two kids to take care of. Stripping paid the bills, and her landlords never found out. “You can’t tell them you’re a stripper,” Passar points out.

She eventually ended up back in the massage salons, but this time as an outreach worker for API Wellness Center in San Francisco, helping massage workers. “A lot of massage workers are very, very shy,” Passar says. “I would accompany them to clinic appointments, and they were embarrassed to take off their clothes in bright lights.”

Dawn Passar, health educator for St. James Infirmary in San Francisco, fights for the rights of massage workers and exotic dancers. Photo Courtesy of St. James Infirmary

GETTING OUT

Able to compare her erotic dancing and massage experiences, Passar calls massage work more hidden and quiet, and stripping louder, more entertainment oriented. A while back, Passar encouraged Gennifer Hirano to try dancing when they met at a women’s issues conference at University of California, Berkeley, organized by Hirano. Now 25, she felt it was a natural thing to dance and be on stage. She started stripping her last semester at college out of “curiosity,” a “cultural experiment” that was also a matter of survival. “I wasn’t able to get a real job and it really messed with my head,” Hirano remembers. “[Stripping] was a god-send to me.”

Helping Hirano learn to do things such as set boundaries with men, sex work also gave Hirano strength to heal from her sexaul assault experience. Passar also suffered sexual assault. Roughly 1 out of every 3 women in general are sexually assaulted at some time in their lives, and the nature of sex work forces many women to come to terms with it at some point. Hirano adds: “Assault, abuse and addiction are probably the most prevalent things in a strip joint.”

Hirano sees strippers as being near the top of the sex work hierarchy, especially because they need to negotiate and manipulate the customer into thinking that something is going to happen that usually doesn’t.

“We are like door-to-door salespeople in g-strings,” Hirano says, explaining that dancers need to have a good command of the English language to do the job. Hirano says she assumes massage is a very straight-forward transaction. “You could probably get away with hand signals and pointing if you had to.”

While Hirano admits that sexual acts do happen in strip clubs, she says this “extra work” is usually looked down upon by the dancers because “it hurts those who just do the illusion and manipulation part of the job.”

A grade-school teacher in San Mateo, Hirano performs at Crazy Horse, a full-nude club in San Francisco’s SOMA district, in order to support herself as a young artist and photographer. Just a few months ago, she finally made the decision to transition out of the industry because she suddenly didn’t like it, and didn’t want to do it anymore.

“My tax forms claim that I am an entertainer, but I feel like I am a sex worker. I’m not in denial about [the work],” Hirano says. “But I’m not really happy about it.” She dreams of getting a good job, getting out of sex work, and building her art career.

Hirano has also developed a body of work, both as a performance artist and photographer, around the constructions of sexuality. She especially focuses on Asian femme sexuality with her “Asianprincess” creative personae.

In talking openly to AsianWeek, Hirano acknowledges she is effectively coming out as a sex worker to her family who doesn’t know, and who reads the paper.

“If my relatives see this, I want to come out as transitioning and that I’m good at other things,” Hirano shares.

But according to Passar: “Getting out is not as easy as getting in. You have to make a plan of action. You need support from friends and the community.”

Silard agrees: “We prefer to see interventions done on a peer basis, to provide them opportunities to get out.” City authorities work closely with SAGE, a nonprofit organization founded by former sex worker Norma Hotaling in 1993, to help people transition into new lives and other lines of work.

From massage to stripping to prostitution — the lines between what is and what isn’t sex work are often blurred. And generosity comes in different forms, whether it’s cash in the hand or a job in the White House.

“The first time I did sex work was with a person who I knew would give me money, but there wasn’t any spoken exchange,” remembers Katie*, a 24-year-old Southern Californian, born in Taiwan and now living in San Francisco. “I feel like if I had actually said ‘I will sleep with you in exchange for money,’ that I wouldn’t have gotten the money. It was a sketchy, un-ideal experience for me.”

A FINAL LOOK

Helen instructs me to take a shower first, and leaves the room. Wrapped in just a bath towel, I stand alone in the light-starved room. The shower is quick and efficient, military-style, as if I were quarantined for future examination. Water drips off my skin.

Moments later, the door opens. “Ready?” Helen asks.

I nod my head, shivering in the cold and humid room.

*These names have been changed. Abrasive stigmatism attached to the massage parlor occupation makes those who are even loosely connected, such as knowing friends or family members in the industry, leery of talking about it.

URLs mentioned, in alphabetical order:

www.ahschc.org

www.apiwellness.org

www.asianprincessartifacts.com

www.eda-sf.org

www.lovings.com

www.sageinc.org

www.sfredbook.com

www.stjamesinfirmary.org

Reach authors kevinjamesgardner@freeagent.com and elieser@asianweek.com. Edward Park also contributed to this story.