Asian Massage Worker

I am a Korean immigrant woman to the United States and an outreach organizer for Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective based in Flushing, New York, that supports the labor rights of Asian and migrant massage and sex workers. When Americans learn that I was raised in Korea, they start talking about K-pop and K-beauty. However, these positive contemporary references to Korean popular culture do not erase the scars and pain resulting from war and loss under US militarism and imperialism. In Korea, I lived near US camp towns and witnessed the ways that US militarism and imperialism led to the subjugation of Korean women.1 I am reminded of these histories while working with Asian migrant massage and sex workers in the United States and hearing their stories of police raids, arrests, the "rehabilitation" programs of the anti–human trafficking NGOs, and deportation.For instance, C, a Korean massage worker with whom I work, migrated to Texas with her American GI husband and opened a spa near a military base in the 1970s before moving to Flushing to expand her massage business. During forty years of working at spas she was arrested numerous times on charges of prostitution, unlicensed massage work, and sex trafficking. Now she is sixty-five and still works at a spa with the continual fear of police raids. Similarly, I also met a Chinese-Korean worker, S, who had run spas. She insists that she has never been involved in sex work, yet she was held on the charge of sex trafficking and now faces deportation.Regardless of whether Asian massage workers are involved in sex work or not, mainstream narratives regularly depict all Asian massage workers as being engaged with sex work, and Asian massage work has been homogenously tied to "rub and tug" and "happy ending." Elizabeth Nolan Brown analyzed national news about massage spa raids between June and September 2019 and found that a disproportionate number of the massage workers shown in the news are Asian women.2 At the same time, anti–human trafficking groups have relied on legislation, such as Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficker Act (SESTA) of 2018, to target Asian massage workers either as perpetrators or victims in international human trafficking rings.By contrast, when I talked with Asian massage workers on the ground, I found that each worker defines and elaborates their work differently. Some workers strongly identify themselves only as a massage worker or a therapist, whereas others see massage work as their main job but acknowledge that they offer sexual services occasionally. Some workers explicitly tell their outreach worker that they need more condoms and lube, confirming implicitly that they engage in sex work. In many ways, Asian massage workers do often cross the line between massage and sex work, depending on the individual worker's labor practices, management of work, relations with various customers at a different time and space, or the agencies they work with. But to describe all Asian massage workers as sex workers is not accurate.One day, I visited the worker E's house for lunch, and I saw her handwriting on a paper attached to the wall in the living room: "마사지, 성노동자도 예술가이다. 몸과 마음으로 표현하기 때문에" (massage and sex workers are artists too, because they express themselves through their hearts and bodies). After reading this aloud, we hugged and cried together. Asian massage workers suffer due to the ways in which anti–sex work and trafficking movements frame their work, regardless of how the workers reflect their work themselves. However, E sees her work beyond the definitions of Western laws, policies, and capitalistic systems and instead emphasizes what she sees as her artistic talents, in the ways that her touch embraces the feelings and emotions of her various clients. Her massage work, therefore, is not just low-skilled and illegal migrant labor but is an artistic embodiment of making a connection, through her touch, between the stories of two different people's lives. Seen through a feminist lens that invests agency in the choices of each worker, Asian massage work is defined in various ways by the workers themselves and the ways that they engage with their clients, rather than being limited by the representations put forward by anti–sex work and human trafficking rhetoric.Red Canary Song's aim is to amplify the voices of Asian massage workers in public, from offering mutual aid, such as legal aid and free OB-GYN regular checkups, to launching the Massage License Decriminalization Act, to publishing workers' poems and paintings on social media.3 By doing this work, Asian massage workers express their sorrows and pain and at the same time, find joy and fulfillment while surviving under oppressive systems. With holding our hands together, we are taking further steps to demystify stigmatization of massage and sex work and to center the voices and actions of the workers in politics of sex work. Hence, Asian massage should not be understood as criminal sex work, but as feminist care, love, and action through which women heal others' pains and sorrows coming from the exploitive capitalistic system where the workers, dehumanized too, nevertheless survive and thrive. Again, a definition of Asian massage work that is homogenously conflated with sex work is inaccurate; rather, the workers' voices and actions should be at the center of the multifaceted definitions of Asian massage work.