Maybe the client has already paid his money, But only have sex the proper way! Add to this the various other people who were employed off the back of this most ancient of trades madams, pimps, hoteliers, rickshaw-pullers, etc. In an act of journalist reportage a style popular throughout the s , Vu Trong Phung speaks with nurses, prostitutes, doctors, healthcare workers and government officials to gain an understanding of the problem.
The work was originally published in 11 installments in the newspaper Tuong Lai Future. Translator Shaun Kingsley Malarney includes an excellent and scholarly page introduction, which gives much needed context, allowing you to pick up on a rich variety of details that would otherwise be missed. More than years since his birth, he is still taught in Vietnamese schools today. Instead of having to go through the motions and have sex, the prostitutes are happy that they are just asked to chat about their lives and smoke opium.
Despite Vu Trong Phung being quite the reformist and ahead of his time, the book was nevertheless written in and readers may, quite justifiably, have difficulty with some of the more outdated attitudes expressed in it. But a book will always be of its time, and despite some of its faults it does serves as a valuable window into some of the thoughts and feelings of the era, as with the frequent mistrust Phung shown for being a newspaper writer some things never change.
Go on in, and then go write some more garbage! Phung is doing himself a bit of a disservice hereβhe conducts plenty of interviewsβbut overall his reportage suffers from this approach. He only actually talks to two prostitutes at length, and he may have been better off being a bit more gonzo in his reporting. Phung immediately orders some and partakes. If only we had clients like every night; what a life! Working in a brothel would be great!
It is notable quite how enlightened the approaches were to prostitution back then. It was widely seen as a public health problem as much as moral oneβvenereal disease was virulent at the timeβand responses to it seem to have been a choice between if prostitutes should just be left alone to do what they like, or to what extent they should be regulated.
