Asian Uncle
Welcome to Asian Uncle, the unfiltered dive into Asia - from the back-alley brothels to the shadowy underworld gang, from hardcore military life to the spiritual mystique of Tibet. This isn't your grandma's history lesson on sanitized travel guide. Asian Uncle pulls back the curtain on the continent's most controversial, misunderstood and surreal corners.
Each episode, we explore the raw, untold stories - whether it's the truth behind Thailand's nightlife, untold life of pimping in China or Yakuza's business empire. Come with me on my journey that explored the hidden and dark world of Asia that you never learned about in school.
Asian Uncle
S1E6 - China's Heaven & Hell: Working as a pimp - Part 6
Welcome back again to Asian Uncle. Now back to our segment topic. As soon as I sat down, an incident soon happened. I was there just playing with my phone while my sister was just toasting everyone and making her rounds. I didn't know many people there, so I was pretty quiet for the most part and all of a sudden the ducks came in. They did their tryouts, and if y'all still don't know what tryouts mean, please go back to episode one and go through the vocabulary. But anyways, they stood in a perfect line. I think there was about 10 to 15 of them, all different styles, good looking. They all introduced themselves and I was just admiring it, like okay, this is this type, this is the muscular type, this is the older kind of gentleman type, this is the younger party type. The ladies there they weren't too excited but they were like oh, and they started chatting back and forth and it seemed they were very easygoing. It wasn't like it before, where when you came in they sat down and pretended like you guys just met right, but there the woman already used to it. This was 10, 15 years later. They looked at the men and they just they were like wolves now. Like wolves. They were just looking at them drooling, and a couple of them sat down and we began drinking, playing dice games.
Speaker 1:I was getting annoyed because one of the ducks was being very rude to me. I was trying to be nice playing dice with my sister and her friends. I asked him just out of curiosity how old are you? Very straightforward question. He replied younger than you. I was like what the fuck? He replied younger than you. I was like what the fuck? And maybe like a couple seconds after I asked him to grab me a drink across the table because there was just too many people around and this kid told me to get it myself. He must have been like 17, 18 years old. And now I'm heated because at the time I was really busy. I already made a lot of money and I'm one of those extremely I think my daughter calls me what she calls me intense, and at that time I was very intense. I had a little bit of drink and I stood up. I was about to punch him in the face and my sister saw. She pushed me back, turned to him and just bitch smacked him. She didn't even smack him with the front of her hand, she smacked him with the back of her hand right in his face and everyone was shocked. It was just silence Forever. It felt like the guy apologized profusely and my sister grabbed a bottle of scotch that was next on the table it was half a bottle remaining Put it down in front of him and said drink this shit. And he drank it. He chugged it down. Half a bottle of liquor chugged it down like it was nothing.
Speaker 1:What happened afterwards was the highlight of the night. The night and he sat next to me and he apologized to me personally. He said that he thought I was one of the ducks and I was trying to make a buck. When he told me that, I didn't know whether to smile or to make him drink another bottle, it was a compliment, but it was also. You know, it just took the words out of my mouth. It's somehow. I felt like he knew. But then the rest of the night we got along pretty well.
Speaker 1:Um, I think at one point I was pretty drunk and I grabbed all the duckies together, the little ducklings together, and we sat down and they all toasted me. They called me og and and I shared with them my story. I didn't share with them all of it like I'm sharing with you now, but I shared with them like one or two stories about me doing this before. I didn't tell them I did this professionally for a year. But anyways, that was a very interesting encounter of going into a place that was exclusively for women. I didn't forget that over a decade ago I did the same thing and when I left I didn't have any feelings towards it. I had fun, to be honest, but I was mostly contemplating about how the market has changed and how the Chinese people have changed. The women have changed. These demands have gone up so high that there wasn't enough supply. Because of that, everybody could do it and there was no more class to it.
Speaker 1:Back then, women did it very discreetly. They came in, the manager knew their intent and then they brought one person in that they knew they would like somebody you know. The manager knew their intent and then they brought one person in that they knew that would like and they pretended that they just met like a fling and the person had to know how to sing, dance, speak other languages, be educated. But not now. When I was talking to these ducklings, I was right. Most of them have never been through any schooling, don't have any special talent. One of them the most talented one is a fitness coach. Another one was some student that was studying at a local college from overseas. We came here to make an extra buck A good looking Korean kid. All you had to do was look appealing, be a bitch and be submissive.
Speaker 1:At that time, women liked it and women felt the stress at home whether their husband went out, whether the husband was abusive, whether her husband didn't come home. And most of the women at that age, in their 50s, their kids already left home. They're alone. They probably don't have a sex life with their husband anymore. And they have money. What are you going to do? They're going to spend it, and that became a norm in developed cities. Perhaps it has to do with how I was raised. Being in a very conservative Chinese military background family, I was always raised to work hard, to believe that men should take the burden of providing for the family and not the other way around. So even in instances where I could have made more money, I chose not to. It just made me feel less like a man to take money from a woman to be her company. Nonetheless, it was a cool experience.
Speaker 1:Doing this podcast brought back a lot of memories for me, so much that I texted and even called my old head manager. Remember him, the Chinese Iceberg Slim. It was just to catch up on old times, to tell him I miss him. How's his kids, how are my kids? And we kept in touch. After all these years, two people who would have lived entirely different lives, otherwise Kept in touch, and he said to me that he doesn't tell anybody about this part of his past. Why would you? He doesn't even tell his wife. His kid knows nothing about it, and when my son hears this podcast, he's going to be like what the fuck? It wasn't something to be proud of. Nonetheless, as I mentioned, he agrees too that it's a valuable life lesson that you would not be able to get proud of. Nonetheless, as I mentioned, he agrees too that it's a valuable life lesson that you would not be able to get anywhere else.
Speaker 1:I was only there for a little over a year working full time, but he was there doing it for 20 plus years. Things are very different now. We both talked about it. How different, except being more expensive. We both talked about it. How different, except being more expensive, the way the business is ran. Now it's completely different. We could get into that in one of the episodes later, but more on. Him is working here under a mentor like him. It taught me a lot about the underground world. It was all legal from the looks of it, but beneath it all it was nothing more than money and pleasure in a developing country. Most of these clubs that I mentioned in this story are now closed, including the White Horse Club.
Speaker 1:China isn't nearly as crazy as it used to be when it was blowing up and developing, and I do remember very clearly my first time in mainland around the late 90s. I'm going to share with you other things about it, like fortune, telling how I went to the slums, but in here I'm going to tell you about the nightlife. So when I was there in China, my cousins, my step cousins from my stepmother's side, took me out one night. A bunch of dudes, not college students, but like 26, 27, not married. I had a little bit of money. Family was rather well off. They took me out to what is called a meat market and indeed that's exactly what it was. On the way there, the car ride. They were talking in their own dialect. I could only make out parts of it at the time, but I know they were giggling, thinking about what it would be like for me to experience what I'm about to experience. So what a meat market was.
Speaker 1:When we got there, the sun had just gone down, just started turning dark Probably around seven o'clock, I remember and it was a street block hidden somewhere. But the street block was very long and there were I shit you not hundreds, hundreds of girls just standing around. It was like that girl's locker room at the KTV. But now they're standing on the streets. Two sides were covered with all different types of restaurants seafood, hot pot, whatever you wanted to eat. I didn't know what to do. I was like what the hell is going on? What are all these girls standing out here for?
Speaker 1:My older cousin stepped in. He looked like a little street punk. He walked up, started walking down the block. We followed him. He started gazing and harassing the girls. It was ridiculous. Once he was ready, he grabbed five of them and pointed to the girls. It was ridiculous. And once he was ready, he grabbed like five of them and pointed to a restaurant.
Speaker 1:And then we all went in and it was then that I realized that the girls standing outside were all prostitutes. There were businesses and even towns centered around the prostitution industry, which I will share in the later episodes. But it wasn't as nasty as everybody thinks. We call it a meat market because they're all meat. They're just standing on the street block. But it was just how business and entertainment was done during that era. It doesn't exist now. Think about it Alcohol, music and beautiful women. What a better way to create a deeper connection with someone. You won't see any Chinese people go there and split the bill. It's always the richest one that pays or whoever called everybody out.
Speaker 1:And again, like I said, you'd be surprised how many deals are done behind these very doors KTVs, whorehouses, sauna houses. It was part of the culture. People don't want to admit it, but if you were working there at the time, you had to have done some of it. Interestingly enough, afterwards we went to KTV to sing and it was just like a regular KTV. But you could bring these girls out and you tip them for dinner and you tip them to go to wherever you want to go, right, if you want to go party, you want to go to hotel or you want to go sing.
Speaker 1:And so that night we chose to sing and so I had a chat with her while we were there. I was, I was super curious and she was happy that I'm not forcing her to drink or do anything else inappropriate. I just wanted to ask her questions and I was curious about her upbringing. She told me about her childhood. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary. She and her family worked on a farm and she said that when she walked down these streets on vacation with her family when she was around five to six years old on a bus in the city in Sichuan province, she saw. She told me she saw on these very streets hookers, prostitutes all over the place, hookers, prostitutes all over the place, and her mom told her what they did. And at the end of the conversation she said life takes sudden turns. You just have to deal with it. She ended with. I never thought years later I'd be standing on the same corner. This was all in the past and of course, these are just some stories about the topic.
Speaker 1:I could probably write a book on this. The Chinese pimp I'm also interested in. What would you do if you worked there, or would you do it what I if you had the chance to, if somebody offered you a chance to go work as a manager or to work as a gigolo for a year or half a year, would you do it? Before you get excited and be like, yeah, would you seriously do it? You think about what you would have to go through some of the misery, the trauma just to make that money. And if you're like me you don't want to make cuts off ladies then you're not going to make any money and you're going to fuck up your body by the time you're 30, like the head manager, he can't even drink anymore. So this is an interesting topic that normally people won't share. I'm going to make more topics regarding this, including entertainment industry, later on, but again, thank you for tuning in. This will conclude the first part of this segment and wish you all the best. Follow me if you like. Peace guys.
