Xiaohui (小慧), now 20, hails from a village in Fujian Province, China, where she used to work as an assistant in a local clinic. That was until a year ago, when she came to Taiwan expecting to see a country of wealth and freedom, and hoping to earn some extra money for herself and her family. Instead, she's spent the past year as a prisoner -- first of the people-smuggling group she paid to get to Taiwan and then as a prisoner at a government detention center in Hsinchu.
The Hsinchu Detention Center For Mainland Chinese (大陸地區人民新竹處理中心), or so-called Chinlu (靖廬), is Xiaohui's temporary home, along with 900 other girls from China. Most share a similar story about their journey to Taiwan: First they were tricked to get on the boat to Taiwan. After reaching Taiwan, they were forced to become prostitutes. A few months later, they were caught and sent to detention centers.
At the detention center, the women wait for boats to deport them back to China. But it can be a long wait, delayed by paperwork and the vagaries of cross-strait relations. As people-smuggling and trafficking of prostitutes has become rampant, the detention center has turned into an overcrowded women's prison.
Xiaohui lives in a cell for 30 people with 15 iron-frame bunk beds. When we visited Xiaohui, the detainees were reading on their beds or chatting in low voices. At lunch time, four detainees from the cell, including Xiaohui, went on their weekly duty to get lunch boxes for everybody.
Retrieving the lunch boxes is one of the few times in a day that detainees are allowed out of their cells. They're also led outside twice a day for morning and evening exercises.
"Because we have a big group of people here in the center, we had to adopt a military-style management," said Peng Ching-chin (彭鏡琴), deputy director of the detention center.
In each of the stainless steel lunch boxes are rice, stir-fried vegetables and egg. Each woman also gets an apple or orange.
"We found out in surveys that the women gain on average 2kg to 3kg here before they are sent back to China," said Peng with a proud smile.
According to Peng, the proportion of male and female detainees has undergone a drastic change in the past five years.
"Before, the majority here were men who'd stowed away from China to take odd jobs in Taiwan. ... The demand in the sex industry for cheaper labor is still strong. In the past two or three years, we have been receiving more and more women," Peng said.
Apart from the Hsinchu detention center, there are detention centers taking in illegal Chinese immigrants in Ilan and on Matsu, accommodating 2,800 people in total. According to the National Police Administration, 84 percent of the detainees are women.
An offer too good to refuse
Xiaohui said that one day, a year ago, she was in Fuzhou, China, drinking with friends. She was told that she could earn four times her salary at the time by working as a babysitter in Taiwan. "My family is very poor, so I thought it would be good to take a job for one to two months for the family," she said.
After two days huddling with two dozen girls in the hold of a boat, she reached Taiwan and was immediately taken to a "dormitory" arranged by the "agent." The agent asked her: "Weren't you told what you're going to do in Taiwan?"
The agent said he had spent NT$200,000 to buy her, so she had to do the job to at least pay the money back. "Otherwise, he said he would beat me up and inform my family that I was a prostitute," she said.
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