Activists, friends, volunteers and former clients yesterday gathered at the Wenmeng Building (文萌樓), a former brothel in Taipei’s Datong District (大同), to mourn Li-chun (麗君), a former sex worker and leading figure in the movement to relegalize the sex industry in the nation.
“Li-chun has passed away; it’s now our responsibility to pass on her story and the stories of all former sex workers, because their stories are not only about the sex industry, but also about the disadvantaged classes of society and so form an important chapter of the nation’s history,” Cheng Tsun-chi (鄭村棋), a long-time labor rights activist who is also active in the sex industry rights movement, said as he paid his repects to Li-chun at the Wenmeng Building.
Born into an economically disadvantaged farming family in what is now Wugu District (五股), New Taipei City, in 1940, Li-chun lost her mother when she was four years old.
Photo: Loa Iok-sin, Taipei Times
At 16, she moved to Taipei to earn a living for herself and provide for her family.
She worked at several low-paying, labor-intensive jobs, such as housekeeping, babysitting and at a noodle shop, before eventually becoming a sex worker at licensed brothels in Taipei, where prostitution was legal at the time.
However, that changed in 1997 when former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), who was Taipei mayor at the time, decided to ban the sex industry and revoked all brothel licenses, triggering a campaign for the relegalization of the sex industry that is still being waged today.
In recent years, activist group the Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters (COSWAS) has faced another challenge: eviction.
The problem arose when the new owner of the Wenmeng Building asked the group to vacate the building, which it uses to house a private sex industry museum it runs, provide lodging for former licensed prostitutes and as the base for its campaign to relegalize prostitution.
“From the time she was living here until her death, Li-chun was constantly telling the world that the Wenmeng Building always has, and always will, belong to sex workers,” COSWAS executive director Chung Chun-chu (鍾君竺) said. “That’s why she chose to pass away in the house, declining to be sent to the hospital.”
Su Tzu-hsuan (蘇子軒), a 19-year-old student at National Yang Ming University who is one of the volunteers that kept Li-chun company on her deathbed, said that, despite her suffering, Li-chun was very fortunate.
“All throughout yesterday [Wednesday], her friends came to see her, one after another, and she was accompanied until the last moment of her life,” Su said. “So I think she’s lucky, because there are not many elders who get to pass away in a place they would want to stay in, with their friends all around them.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching